This fact alone steams me up to no end, where this meme needs to be killed for once and for all. The Hubble Space Telescope is a fine instrument, but the James Webb Telescope is not being designed to do the same mission and is not a replacement for the Hubble. It is flat out misleading for those in the NASA space exploration directorates to keep repeating this lie.
There may be a good reason to have the James Web Telescope too, but defend it for its own mission and don't be riding the coattails of Hubble either, particularly when the capabilities of Hubble are going to be gone when that telescope finally kicks the bucket. There very well may be another telescope (or not) to act as a genuine replacement, but this isn't it.
Surprisingly, eastern Siberia and even as far south as Japan are all on the "North American Plate", so in terms of a tectonic plate being of concern, it is not an issue going across or under the Bering Straight.
The problem with police officers is that they deal with evil people all day long. They occasionally come across "ordinary" civilians, but for the most part they deal with the scum of society that the rest of us would rather not be dealing directly with. These are folks who commonly lie about what they are doing, where they are going, and genuinely are a drain on society who have to eventually be dealt with. After dealing with a constant barrage of people like this day after day, when they happen to come across an innocent person, it become a jarring experience as all they are used to is the scum who really are guilty.
I stand by my assertion that the key here is to increase professionalism.... which implies that two or more officers will be present at all situations at a minimum, and that "partnerships" are kept to a maximum term so it can "keep the honest people honest". Rarely will an officer from a well-run department testify as the sole witness, particularly for an arrest.
On top of that, it takes quite a bit of extra training for a police officer to know when they are dealing with an ordinary civilian instead of real scum of society. Quite often those officers need to be reminded that sometimes innocent people can look suspicious and that sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time for no fault of their own. Those officers also need to be reminded quite often that citizens also have civil rights, whose rights they are expected to defend and enforce as well. That get back to more training and professionalism, as a quality officer will defend those rights even against another officer if necessary.
There are bad cops, and because of the trust and authority they are given those officers can abuse their position causing considerable harm as well. The basic system of justice is fair, but the implementation of that justice is what is at fault. The alternative is to simply submit to anarchy, where anybody at any time can "do" to you whatever they feel like doing at the moment, and the worst bullies can get away with doing anything without consequences. A justice system is an attempt (not always successful) to force consequences upon that bully in spite of a position of privilege or better resources. I suggest it works more often than it doesn't, but I agree it still could be improved upon and that innocent people still do suffer due to corruption, poor training, and a lack of standards.
I don't understand... what is the difference between a "cop" and any other person? When is it ok to kill a human being? When is it ok to kill a dog? When is it ok to kill a rat? When is it ok to kill a spider? When is it ok to kill an ant?
I properly trained and professional law enforcement officer has training for those specific questions.
When is it OK to kill another person? Certainly when they are being a danger to others where not acting and killing that person may cause others to die through inaction. This is also a motivation for "non-lethal" devices like tazers, tear gas, "stun guns", and others equipment besides a Colt.45 handgun (or whatever gun that officer may have). Most well trained police officers and other law enforcement officers do not even attempt to take the life of somebody unless they are being immediately dangerous to society.
While it is a fuzzy area, resisting arrest and by doing so you are also endangering the lives of others is something I also consider justifies the taking of a life. Preferably, you should submit to an officer and then fight the battle out in court and perhaps file false reporting procedures or wrongful arrest charges against that officer if they have erred knowingly. There is a point to a rule of law here.
An ordinary person does not have this training, nor do they have the special obligation to protect lives and property at the risk of their own life. Furthermore, there is the commissioning of officers by those in authority to grant that right to perform this task. It is a commission that can and quite often is revoked due to carelessness, abuse, and neglect. While I'll admit there is a "blue wall" sometimes when bad cops are doing bad things and seemingly get away with it, that implies there needs to be higher standards and more professionalism within that department.
I'm not discounting that bad laws can be written and enforced too, and that is the purpose of being involved politically as well. If you think a law stinks, speak up about it before you get arrested under that law. Use the ballot box if you can't seem to get the law changed. If it is an obviously bad law, you can eventually convince many others to realize it is bad as well.
Of course the hanging chads had to do with two things:
Blatant voting fraud where long sticks were pushed through stacks of ballots to "punch out" votes for candidates that the voting judges supported, as well as voters who were casting multiple ballots simultaneously. In other words.... "vote early and vote often". If you don't mind that some people have hundreds of votes to your one vote, I suppose it is just fine.
The other was that there were simply had too many people voting at the same voting booth, where the devices being used in 2000 needed to be cleaned out from time to time in order to make sure you could push the plunger through to the bottom and completely remove the chad from the ballot. This could have been "fixed" by having more voting precincts (not always an easy solution) or more voting booths. The voting devices may also have needed to be replaced due to overuse (essentially a variation of the same problem). It may also have been part of deliberate voting fraud so far as to gum up the devices to prevent proper casting of a vote or to deliberately damage the devices to keep them from casting a vote.
To solve the problems with the "hanging chads", changing out the voting machinery was not really the issue that needed to be addressed and switching to other voting equipment didn't really solve the corruption problems that still exist in Florida.
Yes, and there is no way to fool someone by manipulating pieces of paper.
It is much, much harder to do, and can't be done on a widespread basis. You might be able to manipulate an election by ballot substitution or some other "slight of hand" trick to perhaps replace a couple of ballots, but how are you going to replace the voting results for an entire voting precinct, much less a whole country through slight of hand? With electronic voting, that indeed could happen where national elections could be completely compromised.
I don't think you understand what goes into a typical election and how those ballots are secured against tampering.
The ballots do not have to be counted when the vote is cast. I think that is an issue which needs to be driven home as well, where the issues of casting ballots can and need to be separated from the process of counting the ballots. It is two completely different activities that each have different problems.
