It is also about "you" buffering, as even something so innocent as your home network router box can be at least a source of some of the problems. The problem is all across the whole network and the fact that buffering because memory is cheap isn't the solution to all networking problems.
If your home router (or the router connecting your LAN to the greater internet) has a huge buffer, it is possible for the outgoing packets to also start backing up where the latency of the network drops considerably. In the original article, the author goes into details about how a simple switch of routers at his home is something that triggered some huge problems with latency on the order of 10 seconds or more. When you are talking network connections, that is a huge latency issue and it completely kills connections with something like Skype that needs latency on the order of a fraction of a second to work effectively.
The funny thing is where he goes and explains how Bittorrent files exposed this problem early on, why it became an issue for cable modems in particular and not so much for DSL users. That analysis is brilliant, furthermore explaining why the "solution" by Comcast to filter out torrent uploads was a silly move in the first place and only kicked the problem down to a future resolution.
This is an excellent explanation of what issues are happening here. I can clearly see that this is an issue, and the problem is something that over time will impact everybody.
The problem is really focused on trying to deal with differences in bandwidth between computers... always a problem but in this case trying to match up slow connections with fast connections is particularly difficult. Since memory is cheap, a 1 GB buffer certainly can be found in some devices now and perhaps much more. I don't see this example as being really too far off the mark in the near future.... which is the point being raised and why buffer bloat is such a big deal.
More to the point, some of the complaints that triggered the "quality of service" debate are rooted in this problem. As mentioned in the original article triggering this whole slashdot thread, setting up "quality of service" priorities only creates multiple buffer queues.... it doesn't solve the problem of the monster queue to begin with. That is why the author of the blog post suggests that the debate over network neutrality is not based upon the real problem that is facing network engineering and why it is a political solution in search of a problem.
It takes awhile to "grok" this problem, but once you do it becomes obvious why this is such a huge deal.
FDR had almost nothing at all to do with the interstate highway system. That was a product of Dwight Eisenhower and something borrowed from Germany... with arguably some thanks to Adolph Hitler (although Hitler really can't get the credit for creating the Autobahn either).
While FDR can be credited with a number of things including the New Deal, interstate highways certainly shouldn't be on that list.
I will give all of the credit and blame about the Social Security system to FDR, however. He was also responsible for getting the Pentagon built (arguably one of the last WPA projects depending on how you look at it even though the WPA was disbanded by the time construction was started).
I think the GP post was referring to the attempt by Benedict Arnold to invade and conquer Canada in 1775 on behalf of the Continental Congress, before Arnold decided to switch sides himself and really make a mess of things. The dreamers were hoping that Canada would make the switch voluntarily, and if not would do so at the point of a gun to support the other North American colonies.
Those in Quebec really didn't care, and the Canadians in what is now Ontario were so few that it really didn't matter anyway. The British simply wouldn't give up Halifax, which was really the only substantial city in the 18th Century North America that didn't support the war effort... again in part because of the low population and the fact that Halifax turned out to be a good staging area to conduct operations in North America and never really could be freed from British influence at the time.
It makes me wonder a bit about voters who are so shallow that they want to have voted for the "winning" candidate regardless of if that person is the best for the job or not.
Of course that is only if they bother to even vote in the first place, which I suppose is sort of the point too.
This is one reason why I think geeks should get more involved in politics as anybody who can fight through the bureaucracy of a typical open source project to commit code to the main branch of a project more than has the skills to be able to do the same thing to legislation.
If anything, getting legislation changed is much easier because most people are apathetic about what happens in their government and the people who are in charge of writing legislation (or have "write access" as you suggest here) are usually not all that intelligent. The ability to sell yourself to a lobbyist to get a pile of money isn't too difficult but does require some "social networking connections" that unfortunately a typical geek lacks.
The trick is to become the activist that becomes a pain in the behind to the lobbyist, where they might just become interested in what you are doing and support your cause... at least if you can deliver votes. That isn't really social networking but simply staying busy and simply convincing people to show up to the voting booth in the first place.
The Linux equivalent was the computer freezing up, capturing the mouse, and doing all sort of weird things to me that wouldn't happen under even Win 2k. Applications weren't isolated from one another and some other weird artifacts. Perhaps the fault of the GUI instead of the kernel, but still it is a problem related to the operating system. I admit it wasn't bleeding edge system I was using as I could have used a fair bit more RAM and some other things to help mitigate some of the problem I faced, but I am calling it like I see it.
No, I don't forget how bad Windows 98 was, and how Win 98 really was an improvement over Win 95, which itself was a fairly decent improvement over Win 3.1. The really horrible operating system was Windows version 2, and how Microsoft got past that one I still don't know.
There still are some rough edges that need to be pounded out of Linux, which is my point. Millions of people purchased Windows 98, including even in commercial production software studios. I might even put at least the version of Ubuntu Linux I'm using at a grade above Windows 98, but still inferior to Windows 2000. BTW, I rank Windows XP and Vista to be inferior to Windows 2000 in terms of quality, so that is to me a pretty high bar to pass. Windows 7 appears to be a better operating system than Win 2k Pro, but dang if it didn't take Microsoft long enough to get there and Linux has been able to do nearly the same on a minor fraction of the budget that Microsoft took to do the same, even if you count hours spent by volunteers to develop Linux as "in-kind" donations.
Where Linux has a huge advantage for me, however, is the fact that the source code for nearly everything I do on it is freely available and that I can tweak the things that go boom in the night, particularly if it only impacts the particular set-up of computer hardware that I happen to be using. Software freedom is the much bigger deal, and the fact that I don't feel like slime every time I get presented with EULA's that I have to "agree" to when I install the software. I have no problem in agreeing to the terms of the GPL, particularly in contrast to Microsoft's EULA. I can also rip the guts out of any "digital rights management" and other malware introduced by the main-line operating system if I don't like it.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I like about Linux that make it way better than Windows, but I am saying that some attention needs to be paid on increasing the stability, particularly for the GUI applications. It does leave me wanting at the moment. I can't run my Linux laptop for more than about two days without rebooting, something I currently find a bit sad as it is claimed to be doing much better. When running Linux in terminal mode that certainly isn't a problem, but then again I'm not using it in terminal mode either.