I do ask this in terms of a general question in regards to on-line voting: Can you be certain that the ballot received by some government office computer is going to be identical to what a voter would have cast had they been in a more traditional voting booth? Where is the chain of custody of that data to confirm the ballot information hasn't been changed between the voter's computer and the office? How can you be certain the ballot cast was done by the person claiming to be a certain voter? What sort of coercion may have been applied to the voter using on-line tools? How can you verify that the data in the government computer even gets recorded properly once the data arrives? How can you verify that the information in that computer does not get manipulated or changed to achieve some sort of desired political result?
A paper ballot provides a whole bunch more safeguards because the voter can verify that the way they wanted to vote went into that ballot, and it can also in turn have a number of safeguards to ensure that further tampering does not happen along the way before it is counted. Paper ballots also can be counted with multiple technologies including a simple manual count performed by multiple people. Electronic ballots simply do not have those same safeguards.
Let's see, in a paper voting system how many Slashdotters could have access to the counting process? Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct? Or would you necessarily depend on other people, believing they are honest?
I don't know about other slashdotters, but as a matter of fact I can get access to at least the paper audit trail which is currently being used as verification of the election process for the jurisdiction where I live. The process for me to conduct that audit is highly structured and there are some legal controls on it in terms of how I can perform that audit, but it is something which is legally permitted and I don't have to trust a 3rd party if that is something I don't care to perform.
I've said it before, electronic ballot preparation is certainly something that would be a huge improvement to voting, but ballot preparation and ballot counting are two different activities which can and should be separated. Paper ballots can be prepared independently through some kind of process that can also be verified by the voter before being "put into the box" before the counting process begins. At that point, you have the "database" of votes cast which can be verified from tampering and other sorts of foul play before the counting begins.
For myself, we shouldn't be depending on a single machine, manufacturer, political group, or other sort of group to perform the actual vote counting. Indeed, I think it would be useful to have two or three different machines manufactured by completely independent organizations or software written by completely different teams being used to perform the actual counts. You can perform the counts independently if you want, and I don't even see why you couldn't release PDF files of scanned ballots if you would want allow citizens to perform their own count (with ballots scrubbed of any personally identifying information).
We shouldn't have to depend upon any committee to perform the actual ballot counting itself, and the technology is certainly available to allow more people from the public to help participate in auditing elections if they care to be involved. No, I don't trust electronic voting systems, and they are not nearly as secure as you are claiming here.
The processing of physical ballots is by far and away much more secure and more importantly can have a strict audit trail to verify the entire chain of custody of the information and perform other checks to make sure that the data wasn't tampered by others along the way together with witnesses who can watch the entire chain of custody to completely verify that the votes have not been tampered. Such verification simply can't happen with a TCP/IP packet where the packets can be routed through North Korea, Iran, servers run by Wikileaks, "Anonymous", and others who may or may not want to tamper with the results. Are you serious that electronic voting systems can be as secure as a paper ballot?
Other than the videotape part, this is already state election law where I live (Utah) and is pretty similar throughout the USA... at least with the exception of electronic counting systems where the only current legal "backup" is a manual count. Having seen pure manual counts even for small elections (aka literally counting each vote) where you can have three judges get nine completely different counts after going through the results three times each, there are some benefits to mechanical/automated counting procedures. I saw that happen with a single voting precinct with less than 1000 votes cast for a single race.
That said, I don't object to electronic ballot preparation, where computers can be used to help prepare a clean ballot which can in turn be verified as accurate by the voter before it is put into the box. Such preparation can watch for multiple votes cast, remove ambiguities (if a voter selected one candidate then changed their mind before turning in the ballot), and gently remind a voter they have skipped some particular contest or office in that election (if multiple offices or issues are on the ballot like in most American election contests). You could even remove issues like ballot positioning where each voter would have the candidates listed in a different order when the ballot is presented to the voter. But in the end there can and should be a physical paper ballot (or other recyclable material) which contains the voting information which can be independently counted through multiple systems.
That really is the key here.... computers can't be trusted with our elections, and just like you can't trust a single person to declare the winner of an election, neither can you trust a single computer or mechanical system to tell you the results of that election. That optical scanning technology has advanced enough to completely remove the need for mechanical systems to link the ballot casting and ballot counting together is only a bonus. Those two system can and should be completely separate activities, and sadly are far too often linked together.
The issue with trusting local precinct election judges is that first of all they are dispersed around the voting area so their impact on the overall election is small. There are also redundant checks where a high quality "election committee" will have representatives of all of the parties interested in getting elected who can literally watch each and every part in the process and be able to legitimately certify that the election results are valid.
You can see the voters go into the voting booth with a blank ballot, see that the voter registration (or themselves with the finger staining with ink) be marked so somebody can't vote twice, see that whatever markings that particular voter has made goes into a "tamper resistant" box, and you can identify literally each person independently in terms of just what ballots have gone into the ballot box. You can also see that box opened and watch the entire process making sure that some other judge doesn't start adding extra ballots to the process or start to throw ballots out for arbitrary reasons which might skew the results of the election. When ballots can and must be transported (to a county courthouse or a regional election center) there can be seals placed upon
The problem with electronic voting of any kind is that this whole process is much more hidden and harder to track. I'm not really against electronic ballot preparation so far as a machine which can create a ballot which can be more easily scanned and more quickly and accurately tallied is certainly a useful thing. The problem is when the votes are being counted by the machine as the ballots are being processed and the whole election system is essentially in a closed black box which we are being told not to worry about because we can "trust them".
When you move to an on-line system, you have the complications of electronic voting compounded with having so many more people in between who can tamper with the election process, compounded with the fact that on-line identity simply is something which I would dare say ranks as impossible to actually prove. How can you possibly know with any reasonable level of certainty that the person casting the ballot is in fact the person being claimed? Having a judge check government-issued identification verifying biometric data like a picture, signature, or fingerprint can do that.... but on-line?
The issue here isn't just trusting somebody, it is trusting everybody involved in the process. On top of all of the other issues (and there are certainly many more) the process of on-line voting as the central authority problem where just a single person or a small handful of people who are unaccountable for their actions (such as the "Anonymous" hacker group) who can manipulate the results for their own purposes.