On the contrary, any software that can "run" can be decompiled and reverse engineered, where it is copyright alone that protect its further dissemination. Trade secrets depend upon those who are making or producing a product to "keep their mouths shut" and not spill the beans about whatever it is that they were doing. Sort of like handling classified materials in the military where potentially there is a death penalty hanging over your head if you discuss what you are seeing. For trade secrets, while not as severe, it can ruin your life financially and destroy your ability to get any more work in that industry. If you don't mind being a manager at Taco Bell, go ahead and disclose trade secrets. That job at Taco Bell might not even be available for you either if you do that too.
Once the "secret" is disclosed in public, it simply can't be stuffed back into the dark. Some people have tried real hard to do that, but you can't force a 3rd party to agree to contract terms they never signed in the first place.
Patent law can help a little bit, but the original GP was spot on that open source/free software only works because of copyright law. Hardly ignorant, I'd call that stinking insightful.
In the annals of marketing, I have yet to find somebody who has been able to document how Coca-Cola was able to transform a word from an entire language to have a drastically different meaning.
What I'm talking about is the word "cola", which in Portuguese means "glue". I'm talking the Elmer's variety here and everything related to it, where you can still go to a store in Rio de Janeiro and pick up a bottle with that word in large letters for fixing your furniture or pasting two pieces of paper together.
Somehow the Coca-Cola company didn't want to come up with another word for their product when marketing in Brazil and Portugal, so instead they dumped an ungodly sum of money to convince both countries that the dark colored beverage was something worth purchasing and drinking.
The "coca" part wasn't so big of a deal, although the reference to the cocaine leaf is certainly still with the name even in that language. I just wonder how people drinking the bottles of glue first thought of the idea until after this marketing campaign.
I'm sure a similar marketing effort could have been done with "free software", but "open source" certainly seems to have a nice marketing angle and isn't nearly so threatening to major corporations. Unfortunately it is also co-opted by companies like Microsoft and others who claim to release software under an "open source" license but where all that happens is that you have the ability to read the source code and that is about it.
Based upon my own experience and the environments that I have worked in, I generally find most FOSS software to be pretty good and generally good enough to get the job done, but often is lacking against the top software in its category.
After years of being tethered to MS-Windows, I finally made the leap a while ago to Ubuntu Linux. My experience is that it is about as stable as Windows '98 was for me all those years ago, and frankly that is pretty impressive for what is mostly an all-volunteer project. It does lack the final little bit of polish that I expect from professional operating systems and still doesn't hold a candle to very stable operating systems like VMS that I still use as the ultimate standard for a stable operating system. Perhaps that one is a bit unfair because it is comparing different things, but comparing Linux to Windows certainly is appropriate.
Yes, I get the "so fix it" issue around Linux, which is why I think I've purchased my last copy of Windows if I can help it, but my point is that there still are stability issues in the open source software including base issues with the stability of the applications under Linux. I've encountered the "blue screen of death" equivalent far too many times to simply dismiss the issue as something isolated to a single application.
A similar kind of issue comes with programs like Inkscape and GIMP, which are fine image manipulation tools, but seem to be just a few steps behind the major software packages like Photoshop. For casual use where you can't or really don't want to afford the software license for something like Photoshop, the other programs certainly are "good enough", but I don't know if I'd use them as a professional artist, and I don't know too many artists who are using them when I ask what software packages they are using.
In short, It isn't really so much "free-as-in-beer" free that is the issue, but if the thing works in the first place at all and will get the job done. Software like Apache certainly gets the job done, and if you are running a web server I think Linux with Apache and a strong database engine like PostgreSQL or MySQL certainly beats out any similar system with the same hardware.
The largest advantage I find to FOSS products in general is the end-of-life issues, where open source software often has at least somebody working to maintain the software unless the "market share" is so small that it is completely abandoned and not worth maintaining. More significantly, if there is a "mission critical" need to use some software or product, you can do your own maintenance if necessary or at least cheaply hire out the needed changes without having to go through nasty legal negotiations. Nothing is more frustrating to me than finding some piece of equipment that I am using where I need to either replace a driver or do something with the equipment to interface it with something else and then be told "sorry, but you have the old software and we can't support you anymore." That never happens with FOSS products, at least with my experience.
Whenever someone disagrees with you, it must be because they are badly misinformed.
Often it can be the case, and in this case I think it is a bit of a problem. The issue is one that is being politically charged and turned into a partisan issue because those who are promoting this current concept of "net neutrality" is also doing the concept a disservice as well. From the Daily Kos article itself:
No one, other than the big telcos, seems to be particularly happy with the FCC's Net Neutrality rules, as Chris documented earlier.
Unfortunately in American politics, a clean and clear "left vs. right" paradigm doesn't work either and there are also many aspects to somebody's political beliefs that by turning this into a "liberal vs. conservative" issue is doing themselves and this issue in particular a major disservice.
The core of the problem is the FCC getting into the mix here where they clearly lack the authority to act at all, and where this really ought to be a congressional issue or better yet something where the government simply stays out of the whole issue altogether. It is also a problem where just a few gatekeepers have somehow been able to get themselves to a position where they can in theory "control" the internet, and I contend it is because of too much regulation of the internet that this situation has happened. If private individuals were allowed to connect to whomever and however they wanted for a network connection, most of these problems would go away. It is the legal restrictions which enact barriers to competition and the encouragement of government-backed monopolies which has forced this situation to a head.
While I'll be the first to admit that Rush Limbaugh is speaking out through ignorance of the issue, this politically charged reply is showing equal signs of ignorance for what is unfortunately a very complex issue with multiple "solutions" if the goal is to permit more freedom for individuals to express themselves as they so choose.
In my opinion marriage has little to do with government, which is one of the reasons why government trying to regulate how somebody can or can't be married is sort of pointless anyway. Marriage is one of the few things that is nearly universal among all human cultures throughout at least recorded time and seems to be present even in "pre-historic" societies as well.
In this sense, tying marriage to government authority is something that is really stupid.
The fact that there are customs and rituals associated with marriage is, however, something that should not be lightly discarded. While I'll openly admit that some people go over the top on weddings and turn it into a pageant that has little to do with the actual couple being married.
The role of a divorce... again something that usually involves a courtroom but is not necessarily something that must involve a government authority to happen... is to note that such a relationship should not be entered into lightly and that there are consequences for dissolving such a relationship.