Ultimately, I would have zero confidence in any sort of results which happen with an on-line election. I have participated in some comparatively trivial on-line voting elections with groups like the Wikimedia Foundation (some members of their board of trustees are selected through on-line elections), but ultimately those elections really don't matter much in the long run. We are talking the literal governing apparatus running society here, and on-line voting is fraught with so many intractable problems that I can't possibly recommend it with a straight face to any governing body. I would even be willing to go to the extreme of renouncing my citizenship and leaving my country if such a law was to be passed to permit on-line voting because it essentially kills the election process so completely or at least leaves it so wide open for tampering that elections become a total joke.
I suppose that a very strong hash like an SHA-2048 with a public/private key where you have to physically pick up the "private key" from a county court house could begin to establish some sort identity for the person voting. Then again, that sort of defeats the purpose of why on-line elections are being held if you need to physically go some place to begin the voting process.
That still doesn't stop your employer from requiring you to turn the key over to them as a condition of employment, or requiring that employer review your votes as you are casting your ballot. Replace "employer" with "union" and you get similar kinds of problems that supposedly a secret ballot was supposed to prevent.... or perhaps both want into the act?
What happens when your six-year-old son gets ahold of that "voter key" and casts the ballot for you..... or your spouse instead?
There is a reason why election procedures have been established in the way they have been, and on-line voting suffers from so many problems every suggestion to "solve" the problem can be shot down in flames in a horrible fashion with real-world examples for why it is a bad idea.
That is presuming that a legitimate person is trying to access the legitimate site and perform the voting in a straightforward manner with good intent only voting once per election. There are so many other factors involved where identity can't be proven or other aspects that to me it boggles the mind that anybody would even consider on-line voting for anything critical.
I'm mainly worried about what the U.S. federal government will do when large numbers of Americans want to leave. Will they turn the border patrol around and start shooting American citizens trying to leave? Fences can work in both directions.
Questioning Republican policies on Republican forums is like questioning the existence of God on Rapture Ready forums.
The thing is, if you question the existence of God on a religious forum of some kind, I promise that you will get at least one if not a dozen replies, and if you start to reply defending your position it can turn into a flamefest royale. Ditto of you start to proclaim that Ronald Reagan was a tax and spend liberal or that we must return to a 90% tax bracket for the wealthy on Republican forums.
Instead, all I get when I mention the space policy of Republicans in Congress on these forums is a dead silence, or somebody meekly agreeing it is a bad thing. Rarely to I even get a chance to reply when I bring the topic up on those forums. I can only presume it is either ignorance or apathy. Ignorance that they have never really thought about space policy or apathy so far as they want the bacon being brought home to their god-fearing conservatives states.
The article I cited was just one of several that I've seen recently about the Brazilian space program. Stuff is definitely happening which is why I cited that article, but the link between Bigelow and Brazil is something I can't find straight off at the moment, but I know it exists as I've seen numerous reliable (to me) references to it over the past couple of months about it.
Bigelow signed an agreement with nearly a dozen countries to fly astronauts of those countries into space for various projects, although not all of those countries have been formally disclosed. My point in bringing this up in the first places is that Bigelow has many customers needing manned spaceflight vehicles, and SpaceX is one of those companies Bigelow is strongly looking at having as a partner to get astronauts into space. Brazil is just one of those countries that has been disclosed along the way more as an example of who is interested, as has South Korea. I also know that neither China nor India are among that list of countries as well.
Unlike NASA, however, Robert Bigelow doesn't want to be stuck with just one potential source of space travel and has openly signed agreements with Boeing as well for flight services (using their CST-100). Assuming Brazil could build something competitive to SpaceX, I don't see why they wouldn't be considered, but I also have no inside knowledge as to what Brazil may or may not be doing in space. On the other hand, I did live in São José dos Campos for about a year and am quite familiar with the CTA, although that has been quite some time ago too. When I see it in the news, it does draw my interest because I still know people who live in that city. I just don't keep bookmarks for every article that comes along about it, however.
I will say that for the shuttle main computers, the software engineering standards are perhaps the highest in the computer industry and really do set the gold standard for software design and review. On average the software engineers developing the guidance system software produce about 4,000-5,000 lines of code per year.... and the rest of the time is spent busting up each other's software and mathematically proving the correctness of the algorithms they've produced. The amount of software generated per programmer may be even less, but it seems like that is about the right figure from what I remember.
In that sense, perfection is perhaps the appropriate word to be used, but it is in certain contexts. That said, the overall spacecraft design for the Shuttle did have some incredibly huge and sadly fatal design flaws, so I agree with your general sentiment that perfect is perhaps a bit overstated. The problem with spaceships is that you can't fix bugs with software that your hardware engineers couldn't resolve. There is this little thing called physics that must be dealt with and can't be brushed aside. Then again, that is why the Shuttle program was a couple of decades late in being canceled.
Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program?
I don't know what capsule that the Brazilian Space Agency is going to be using, but Brazil is one of the countries who have signed an agreement to lease and/or purchase one of the Bigelow modules. I presume that would involve either purchasing spaceflight from one of the existing companies or perhaps creating their own space capsule to get up to that space station on their own.
Bigelow doesn't have the list of countries on their website but there are some other stories that have come up fairly recently. This story might interest you on this issue:
The Brazilian space program has been in the news in a few other cases, including some work in the CTA and the AEB starting to get serious about Brazilian access to space.
But the saliva in your mouth can boil, you get real bad nosebleed, and other problems can happen as well. The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.
I wish I could take credit for this quote, but I have to give the credit to some other person:
Democrats don't think capitalism works below the sky, Republicans don't think it works above
That about sums up the problem here. I've raised the issue in Republican political discussion forums thinking that maybe somebody might get a clue that Republican congressmen are two faced on this particular issue. Such discussion threads usually go like a lead balloon and die a premature death as nobody responds or even sees a problem... or worse yet defends Republican congressmen for their actions to support a central design bureau with a command economy structure because it benefits their own districts.