BTW, I completely disagree with your assessment here that there should be zero legal consequences to marriage. Somebody who treats a life partner with contempt and is abusive in their relationship deserves to have some substantial "punishment" for their actions. Either social shunning, exile from the society, or in a more "civilized" fashion to seek redress from a courtroom are all certainly appropriate actions in such a situation.
You mention that a marriage can be a contract, and that I'd agree. It should be a contract and one that both parties are very familiar with before such an arrangement is made. BTW, one of the things I don't understand with gay couples is why they don't bother simply forming a chapter-S corporation or an LLC as a way to get around civil marriage laws. They could still have all of the pomp and pageantry if that is what they desire, but being bound in a business partnership seems like something that would be incredibly hard for a state court to dissolve between two people of the same gender. It may end up costing a little bit more than an "ordinary" civil marriage, but you could certainly spell out such obligations. Corporations do not have to exist strictly to "maximize profit and increase shareholder equity", and you can certainly put together a purpose in such a formal partnership that would be legally identical to marriage.
If you think that a hospital can exclude a business partner where a fiduciary relationship exits, I think a couple of good lawyers can fix that for the hospital in a real hurry including power of attorney and other legal aspects normally considered typical within a marriage. About the only thing you can't get from an LLC relationship is the ability to refuse to testify against a spouse on the grounds of being married. That is something courts have largely ignored lately anyway where a spouse has been called upon to testify against the other partner in a marriage.
It sounds like you are somebody who doesn't either need nor deserve marriage in any form. Part of the point of a marriage is that you share your life in such an intimate level that it becomes difficult to distinguish any separate property. Marriage is about serving and cherishing each other, about giving more than you receive and doing good for others in spite of personal limitations.
In such a situation, marriage is something that is incredibly powerful where two people support and sustain each other to fill in the weaknesses of each other to be much stronger together. Unfortunately when you have two selfish people who fight against each other rather than work with each other to make each other stronger, the effort to cut each other down actually backfires and makes both "partners" all that weaker and makes attacks from outside of the marriage all that easier to destroy the lives of those bound in the marriage.
Marriage is thus a two edged sword that can be incredibly powerful or to be absolutely horrible, depending on how those involved make it. Divorce in particular is awful because intimate details have been shared and are being used against each other, often as a sort of a game. I'll also point out that with rare exceptions (and I'm not even sure with that) there are no "winners" in a divorce. At best it can be said to be a form of "cutting your losses" and at worst the equivalent of a thermonuclear war in terms of relationships. Amicable divorces can happen, where at least those married can agree to disagree and move on with their lives and a minimum of damage to each other. Unfortunately it is all too easy to lob that first "bomb" and start the war where everybody loses, including those outside of the marriage and in particular the kids in the marriage in particular are the ones hurt the most.
Is this compatible with a technical discussion about law ?
Absolutely! The best laws are ones where common sense prevails, and where somebody being an ass is laughed out of the courtroom. If you can clearly demonstrate to a judge that the opposing counsel is being an ass, they most certainly have proven that they have lost the argument.
Fortunately it is the person who responds with name calling because they lack other tools to demonstrate the benefits with their side of the argument who most often loses, but that isn't always the case as is most certainly true here. The advise to not "be an ass" is certainly most appropriate in this context, although the point could have been proven without such language.
Certainly a spouse is given extra consideration in such a context like reading mail that isn't normally afforded even a supervisor or landlord. If your employer can read your e-mail with impunity, the same argument can be used with a spouse. This prosecution, if successful, has some major legal consequences if it gets anywhere near to common law status for more than a single courtroom.
Is Assange a Journalist? Last time i looked at Wikileaks I didn't see a single news article written about a particular cable, all the site does is go "Here are the Cables".
The U.S. Constitution makes no distinction between a "journalist" or an ordinary citizen. There is absolutely no difference, and the only thing that a journalist can claim is more experience at doing their job. I hate "shield laws" because they do give some sort of special distinction to journalists where none is necessarily warranted and in fact is making a "law" that protects one person's freedom of speech over another.
The real whistle blower, the provider of the content, will be seeing the inside of a prison cell for the next 50 years.
If you serve in the military, you swear an oath to uphold all "lawful" orders given by your superiors and more specifically you also swear an oath to keep secrets that may be available to you. The problem, if there is one, is in regards to keeping too much secret that doesn't deserve to be classified. That is the real issue here with Wikileaks, and one not being addressed.
If Wikileaks was to post their own informational news pieces then extract relevant information from the cables. I could see this as a form of journalism but they are to lazy to do this.
It makes no difference if all you do is publish stuff verbatim waiting for somebody else to make sense of it or making commentary. This is a basic and fundamental right, and the fact that it is a hot-type press that Ben Franklin would recognize or a website makes absolutely no difference. Publishing this sort of information was illegal by British law in the 1770's, and was one of the reasons why this particular amendment was written in the first place. Formal journalism with a degree and being on the payroll of a newsroom is not a requirement for protection here.
Just as much as freedom of speech applies, its also abused, Wikileaks being the main culprit here. When does one simply shoot the messenger out of frustration? Because they get off scott free, while the guy who did the real grunt work, well, he's life is now over.
Nobody at Wikileaks made the decision or induced this particular soldier to find a forum to publish these documents. If anything, Wikileaks is showing some responsibility by trying to hide the identities of innocent people only tangentially involved with these cables and redacting the names of soldiers in some of the other previously published contents. I dare say that Wikileaks is being responsible when there is no constitutional requirement to do so.
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
Regulation doesn't prohibit it. Only when regulation prohibits it then it's prohibited and when when civil liberties are denied the law needs to step in
What part of "congress shall make no law" do you not get? Laws that govern this simply are prohibited completely. If anything, I dare say that even common law that regulates this activity is even unconstitutional. The only "regulations" that are generally upheld are a time, manner, and location issue where doing something stupid like holding an anti-war rally during a funeral in the actual cemetery of a soldier is of really bad taste and therefore the clueless have to be bashed over the head with laws to stop that idiotic behavior.
Obscenity or "instigating a riot" like butchering a pig in a mosque is similarly of bad taste and not permitted. Wikileaks can't be accused of doing any of that at all. Besides quoting what is some obscene language by some politicians who should have known better (and thus Wikileaks is only "reporting" the obscenity), what else are they doing that is regulated speech here? This is all political speech in its most pure form.
I believe in freedom on speech as much as the next guy but I wont stick every piece of i
If SpaceX ever builds that "F1-class" engine (aka the "Merlin 2") and puts it into production, SpaceX is going to simply own the heavy lift market entirely. The initial target is to simply replace the cluster of 9 engines with the Falcon 9 and have simply a single engine on the first stage. I doubt that would be used for manned spaceflight (due to the safety features of an "engine out" capability being bragged about by SpaceX), but it does give an idea how powerful that engine would be.
I certainly don't see ULA or ATK competing against SpaceX if any of these vehicles get built, at least not competing without a massive reorganization of those companies to more closely become clones of SpaceX. That wouldn't be a bad thing either, but it would be a remarkable change in American space launcher activity.
Elon Musk is suggesting a price figure of $2 billion because I think he is trying to get congress to pay for the thing right now. If SpaceX had to pay for the project out of its own funds entirely as an in-house development effort, it might be a fair bit cheaper although I have a hard time seeing him create a more powerful rocket than the Saturn V for less than a billion. What impresses me more is that SpaceX has a development path to get to that Saturn V-class launcher that doesn't have to get there in one step, and that the whole program can be developed on an incremental process being paid for by their existing customer base without a crash program to get it to happen. SpaceX has a financial incentive to build the Merlin 2 engine even without a government contract pushing them into getting it to happen simply because of its utility on the Falcon 9 rocket itself.
I would like to know what "mountain" in the Marshall Islands you are talking about that would be suitable here? Most of that country is a bunch of coral atolls that are just a few meters above sea-level, and the combined land area of the entire country is about comparable to a small typical mid-western county in America, or one of the smaller counties in the UK. That isn't a whole lot of room to be able to build something on the scale you are talking about here. It is a fine place to launch rockets because there is a whole lot of nothing around at least in terms of people and houses if you decide to launch from the area in a rocket.
You might be able to find some more appropriate mountains in Indonesia, but regardless there are some substantial problems that come from any sort of similar kind of system. By far and away the largest problem is simply the sheer amount of initial capital that would be required to put one of these systems together. Land acquisition costs would be the minor part, where purchasing part of Manhattan and demolishing several acres of buildings would be by comparison cheap.
Sure, you can build demonstrator projects that can show the principles of the system... you've already suggested that has been done repeatedly so the initial statement "why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days" should be painfully obvious: because nobody can afford to build the system necessary to get it to work out. For what is by definition an untried and unproven system (these things don't just scale up to larger sizes) not only are private businesses unwilling to spend money on something that may not bring any sort of financial return, governments are equally unwilling to spend that kind of money on an untried and unproven system too.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage at the price a mere mortal can afford, even if you happen to be an independently wealthy millionaire to start out with. They can make it out into space, and have done so by multiple groups of people in multiple countries around the world. I don't know what a man-rated railgun system that would be capable of putting an astronaut into low-earth orbit would cost right off the top of my head, but it is at least in the hundred billion dollar or larger size budget if I had to guess, possibly trillions of dollars. Even a purely cargo system carrying just fuel or water (which can be turned into fuel when in orbit) would hardly be cheap.
Such a railgun system might be more economically feasible than a space elevator or some other kind of crazy systems that have been proposed, but I would dare argue you don't even know the engineering questions that need to be asked if you build such a system. There are certainly a great many reasons why it hasn't been built, and the Marshall Islands would be in particular a lousy place to build such a system, for a great many reasons.
BTW, why the latest US Air Force "Shuttle", X-37, was launched using Russian engines?
Because they are cheap. They meet reliability standards and can certainly be able to take the rigor necessary for spaceflight, but have been produced at a cost which makes it hard to justify creating a new engine that would arguably cost more and do less. The production lines for some of those Russian spacecraft engines are still running, so some American spacecraft manufacturers are using Russian engines as a cost-savings move. They still have to meet the safety requirements and other related issues for flight status and I think there is little doubt that those engines can get the job done.
I will say that I've been rather impressed with the overall Soyuz safety record, and they have been able to demonstrate through actual usage of their launch escape system including one rather spectacular "flight" where the cosmonauts needed the LES to kick in on the launch pad itself. That a total loss of vehicle on the launch pad was non-fatal (to the passengers.... I'm not so sure about the ground crew, but that can be dealt with through a well crafted safety procedure) is an excellent sign of robustness.
The earlier Vostok program had several fatalities including a couple of simply stupid mistakes and prior to the Shuttle disasters represented the bulk of human life lost in space, including astronaut accidents like Apollo 1 (which was a ground test failure unrelated to the rocket itself) and some astronauts who died flying the T-38s prior to their scheduled flights.
Had this particular Indian spacecraft been manned, it too might have been survivable had a proper LES system been in place. Those astronauts sure would have been angry, but they would have been alive to talk about it. Keep in mind that this rocket was deliberately destroyed to keep the loss of life or property to a minimum.
My largest complaint about standardized tests is that the teachers/instructors teach for the test itself, and in fact spend far too much time talking about testing strategies and how to physically take the test itself or concentrating on trying to push the students to get a high score on the test rather than trying to teach the material actually covered by the test.
If you want students to regurgitate rote answers that come from a multiple-guess testing service, I suppose that helps. While that may assay the raw information that a student may possess, it does little to show that the student can apply that knowledge in any reasonable form.
Then again I'm a big fan of essay tests or better yet, as appropriate, some sort of demonstration of the knowledge such a a "final project" or something of substance which can be used to show that the student has been able to assemble the knowledge from the class in a reasonable manner. A "term paper" is another good example of this. It is much harder on the instructor to go this route as it requires evaluating the students more directly on their knowledge and more importantly their comprehension of the topic.
This particular paper that was published in Biology Letters is precisely the kind of "final project" that to me ought to be routine for even elementary schools, even if it doesn't necessarily get published in a formal journal of this nature. Showing kids that they are certainly capable of doing real science and pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge is something that ought to be a part of science education in particular. I applaud this particular teacher, and I hope that this example can be used to encourage other bright students to at the very least build a science fair exhibit of the quality which goes beyond the volcano models that I see far too often.