The difference here is that SpaceX is planning on selling flights to people other than the U.S. government, and thus is interested in a reasonable price that can induce those other customers to be using their services. They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs, so the issue here is really the bottom line: How much does the spacecraft actually cost?
Most other space contractors use a cost-plus contracting model where the "cost" is assured to be completely paid by the government where the "plus" is the guaranteed profit from the contract. That works fine for things like building an atomic bomb when nobody has ever built one before, but it stinks for things like a rocket going to space that has been done dozens of times before and the engineers do have a pretty good idea on how to build the thing.
The launches that follow are not expected to be significantly higher in price.... and SpaceX wants to keep them low out of self interest because other rocketry companies are close on their heels within a decade or so which can compete with the flights to low Earth orbit. As it is the Atlas V is being reworked to launch the CST-100 (made by Boeing) and Oribtal's Taurus II launcher is going to be flying the Cygnus spacecraft.... either of which can also compete against the Dragon/Falcon 9 spacecraft combo. That says nothing of the dozen or so smaller companies like Xcor, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Blue Origin, and more that are moving onto larger spacecraft who all have eventual orbital vehicles in their long-term business plans.
These companies know full well that the number of flights for government employees and government sponsored flights is few and far between, but the U.S. government does have the money right now and the need while private groups are still trying to get themselves organized to take advantage of much lower launch costs.
There was a suicide which took place in a ground-based vacuum chamber. It wasn't pretty and rarely gets talked about... in part because of the circumstances involved. Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.
That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated.
Tell me when realistic human rating standards ever get established for spaceflight in America. At the moment, the only standard that I'm aware of is if the NASA administrator or one of his deputies simply declares that a spacecraft meets "man-rating" because that is what it was designed to do. So far, not a single spacecraft (including the Space Shuttle) ever met that human-rating requirement that was anything other than an arbitrary decision.
Oh, there are "man-rating" standards.... so stringent that NASA engineers or contractors themselves don't meet them. They are also politically motivated standards that are explicitly set up so only NASA engineers or favored contractors can possibly be expected to meet them. Perhaps someday more realistic standards will be established, but they really don't exist in terms of something based upon real experience or scientific principles that can be independently derived.
Since the cost of almost any NASA project can't be nailed down to within an order of magnitude anyway, pulling numbers out of your a** may be about as accurate as anything else you might find in any formal report that even comes from the GPO. I've seen the cost of a shuttle mission anywhere from about $50 million to about $5 billion (usually somewhere in between those numbers) depending on how you make the calculations... just to give an example. The costs for the ISS are in a similar range and even more extreme.
Since it is all other people's money, the amount NASA spends on extra safety is irrelevant. Keep in mind that during the Apollo era, the mantra was "waste anything but time" in order to get people put on the Moon. And they succeeded as well for both cost and getting people there.
The difference with SpaceX is that they are indeed footing the bill and are accountable to investors on Wall Street (or rather investment groups in Silicon Valley... Wall Street is just around the corner though with an IPO) and so far all SpaceX has done are fixed cost contracts where the costs for safety must be accounted for to the penny. That kind of focuses the engineers a bit more as well as makes them very much paranoid about a NASA engineer saying they need to add an extra billion dollars worth of safety features.... when the whole project (engines, spacecraft, launch vehicle, launch pad, testing facilities and more) has been done for less than a billion dollars. NASA can't even do a power point presentation for less than $100 million.
If you are an American, you can renounce your citizenship by going to practically any embassy or consul office and making a formal statement disclaiming your citizenship. After that, you have about ten years to continue to pay income taxes if you don't want the U.S. federal government going after your for tax evasion. You do get credit from the IRS where you can deduct taxes paid to another government if those taxes are higher than what you would have paid if the money was earned in the USA. After that clock has run out, you are completely separated from American society and you are free to do whatever you want to do in that regard. You may be a stateless person, which has its own set of headaches and most embassy officials will try to discourage you from renouncing citizenship for that purpose alone.
Some other countries have similar laws for renouncing citizenship.... but not all of them. I know Greece and Turkey have citizenship claims for up to three generations after a citizen leaves their nations, as do a few other countries as well. That counts if you are a young man and suddenly find yourself drafted into the armies of those respective countries even though you may be a third generation removed from anybody in those countries. Michael Dukakis, for example, technically held dual citizenship with Greece when he ran for President of the U.S.A. and was also eligible to run for the office of President of Greece. Citizenship can be a tricky thing even if you want to get out of it completely.
As for establishing a new state, on a practical matter I think the grandparent post pretty much summed it up. If you have big guns to fight off would-be pirates and other idiots, have enough firepower where major military action would be needed to enforce laws upon your hunk of would-be real estate, and if you are some place that otherwise a country has no claim..... you may have the potential to create a real country. The rest is self-sustainability so you don't necessarily need cooperation from other countries.
One of the problems with Sealand is that they were so dependent upon the United Kingdom that they might as well be a part of that country too. Electrical power, groceries, and even most transportation links went through the UK and the "country" was so small that it really didn't have much to offer except strictly as a tax haven or trying to evade the law. If somehow some significant industries could be built or a service could be provided which sets your country apart, your independent sovereign claim is much easier to enforce and there is a higher likelihood that other countries will "recognize" your claim. If you can get a large enough group of people to join you, it also makes it easier to claim "nationhood", as most "microstates" are usually a single family or very small group.
In other words, being genuinely independent in all areas of life really is the key here. If you depend upon the assistance of a government in some capacity, you lose at least some of your independence regardless of how other governments think of you. Then again, it was many decades where the People's Republic of China was not recognized as a legitimate country. They still existed and pretty much went about their business not caring if anybody else wanted to deal with them.... until it was impossible to ignore a billion people as a market for products.
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A good quality machine lathe can duplicate itself. I suppose we need aliens to teach us that knowledge because our school teachers no longer do.
I think that speaks more about the quality of the education system in this world than the need to search for aliens.
This fact alone steams me up to no end, where this meme needs to be killed for once and for all. The Hubble Space Telescope is a fine instrument, but the James Webb Telescope is not being designed to do the same mission and is not a replacement for the Hubble. It is flat out misleading for those in the NASA space exploration directorates to keep repeating this lie.
There may be a good reason to have the James Web Telescope too, but defend it for its own mission and don't be riding the coattails of Hubble either, particularly when the capabilities of Hubble are going to be gone when that telescope finally kicks the bucket. There very well may be another telescope (or not) to act as a genuine replacement, but this isn't it.
Surprisingly, eastern Siberia and even as far south as Japan are all on the "North American Plate", so in terms of a tectonic plate being of concern, it is not an issue going across or under the Bering Straight.
The map of the various major continental plates can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg
It is a legitimate concern, but North America actually ends at Tokyo, not Nome.
The problem with police officers is that they deal with evil people all day long. They occasionally come across "ordinary" civilians, but for the most part they deal with the scum of society that the rest of us would rather not be dealing directly with. These are folks who commonly lie about what they are doing, where they are going, and genuinely are a drain on society who have to eventually be dealt with. After dealing with a constant barrage of people like this day after day, when they happen to come across an innocent person, it become a jarring experience as all they are used to is the scum who really are guilty.
I stand by my assertion that the key here is to increase professionalism.... which implies that two or more officers will be present at all situations at a minimum, and that "partnerships" are kept to a maximum term so it can "keep the honest people honest". Rarely will an officer from a well-run department testify as the sole witness, particularly for an arrest.
On top of that, it takes quite a bit of extra training for a police officer to know when they are dealing with an ordinary civilian instead of real scum of society. Quite often those officers need to be reminded that sometimes innocent people can look suspicious and that sometimes people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time for no fault of their own. Those officers also need to be reminded quite often that citizens also have civil rights, whose rights they are expected to defend and enforce as well. That get back to more training and professionalism, as a quality officer will defend those rights even against another officer if necessary.
There are bad cops, and because of the trust and authority they are given those officers can abuse their position causing considerable harm as well. The basic system of justice is fair, but the implementation of that justice is what is at fault. The alternative is to simply submit to anarchy, where anybody at any time can "do" to you whatever they feel like doing at the moment, and the worst bullies can get away with doing anything without consequences. A justice system is an attempt (not always successful) to force consequences upon that bully in spite of a position of privilege or better resources. I suggest it works more often than it doesn't, but I agree it still could be improved upon and that innocent people still do suffer due to corruption, poor training, and a lack of standards.
I don't understand... what is the difference between a "cop" and any other person? When is it ok to kill a human being? When is it ok to kill a dog? When is it ok to kill a rat? When is it ok to kill a spider? When is it ok to kill an ant?
I properly trained and professional law enforcement officer has training for those specific questions.
When is it OK to kill another person? Certainly when they are being a danger to others where not acting and killing that person may cause others to die through inaction. This is also a motivation for "non-lethal" devices like tazers, tear gas, "stun guns", and others equipment besides a Colt .45 handgun (or whatever gun that officer may have). Most well trained police officers and other law enforcement officers do not even attempt to take the life of somebody unless they are being immediately dangerous to society.
While it is a fuzzy area, resisting arrest and by doing so you are also endangering the lives of others is something I also consider justifies the taking of a life. Preferably, you should submit to an officer and then fight the battle out in court and perhaps file false reporting procedures or wrongful arrest charges against that officer if they have erred knowingly. There is a point to a rule of law here.
An ordinary person does not have this training, nor do they have the special obligation to protect lives and property at the risk of their own life. Furthermore, there is the commissioning of officers by those in authority to grant that right to perform this task. It is a commission that can and quite often is revoked due to carelessness, abuse, and neglect. While I'll admit there is a "blue wall" sometimes when bad cops are doing bad things and seemingly get away with it, that implies there needs to be higher standards and more professionalism within that department.
I'm not discounting that bad laws can be written and enforced too, and that is the purpose of being involved politically as well. If you think a law stinks, speak up about it before you get arrested under that law. Use the ballot box if you can't seem to get the law changed. If it is an obviously bad law, you can eventually convince many others to realize it is bad as well.
Of course the hanging chads had to do with two things:
Blatant voting fraud where long sticks were pushed through stacks of ballots to "punch out" votes for candidates that the voting judges supported, as well as voters who were casting multiple ballots simultaneously. In other words.... "vote early and vote often". If you don't mind that some people have hundreds of votes to your one vote, I suppose it is just fine.
The other was that there were simply had too many people voting at the same voting booth, where the devices being used in 2000 needed to be cleaned out from time to time in order to make sure you could push the plunger through to the bottom and completely remove the chad from the ballot. This could have been "fixed" by having more voting precincts (not always an easy solution) or more voting booths. The voting devices may also have needed to be replaced due to overuse (essentially a variation of the same problem). It may also have been part of deliberate voting fraud so far as to gum up the devices to prevent proper casting of a vote or to deliberately damage the devices to keep them from casting a vote.
To solve the problems with the "hanging chads", changing out the voting machinery was not really the issue that needed to be addressed and switching to other voting equipment didn't really solve the corruption problems that still exist in Florida.
Yes, and there is no way to fool someone by manipulating pieces of paper.
It is much, much harder to do, and can't be done on a widespread basis. You might be able to manipulate an election by ballot substitution or some other "slight of hand" trick to perhaps replace a couple of ballots, but how are you going to replace the voting results for an entire voting precinct, much less a whole country through slight of hand? With electronic voting, that indeed could happen where national elections could be completely compromised.
I don't think you understand what goes into a typical election and how those ballots are secured against tampering.
The ballots do not have to be counted when the vote is cast. I think that is an issue which needs to be driven home as well, where the issues of casting ballots can and need to be separated from the process of counting the ballots. It is two completely different activities that each have different problems.