If you are wanting to do the GPU generation, yes you need to get some 3rd party support (for now). Then again, this is open source software and if you have the technical skills you can put that stuff into the main stream software app too.
At the moment the cuda-enabled clients really ought to be considered experimental, even if it happens to be an incredibly useful experiment.
You are also missing the point with what this is for, which is as a medium of exchange. To the general public, they are likely not to be using the cutting edge generation and their more pressing concern is to be able to buy stuff or sell stuff. You don't need to generate bitcoins to sell something for bitcoins, and in fact you are far more likely to make something useful and sell it for bitcoins than you are to make money putting together a server farm with GPUs and create bitcoin. Make some wooden train sets or something else you are good at, unless you happen to like putting together computer systems as a hobby and have access to cheap computer equipment and cheap electricity with a really good broadband backhaul.
If you have bitcoins, it is easy to spend them as a donation and to me about as easy or easier than traditional payment methods. It certainly is as easy as PayPal, where you are forgetting what it takes to put money into PayPal in the first place. The hard part is to put dollars in or to take them out, and due to the chargebacks most people trading bitcoins for credit card payment usually decide to drop the business as an unprofitable enterprise. Those who've tried lost their shirt. There are other ways to get dollars defined electronically, and bank transfers do work and are being done, both ways.
If you use bitcoins, however, treat it as its own currency and it makes life a whole lot easier. The only problem there is simply trying to find something to do with them.
I agreed with you until you started to criticize the "congratulatory legislation" as I find it is mostly harmless and doesn't really cost that much to do either.
Keep in mind that one of the purposes of a committee as opposed to a single "king" is to slow down the legislative process so no single person can adversely impact the country as a whole. It is deliberately inefficient. I don't send congressmen to represent me by making lots of legislation, but rather to oppose all of the other junk made up by the rest of congress.
That is also why I hate omnibus bills, as they become something for everybody so nobody really "wins".
I don't see how to junk the party system. It stinks and it causes problems, but political parties are a part of being human. They may go by different names, but they end up appearing in any group larger than about 5 people. The real trick isn't to abolish them, but rather make it disgustingly easy to start one and to set up a culture that is willing to abandon a party when they drift from the rank and file members. This said, I don't think political party leaders ought to get any sort of official recognition such as a party whip, majority/minority leaders, and other "positions". Parties are a voluntary association that can freely be abandoned and sometimes should be too.
As for the electoral college, I support a reform of that system but I think it does a whole bunch of good too. It also helps balance the interests of small states vs. large states, something most alternatives fail to take into account. It also provides a fail safe if a major problem comes up with the presidency.... and should be the ultimate court to decide presidential elections. The U.S. Supreme Court interfering in the election in 2000 with Bush v. Gore is a total tragedy.
All this said, I think laws should be simple, read aloud, and covering one simple concept that is either something new or a change. If laws are so complex that those involved refuse to read the laws before they get enacted, something is certainly wrong with the law. Most laws ought to be a single page in length, in part to be comprehended by ordinary citizens.
Interestingly, the next congress is proposing that appropriations legislation will be done on an agency by agency basis next year. It will be interesting to see how that works out, where there will need to be at least one appropriations bill each week and sometimes more.
How is discussing already leaked documents a suicide pact? Sure, those who leak the documents can be prosecuted and have all sort of torture or even be executed.
The role of being able to discuss, quote, or organize "leaked documents" is that it is impossible to distinguish between secrets which are being held because they are politically damaging and those secrets which are intended to protect the lives or liberty of those mentioned in the memos. The issue really is one of what to do once the information has been leaked. Wikileaks may be facilitating those leaks after a fashion, but how is that different than somebody sending a similar cache of classified documents to the Washington Post or New York Times?
Similarly there were a series of documents which incriminated politicians and ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein working with the Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their effort instead of prison time. Other than the fact that these two reporters didn't end up sleeping with random strangers while their story was making national headlines, how is what Wikileaks doing any different at all? And yes, they did publish "classified" documents without permission of the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
It is also about "you" buffering, as even something so innocent as your home network router box can be at least a source of some of the problems. The problem is all across the whole network and the fact that buffering because memory is cheap isn't the solution to all networking problems.
If your home router (or the router connecting your LAN to the greater internet) has a huge buffer, it is possible for the outgoing packets to also start backing up where the latency of the network drops considerably. In the original article, the author goes into details about how a simple switch of routers at his home is something that triggered some huge problems with latency on the order of 10 seconds or more. When you are talking network connections, that is a huge latency issue and it completely kills connections with something like Skype that needs latency on the order of a fraction of a second to work effectively.
The funny thing is where he goes and explains how Bittorrent files exposed this problem early on, why it became an issue for cable modems in particular and not so much for DSL users. That analysis is brilliant, furthermore explaining why the "solution" by Comcast to filter out torrent uploads was a silly move in the first place and only kicked the problem down to a future resolution.
This is an excellent explanation of what issues are happening here. I can clearly see that this is an issue, and the problem is something that over time will impact everybody.
The problem is really focused on trying to deal with differences in bandwidth between computers... always a problem but in this case trying to match up slow connections with fast connections is particularly difficult. Since memory is cheap, a 1 GB buffer certainly can be found in some devices now and perhaps much more. I don't see this example as being really too far off the mark in the near future.... which is the point being raised and why buffer bloat is such a big deal.
More to the point, some of the complaints that triggered the "quality of service" debate are rooted in this problem. As mentioned in the original article triggering this whole slashdot thread, setting up "quality of service" priorities only creates multiple buffer queues.... it doesn't solve the problem of the monster queue to begin with. That is why the author of the blog post suggests that the debate over network neutrality is not based upon the real problem that is facing network engineering and why it is a political solution in search of a problem.
It takes awhile to "grok" this problem, but once you do it becomes obvious why this is such a huge deal.
FDR had almost nothing at all to do with the interstate highway system. That was a product of Dwight Eisenhower and something borrowed from Germany... with arguably some thanks to Adolph Hitler (although Hitler really can't get the credit for creating the Autobahn either).
While FDR can be credited with a number of things including the New Deal, interstate highways certainly shouldn't be on that list.
I will give all of the credit and blame about the Social Security system to FDR, however. He was also responsible for getting the Pentagon built (arguably one of the last WPA projects depending on how you look at it even though the WPA was disbanded by the time construction was started).