I do ask this in terms of a general question in regards to on-line voting: Can you be certain that the ballot received by some government office computer is going to be identical to what a voter would have cast had they been in a more traditional voting booth? Where is the chain of custody of that data to confirm the ballot information hasn't been changed between the voter's computer and the office? How can you be certain the ballot cast was done by the person claiming to be a certain voter? What sort of coercion may have been applied to the voter using on-line tools? How can you verify that the data in the government computer even gets recorded properly once the data arrives? How can you verify that the information in that computer does not get manipulated or changed to achieve some sort of desired political result?
A paper ballot provides a whole bunch more safeguards because the voter can verify that the way they wanted to vote went into that ballot, and it can also in turn have a number of safeguards to ensure that further tampering does not happen along the way before it is counted. Paper ballots also can be counted with multiple technologies including a simple manual count performed by multiple people. Electronic ballots simply do not have those same safeguards.
Let's see, in a paper voting system how many Slashdotters could have access to the counting process? Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct? Or would you necessarily depend on other people, believing they are honest?
I don't know about other slashdotters, but as a matter of fact I can get access to at least the paper audit trail which is currently being used as verification of the election process for the jurisdiction where I live. The process for me to conduct that audit is highly structured and there are some legal controls on it in terms of how I can perform that audit, but it is something which is legally permitted and I don't have to trust a 3rd party if that is something I don't care to perform.
I've said it before, electronic ballot preparation is certainly something that would be a huge improvement to voting, but ballot preparation and ballot counting are two different activities which can and should be separated. Paper ballots can be prepared independently through some kind of process that can also be verified by the voter before being "put into the box" before the counting process begins. At that point, you have the "database" of votes cast which can be verified from tampering and other sorts of foul play before the counting begins.
For myself, we shouldn't be depending on a single machine, manufacturer, political group, or other sort of group to perform the actual vote counting. Indeed, I think it would be useful to have two or three different machines manufactured by completely independent organizations or software written by completely different teams being used to perform the actual counts. You can perform the counts independently if you want, and I don't even see why you couldn't release PDF files of scanned ballots if you would want allow citizens to perform their own count (with ballots scrubbed of any personally identifying information).
We shouldn't have to depend upon any committee to perform the actual ballot counting itself, and the technology is certainly available to allow more people from the public to help participate in auditing elections if they care to be involved. No, I don't trust electronic voting systems, and they are not nearly as secure as you are claiming here.
The processing of physical ballots is by far and away much more secure and more importantly can have a strict audit trail to verify the entire chain of custody of the information and perform other checks to make sure that the data wasn't tampered by others along the way together with witnesses who can watch the entire chain of custody to completely verify that the votes have not been tampered. Such verification simply can't happen with a TCP/IP packet where the packets can be routed through North Korea, Iran, servers run by Wikileaks, "Anonymous", and others who may or may not want to tamper with the results. Are you serious that electronic voting systems can be as secure as a paper ballot?
Other than the videotape part, this is already state election law where I live (Utah) and is pretty similar throughout the USA... at least with the exception of electronic counting systems where the only current legal "backup" is a manual count. Having seen pure manual counts even for small elections (aka literally counting each vote) where you can have three judges get nine completely different counts after going through the results three times each, there are some benefits to mechanical/automated counting procedures. I saw that happen with a single voting precinct with less than 1000 votes cast for a single race.
That said, I don't object to electronic ballot preparation, where computers can be used to help prepare a clean ballot which can in turn be verified as accurate by the voter before it is put into the box. Such preparation can watch for multiple votes cast, remove ambiguities (if a voter selected one candidate then changed their mind before turning in the ballot), and gently remind a voter they have skipped some particular contest or office in that election (if multiple offices or issues are on the ballot like in most American election contests). You could even remove issues like ballot positioning where each voter would have the candidates listed in a different order when the ballot is presented to the voter. But in the end there can and should be a physical paper ballot (or other recyclable material) which contains the voting information which can be independently counted through multiple systems.
That really is the key here.... computers can't be trusted with our elections, and just like you can't trust a single person to declare the winner of an election, neither can you trust a single computer or mechanical system to tell you the results of that election. That optical scanning technology has advanced enough to completely remove the need for mechanical systems to link the ballot casting and ballot counting together is only a bonus. Those two system can and should be completely separate activities, and sadly are far too often linked together.
The issue with trusting local precinct election judges is that first of all they are dispersed around the voting area so their impact on the overall election is small. There are also redundant checks where a high quality "election committee" will have representatives of all of the parties interested in getting elected who can literally watch each and every part in the process and be able to legitimately certify that the election results are valid.
You can see the voters go into the voting booth with a blank ballot, see that the voter registration (or themselves with the finger staining with ink) be marked so somebody can't vote twice, see that whatever markings that particular voter has made goes into a "tamper resistant" box, and you can identify literally each person independently in terms of just what ballots have gone into the ballot box. You can also see that box opened and watch the entire process making sure that some other judge doesn't start adding extra ballots to the process or start to throw ballots out for arbitrary reasons which might skew the results of the election. When ballots can and must be transported (to a county courthouse or a regional election center) there can be seals placed upon
The problem with electronic voting of any kind is that this whole process is much more hidden and harder to track. I'm not really against electronic ballot preparation so far as a machine which can create a ballot which can be more easily scanned and more quickly and accurately tallied is certainly a useful thing. The problem is when the votes are being counted by the machine as the ballots are being processed and the whole election system is essentially in a closed black box which we are being told not to worry about because we can "trust them".
When you move to an on-line system, you have the complications of electronic voting compounded with having so many more people in between who can tamper with the election process, compounded with the fact that on-line identity simply is something which I would dare say ranks as impossible to actually prove. How can you possibly know with any reasonable level of certainty that the person casting the ballot is in fact the person being claimed? Having a judge check government-issued identification verifying biometric data like a picture, signature, or fingerprint can do that.... but on-line?