I think the GP post was referring to the attempt by Benedict Arnold to invade and conquer Canada in 1775 on behalf of the Continental Congress, before Arnold decided to switch sides himself and really make a mess of things. The dreamers were hoping that Canada would make the switch voluntarily, and if not would do so at the point of a gun to support the other North American colonies.
Those in Quebec really didn't care, and the Canadians in what is now Ontario were so few that it really didn't matter anyway. The British simply wouldn't give up Halifax, which was really the only substantial city in the 18th Century North America that didn't support the war effort... again in part because of the low population and the fact that Halifax turned out to be a good staging area to conduct operations in North America and never really could be freed from British influence at the time.
It makes me wonder a bit about voters who are so shallow that they want to have voted for the "winning" candidate regardless of if that person is the best for the job or not.
Of course that is only if they bother to even vote in the first place, which I suppose is sort of the point too.
This is one reason why I think geeks should get more involved in politics as anybody who can fight through the bureaucracy of a typical open source project to commit code to the main branch of a project more than has the skills to be able to do the same thing to legislation.
If anything, getting legislation changed is much easier because most people are apathetic about what happens in their government and the people who are in charge of writing legislation (or have "write access" as you suggest here) are usually not all that intelligent. The ability to sell yourself to a lobbyist to get a pile of money isn't too difficult but does require some "social networking connections" that unfortunately a typical geek lacks.
The trick is to become the activist that becomes a pain in the behind to the lobbyist, where they might just become interested in what you are doing and support your cause... at least if you can deliver votes. That isn't really social networking but simply staying busy and simply convincing people to show up to the voting booth in the first place.
The Linux equivalent was the computer freezing up, capturing the mouse, and doing all sort of weird things to me that wouldn't happen under even Win 2k. Applications weren't isolated from one another and some other weird artifacts. Perhaps the fault of the GUI instead of the kernel, but still it is a problem related to the operating system. I admit it wasn't bleeding edge system I was using as I could have used a fair bit more RAM and some other things to help mitigate some of the problem I faced, but I am calling it like I see it.
No, I don't forget how bad Windows 98 was, and how Win 98 really was an improvement over Win 95, which itself was a fairly decent improvement over Win 3.1. The really horrible operating system was Windows version 2, and how Microsoft got past that one I still don't know.
There still are some rough edges that need to be pounded out of Linux, which is my point. Millions of people purchased Windows 98, including even in commercial production software studios. I might even put at least the version of Ubuntu Linux I'm using at a grade above Windows 98, but still inferior to Windows 2000. BTW, I rank Windows XP and Vista to be inferior to Windows 2000 in terms of quality, so that is to me a pretty high bar to pass. Windows 7 appears to be a better operating system than Win 2k Pro, but dang if it didn't take Microsoft long enough to get there and Linux has been able to do nearly the same on a minor fraction of the budget that Microsoft took to do the same, even if you count hours spent by volunteers to develop Linux as "in-kind" donations.
Where Linux has a huge advantage for me, however, is the fact that the source code for nearly everything I do on it is freely available and that I can tweak the things that go boom in the night, particularly if it only impacts the particular set-up of computer hardware that I happen to be using. Software freedom is the much bigger deal, and the fact that I don't feel like slime every time I get presented with EULA's that I have to "agree" to when I install the software. I have no problem in agreeing to the terms of the GPL, particularly in contrast to Microsoft's EULA. I can also rip the guts out of any "digital rights management" and other malware introduced by the main-line operating system if I don't like it.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I like about Linux that make it way better than Windows, but I am saying that some attention needs to be paid on increasing the stability, particularly for the GUI applications. It does leave me wanting at the moment. I can't run my Linux laptop for more than about two days without rebooting, something I currently find a bit sad as it is claimed to be doing much better. When running Linux in terminal mode that certainly isn't a problem, but then again I'm not using it in terminal mode either.
How many people speaking Chinese dialects know how to speak Texan?
On the contrary, any software that can "run" can be decompiled and reverse engineered, where it is copyright alone that protect its further dissemination. Trade secrets depend upon those who are making or producing a product to "keep their mouths shut" and not spill the beans about whatever it is that they were doing. Sort of like handling classified materials in the military where potentially there is a death penalty hanging over your head if you discuss what you are seeing. For trade secrets, while not as severe, it can ruin your life financially and destroy your ability to get any more work in that industry. If you don't mind being a manager at Taco Bell, go ahead and disclose trade secrets. That job at Taco Bell might not even be available for you either if you do that too.
Once the "secret" is disclosed in public, it simply can't be stuffed back into the dark. Some people have tried real hard to do that, but you can't force a 3rd party to agree to contract terms they never signed in the first place.
Patent law can help a little bit, but the original GP was spot on that open source/free software only works because of copyright law. Hardly ignorant, I'd call that stinking insightful.
In the annals of marketing, I have yet to find somebody who has been able to document how Coca-Cola was able to transform a word from an entire language to have a drastically different meaning.
What I'm talking about is the word "cola", which in Portuguese means "glue". I'm talking the Elmer's variety here and everything related to it, where you can still go to a store in Rio de Janeiro and pick up a bottle with that word in large letters for fixing your furniture or pasting two pieces of paper together.
Somehow the Coca-Cola company didn't want to come up with another word for their product when marketing in Brazil and Portugal, so instead they dumped an ungodly sum of money to convince both countries that the dark colored beverage was something worth purchasing and drinking.
The "coca" part wasn't so big of a deal, although the reference to the cocaine leaf is certainly still with the name even in that language. I just wonder how people drinking the bottles of glue first thought of the idea until after this marketing campaign.
I'm sure a similar marketing effort could have been done with "free software", but "open source" certainly seems to have a nice marketing angle and isn't nearly so threatening to major corporations. Unfortunately it is also co-opted by companies like Microsoft and others who claim to release software under an "open source" license but where all that happens is that you have the ability to read the source code and that is about it.
Based upon my own experience and the environments that I have worked in, I generally find most FOSS software to be pretty good and generally good enough to get the job done, but often is lacking against the top software in its category.