The issue here isn't just trusting somebody, it is trusting everybody involved in the process. On top of all of the other issues (and there are certainly many more) the process of on-line voting as the central authority problem where just a single person or a small handful of people who are unaccountable for their actions (such as the "Anonymous" hacker group) who can manipulate the results for their own purposes.
Ultimately, I would have zero confidence in any sort of results which happen with an on-line election. I have participated in some comparatively trivial on-line voting elections with groups like the Wikimedia Foundation (some members of their board of trustees are selected through on-line elections), but ultimately those elections really don't matter much in the long run. We are talking the literal governing apparatus running society here, and on-line voting is fraught with so many intractable problems that I can't possibly recommend it with a straight face to any governing body. I would even be willing to go to the extreme of renouncing my citizenship and leaving my country if such a law was to be passed to permit on-line voting because it essentially kills the election process so completely or at least leaves it so wide open for tampering that elections become a total joke.
I suppose that a very strong hash like an SHA-2048 with a public/private key where you have to physically pick up the "private key" from a county court house could begin to establish some sort identity for the person voting. Then again, that sort of defeats the purpose of why on-line elections are being held if you need to physically go some place to begin the voting process.
That still doesn't stop your employer from requiring you to turn the key over to them as a condition of employment, or requiring that employer review your votes as you are casting your ballot. Replace "employer" with "union" and you get similar kinds of problems that supposedly a secret ballot was supposed to prevent.... or perhaps both want into the act?
What happens when your six-year-old son gets ahold of that "voter key" and casts the ballot for you..... or your spouse instead?
There is a reason why election procedures have been established in the way they have been, and on-line voting suffers from so many problems every suggestion to "solve" the problem can be shot down in flames in a horrible fashion with real-world examples for why it is a bad idea.
That is presuming that a legitimate person is trying to access the legitimate site and perform the voting in a straightforward manner with good intent only voting once per election. There are so many other factors involved where identity can't be proven or other aspects that to me it boggles the mind that anybody would even consider on-line voting for anything critical.
I'm mainly worried about what the U.S. federal government will do when large numbers of Americans want to leave. Will they turn the border patrol around and start shooting American citizens trying to leave? Fences can work in both directions.
Questioning Republican policies on Republican forums is like questioning the existence of God on Rapture Ready forums.
The thing is, if you question the existence of God on a religious forum of some kind, I promise that you will get at least one if not a dozen replies, and if you start to reply defending your position it can turn into a flamefest royale. Ditto of you start to proclaim that Ronald Reagan was a tax and spend liberal or that we must return to a 90% tax bracket for the wealthy on Republican forums.
Instead, all I get when I mention the space policy of Republicans in Congress on these forums is a dead silence, or somebody meekly agreeing it is a bad thing. Rarely to I even get a chance to reply when I bring the topic up on those forums. I can only presume it is either ignorance or apathy. Ignorance that they have never really thought about space policy or apathy so far as they want the bacon being brought home to their god-fearing conservatives states.
The article I cited was just one of several that I've seen recently about the Brazilian space program. Stuff is definitely happening which is why I cited that article, but the link between Bigelow and Brazil is something I can't find straight off at the moment, but I know it exists as I've seen numerous reliable (to me) references to it over the past couple of months about it.
Bigelow signed an agreement with nearly a dozen countries to fly astronauts of those countries into space for various projects, although not all of those countries have been formally disclosed. My point in bringing this up in the first places is that Bigelow has many customers needing manned spaceflight vehicles, and SpaceX is one of those companies Bigelow is strongly looking at having as a partner to get astronauts into space. Brazil is just one of those countries that has been disclosed along the way more as an example of who is interested, as has South Korea. I also know that neither China nor India are among that list of countries as well.
Unlike NASA, however, Robert Bigelow doesn't want to be stuck with just one potential source of space travel and has openly signed agreements with Boeing as well for flight services (using their CST-100). Assuming Brazil could build something competitive to SpaceX, I don't see why they wouldn't be considered, but I also have no inside knowledge as to what Brazil may or may not be doing in space. On the other hand, I did live in São José dos Campos for about a year and am quite familiar with the CTA, although that has been quite some time ago too. When I see it in the news, it does draw my interest because I still know people who live in that city. I just don't keep bookmarks for every article that comes along about it, however.
I will say that for the shuttle main computers, the software engineering standards are perhaps the highest in the computer industry and really do set the gold standard for software design and review. On average the software engineers developing the guidance system software produce about 4,000-5,000 lines of code per year.... and the rest of the time is spent busting up each other's software and mathematically proving the correctness of the algorithms they've produced. The amount of software generated per programmer may be even less, but it seems like that is about the right figure from what I remember.
In that sense, perfection is perhaps the appropriate word to be used, but it is in certain contexts. That said, the overall spacecraft design for the Shuttle did have some incredibly huge and sadly fatal design flaws, so I agree with your general sentiment that perfect is perhaps a bit overstated. The problem with spaceships is that you can't fix bugs with software that your hardware engineers couldn't resolve. There is this little thing called physics that must be dealt with and can't be brushed aside. Then again, that is why the Shuttle program was a couple of decades late in being canceled.
Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program?
I don't know what capsule that the Brazilian Space Agency is going to be using, but Brazil is one of the countries who have signed an agreement to lease and/or purchase one of the Bigelow modules. I presume that would involve either purchasing spaceflight from one of the existing companies or perhaps creating their own space capsule to get up to that space station on their own.
Bigelow doesn't have the list of countries on their website but there are some other stories that have come up fairly recently. This story might interest you on this issue:
http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/07/18/aeb-president-wants-to-triple-brazilian-0space-budget/
The Brazilian space program has been in the news in a few other cases, including some work in the CTA and the AEB starting to get serious about Brazilian access to space.
But the saliva in your mouth can boil, you get real bad nosebleed, and other problems can happen as well. The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.
I wish I could take credit for this quote, but I have to give the credit to some other person:
Democrats don't think capitalism works below the sky, Republicans don't think it works above
That about sums up the problem here. I've raised the issue in Republican political discussion forums thinking that maybe somebody might get a clue that Republican congressmen are two faced on this particular issue. Such discussion threads usually go like a lead balloon and die a premature death as nobody responds or even sees a problem... or worse yet defends Republican congressmen for their actions to support a central design bureau with a command economy structure because it benefits their own districts.