After years of being tethered to MS-Windows, I finally made the leap a while ago to Ubuntu Linux. My experience is that it is about as stable as Windows '98 was for me all those years ago, and frankly that is pretty impressive for what is mostly an all-volunteer project. It does lack the final little bit of polish that I expect from professional operating systems and still doesn't hold a candle to very stable operating systems like VMS that I still use as the ultimate standard for a stable operating system. Perhaps that one is a bit unfair because it is comparing different things, but comparing Linux to Windows certainly is appropriate.
Yes, I get the "so fix it" issue around Linux, which is why I think I've purchased my last copy of Windows if I can help it, but my point is that there still are stability issues in the open source software including base issues with the stability of the applications under Linux. I've encountered the "blue screen of death" equivalent far too many times to simply dismiss the issue as something isolated to a single application.
A similar kind of issue comes with programs like Inkscape and GIMP, which are fine image manipulation tools, but seem to be just a few steps behind the major software packages like Photoshop. For casual use where you can't or really don't want to afford the software license for something like Photoshop, the other programs certainly are "good enough", but I don't know if I'd use them as a professional artist, and I don't know too many artists who are using them when I ask what software packages they are using.
In short, It isn't really so much "free-as-in-beer" free that is the issue, but if the thing works in the first place at all and will get the job done. Software like Apache certainly gets the job done, and if you are running a web server I think Linux with Apache and a strong database engine like PostgreSQL or MySQL certainly beats out any similar system with the same hardware.
The largest advantage I find to FOSS products in general is the end-of-life issues, where open source software often has at least somebody working to maintain the software unless the "market share" is so small that it is completely abandoned and not worth maintaining. More significantly, if there is a "mission critical" need to use some software or product, you can do your own maintenance if necessary or at least cheaply hire out the needed changes without having to go through nasty legal negotiations. Nothing is more frustrating to me than finding some piece of equipment that I am using where I need to either replace a driver or do something with the equipment to interface it with something else and then be told "sorry, but you have the old software and we can't support you anymore." That never happens with FOSS products, at least with my experience.
Whenever someone disagrees with you, it must be because they are badly misinformed.
Often it can be the case, and in this case I think it is a bit of a problem. The issue is one that is being politically charged and turned into a partisan issue because those who are promoting this current concept of "net neutrality" is also doing the concept a disservice as well. From the Daily Kos article itself:
Unfortunately in American politics, a clean and clear "left vs. right" paradigm doesn't work either and there are also many aspects to somebody's political beliefs that by turning this into a "liberal vs. conservative" issue is doing themselves and this issue in particular a major disservice.
The core of the problem is the FCC getting into the mix here where they clearly lack the authority to act at all, and where this really ought to be a congressional issue or better yet something where the government simply stays out of the whole issue altogether. It is also a problem where just a few gatekeepers have somehow been able to get themselves to a position where they can in theory "control" the internet, and I contend it is because of too much regulation of the internet that this situation has happened. If private individuals were allowed to connect to whomever and however they wanted for a network connection, most of these problems would go away. It is the legal restrictions which enact barriers to competition and the encouragement of government-backed monopolies which has forced this situation to a head.
While I'll be the first to admit that Rush Limbaugh is speaking out through ignorance of the issue, this politically charged reply is showing equal signs of ignorance for what is unfortunately a very complex issue with multiple "solutions" if the goal is to permit more freedom for individuals to express themselves as they so choose.
In my opinion marriage has little to do with government, which is one of the reasons why government trying to regulate how somebody can or can't be married is sort of pointless anyway. Marriage is one of the few things that is nearly universal among all human cultures throughout at least recorded time and seems to be present even in "pre-historic" societies as well.
In this sense, tying marriage to government authority is something that is really stupid.
The fact that there are customs and rituals associated with marriage is, however, something that should not be lightly discarded. While I'll openly admit that some people go over the top on weddings and turn it into a pageant that has little to do with the actual couple being married.
The role of a divorce... again something that usually involves a courtroom but is not necessarily something that must involve a government authority to happen... is to note that such a relationship should not be entered into lightly and that there are consequences for dissolving such a relationship.
BTW, I completely disagree with your assessment here that there should be zero legal consequences to marriage. Somebody who treats a life partner with contempt and is abusive in their relationship deserves to have some substantial "punishment" for their actions. Either social shunning, exile from the society, or in a more "civilized" fashion to seek redress from a courtroom are all certainly appropriate actions in such a situation.
You mention that a marriage can be a contract, and that I'd agree. It should be a contract and one that both parties are very familiar with before such an arrangement is made. BTW, one of the things I don't understand with gay couples is why they don't bother simply forming a chapter-S corporation or an LLC as a way to get around civil marriage laws. They could still have all of the pomp and pageantry if that is what they desire, but being bound in a business partnership seems like something that would be incredibly hard for a state court to dissolve between two people of the same gender. It may end up costing a little bit more than an "ordinary" civil marriage, but you could certainly spell out such obligations. Corporations do not have to exist strictly to "maximize profit and increase shareholder equity", and you can certainly put together a purpose in such a formal partnership that would be legally identical to marriage.
If you think that a hospital can exclude a business partner where a fiduciary relationship exits, I think a couple of good lawyers can fix that for the hospital in a real hurry including power of attorney and other legal aspects normally considered typical within a marriage. About the only thing you can't get from an LLC relationship is the ability to refuse to testify against a spouse on the grounds of being married. That is something courts have largely ignored lately anyway where a spouse has been called upon to testify against the other partner in a marriage.
It sounds like you are somebody who doesn't either need nor deserve marriage in any form. Part of the point of a marriage is that you share your life in such an intimate level that it becomes difficult to distinguish any separate property. Marriage is about serving and cherishing each other, about giving more than you receive and doing good for others in spite of personal limitations.
In such a situation, marriage is something that is incredibly powerful where two people support and sustain each other to fill in the weaknesses of each other to be much stronger together. Unfortunately when you have two selfish people who fight against each other rather than work with each other to make each other stronger, the effort to cut each other down actually backfires and makes both "partners" all that weaker and makes attacks from outside of the marriage all that easier to destroy the lives of those bound in the marriage.