The difference here is that SpaceX is planning on selling flights to people other than the U.S. government, and thus is interested in a reasonable price that can induce those other customers to be using their services. They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs, so the issue here is really the bottom line: How much does the spacecraft actually cost?
Most other space contractors use a cost-plus contracting model where the "cost" is assured to be completely paid by the government where the "plus" is the guaranteed profit from the contract. That works fine for things like building an atomic bomb when nobody has ever built one before, but it stinks for things like a rocket going to space that has been done dozens of times before and the engineers do have a pretty good idea on how to build the thing.
The launches that follow are not expected to be significantly higher in price.... and SpaceX wants to keep them low out of self interest because other rocketry companies are close on their heels within a decade or so which can compete with the flights to low Earth orbit. As it is the Atlas V is being reworked to launch the CST-100 (made by Boeing) and Oribtal's Taurus II launcher is going to be flying the Cygnus spacecraft.... either of which can also compete against the Dragon/Falcon 9 spacecraft combo. That says nothing of the dozen or so smaller companies like Xcor, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Blue Origin, and more that are moving onto larger spacecraft who all have eventual orbital vehicles in their long-term business plans.
These companies know full well that the number of flights for government employees and government sponsored flights is few and far between, but the U.S. government does have the money right now and the need while private groups are still trying to get themselves organized to take advantage of much lower launch costs.
There was a suicide which took place in a ground-based vacuum chamber. It wasn't pretty and rarely gets talked about... in part because of the circumstances involved. Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.
That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated.
Tell me when realistic human rating standards ever get established for spaceflight in America. At the moment, the only standard that I'm aware of is if the NASA administrator or one of his deputies simply declares that a spacecraft meets "man-rating" because that is what it was designed to do. So far, not a single spacecraft (including the Space Shuttle) ever met that human-rating requirement that was anything other than an arbitrary decision.
Oh, there are "man-rating" standards.... so stringent that NASA engineers or contractors themselves don't meet them. They are also politically motivated standards that are explicitly set up so only NASA engineers or favored contractors can possibly be expected to meet them. Perhaps someday more realistic standards will be established, but they really don't exist in terms of something based upon real experience or scientific principles that can be independently derived.
Since the cost of almost any NASA project can't be nailed down to within an order of magnitude anyway, pulling numbers out of your a** may be about as accurate as anything else you might find in any formal report that even comes from the GPO. I've seen the cost of a shuttle mission anywhere from about $50 million to about $5 billion (usually somewhere in between those numbers) depending on how you make the calculations... just to give an example. The costs for the ISS are in a similar range and even more extreme.
Since it is all other people's money, the amount NASA spends on extra safety is irrelevant. Keep in mind that during the Apollo era, the mantra was "waste anything but time" in order to get people put on the Moon. And they succeeded as well for both cost and getting people there.
The difference with SpaceX is that they are indeed footing the bill and are accountable to investors on Wall Street (or rather investment groups in Silicon Valley... Wall Street is just around the corner though with an IPO) and so far all SpaceX has done are fixed cost contracts where the costs for safety must be accounted for to the penny. That kind of focuses the engineers a bit more as well as makes them very much paranoid about a NASA engineer saying they need to add an extra billion dollars worth of safety features.... when the whole project (engines, spacecraft, launch vehicle, launch pad, testing facilities and more) has been done for less than a billion dollars. NASA can't even do a power point presentation for less than $100 million.
If you are an American, you can renounce your citizenship by going to practically any embassy or consul office and making a formal statement disclaiming your citizenship. After that, you have about ten years to continue to pay income taxes if you don't want the U.S. federal government going after your for tax evasion. You do get credit from the IRS where you can deduct taxes paid to another government if those taxes are higher than what you would have paid if the money was earned in the USA. After that clock has run out, you are completely separated from American society and you are free to do whatever you want to do in that regard. You may be a stateless person, which has its own set of headaches and most embassy officials will try to discourage you from renouncing citizenship for that purpose alone.
Some other countries have similar laws for renouncing citizenship.... but not all of them. I know Greece and Turkey have citizenship claims for up to three generations after a citizen leaves their nations, as do a few other countries as well. That counts if you are a young man and suddenly find yourself drafted into the armies of those respective countries even though you may be a third generation removed from anybody in those countries. Michael Dukakis, for example, technically held dual citizenship with Greece when he ran for President of the U.S.A. and was also eligible to run for the office of President of Greece. Citizenship can be a tricky thing even if you want to get out of it completely.
As for establishing a new state, on a practical matter I think the grandparent post pretty much summed it up. If you have big guns to fight off would-be pirates and other idiots, have enough firepower where major military action would be needed to enforce laws upon your hunk of would-be real estate, and if you are some place that otherwise a country has no claim..... you may have the potential to create a real country. The rest is self-sustainability so you don't necessarily need cooperation from other countries.
One of the problems with Sealand is that they were so dependent upon the United Kingdom that they might as well be a part of that country too. Electrical power, groceries, and even most transportation links went through the UK and the "country" was so small that it really didn't have much to offer except strictly as a tax haven or trying to evade the law. If somehow some significant industries could be built or a service could be provided which sets your country apart, your independent sovereign claim is much easier to enforce and there is a higher likelihood that other countries will "recognize" your claim. If you can get a large enough group of people to join you, it also makes it easier to claim "nationhood", as most "microstates" are usually a single family or very small group.
In other words, being genuinely independent in all areas of life really is the key here. If you depend upon the assistance of a government in some capacity, you lose at least some of your independence regardless of how other governments think of you. Then again, it was many decades where the People's Republic of China was not recognized as a legitimate country. They still existed and pretty much went about their business not caring if anybody else wanted to deal with them.... until it was impossible to ignore a billion people as a market for products.