Marriage is thus a two edged sword that can be incredibly powerful or to be absolutely horrible, depending on how those involved make it. Divorce in particular is awful because intimate details have been shared and are being used against each other, often as a sort of a game. I'll also point out that with rare exceptions (and I'm not even sure with that) there are no "winners" in a divorce. At best it can be said to be a form of "cutting your losses" and at worst the equivalent of a thermonuclear war in terms of relationships. Amicable divorces can happen, where at least those married can agree to disagree and move on with their lives and a minimum of damage to each other. Unfortunately it is all too easy to lob that first "bomb" and start the war where everybody loses, including those outside of the marriage and in particular the kids in the marriage in particular are the ones hurt the most.
Again, don't be an ass.
Is this compatible with a technical discussion about law ?
Absolutely! The best laws are ones where common sense prevails, and where somebody being an ass is laughed out of the courtroom. If you can clearly demonstrate to a judge that the opposing counsel is being an ass, they most certainly have proven that they have lost the argument.
Fortunately it is the person who responds with name calling because they lack other tools to demonstrate the benefits with their side of the argument who most often loses, but that isn't always the case as is most certainly true here. The advise to not "be an ass" is certainly most appropriate in this context, although the point could have been proven without such language.
Certainly a spouse is given extra consideration in such a context like reading mail that isn't normally afforded even a supervisor or landlord. If your employer can read your e-mail with impunity, the same argument can be used with a spouse. This prosecution, if successful, has some major legal consequences if it gets anywhere near to common law status for more than a single courtroom.
Is Assange a Journalist? Last time i looked at Wikileaks I didn't see a single news article written about a particular cable, all the site does is go "Here are the Cables".
The U.S. Constitution makes no distinction between a "journalist" or an ordinary citizen. There is absolutely no difference, and the only thing that a journalist can claim is more experience at doing their job. I hate "shield laws" because they do give some sort of special distinction to journalists where none is necessarily warranted and in fact is making a "law" that protects one person's freedom of speech over another.
The real whistle blower, the provider of the content, will be seeing the inside of a prison cell for the next 50 years.
If you serve in the military, you swear an oath to uphold all "lawful" orders given by your superiors and more specifically you also swear an oath to keep secrets that may be available to you. The problem, if there is one, is in regards to keeping too much secret that doesn't deserve to be classified. That is the real issue here with Wikileaks, and one not being addressed.
If Wikileaks was to post their own informational news pieces then extract relevant information from the cables. I could see this as a form of journalism but they are to lazy to do this.
It makes no difference if all you do is publish stuff verbatim waiting for somebody else to make sense of it or making commentary. This is a basic and fundamental right, and the fact that it is a hot-type press that Ben Franklin would recognize or a website makes absolutely no difference. Publishing this sort of information was illegal by British law in the 1770's, and was one of the reasons why this particular amendment was written in the first place. Formal journalism with a degree and being on the payroll of a newsroom is not a requirement for protection here.
Just as much as freedom of speech applies, its also abused, Wikileaks being the main culprit here. When does one simply shoot the messenger out of frustration? Because they get off scott free, while the guy who did the real grunt work, well, he's life is now over.
Nobody at Wikileaks made the decision or induced this particular soldier to find a forum to publish these documents. If anything, Wikileaks is showing some responsibility by trying to hide the identities of innocent people only tangentially involved with these cables and redacting the names of soldiers in some of the other previously published contents. I dare say that Wikileaks is being responsible when there is no constitutional requirement to do so.
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
Regulation doesn't prohibit it. Only when regulation prohibits it then it's prohibited and when when civil liberties are denied the law needs to step in
What part of "congress shall make no law" do you not get? Laws that govern this simply are prohibited completely. If anything, I dare say that even common law that regulates this activity is even unconstitutional. The only "regulations" that are generally upheld are a time, manner, and location issue where doing something stupid like holding an anti-war rally during a funeral in the actual cemetery of a soldier is of really bad taste and therefore the clueless have to be bashed over the head with laws to stop that idiotic behavior.
Obscenity or "instigating a riot" like butchering a pig in a mosque is similarly of bad taste and not permitted. Wikileaks can't be accused of doing any of that at all. Besides quoting what is some obscene language by some politicians who should have known better (and thus Wikileaks is only "reporting" the obscenity), what else are they doing that is regulated speech here? This is all political speech in its most pure form.
I believe in freedom on speech as much as the next guy but I wont stick every piece of i
If SpaceX ever builds that "F1-class" engine (aka the "Merlin 2") and puts it into production, SpaceX is going to simply own the heavy lift market entirely. The initial target is to simply replace the cluster of 9 engines with the Falcon 9 and have simply a single engine on the first stage. I doubt that would be used for manned spaceflight (due to the safety features of an "engine out" capability being bragged about by SpaceX), but it does give an idea how powerful that engine would be.
I certainly don't see ULA or ATK competing against SpaceX if any of these vehicles get built, at least not competing without a massive reorganization of those companies to more closely become clones of SpaceX. That wouldn't be a bad thing either, but it would be a remarkable change in American space launcher activity.
Elon Musk is suggesting a price figure of $2 billion because I think he is trying to get congress to pay for the thing right now. If SpaceX had to pay for the project out of its own funds entirely as an in-house development effort, it might be a fair bit cheaper although I have a hard time seeing him create a more powerful rocket than the Saturn V for less than a billion. What impresses me more is that SpaceX has a development path to get to that Saturn V-class launcher that doesn't have to get there in one step, and that the whole program can be developed on an incremental process being paid for by their existing customer base without a crash program to get it to happen. SpaceX has a financial incentive to build the Merlin 2 engine even without a government contract pushing them into getting it to happen simply because of its utility on the Falcon 9 rocket itself.
I would like to know what "mountain" in the Marshall Islands you are talking about that would be suitable here? Most of that country is a bunch of coral atolls that are just a few meters above sea-level, and the combined land area of the entire country is about comparable to a small typical mid-western county in America, or one of the smaller counties in the UK. That isn't a whole lot of room to be able to build something on the scale you are talking about here. It is a fine place to launch rockets because there is a whole lot of nothing around at least in terms of people and houses if you decide to launch from the area in a rocket.
You might be able to find some more appropriate mountains in Indonesia, but regardless there are some substantial problems that come from any sort of similar kind of system. By far and away the largest problem is simply the sheer amount of initial capital that would be required to put one of these systems together. Land acquisition costs would be the minor part, where purchasing part of Manhattan and demolishing several acres of buildings would be by comparison cheap.
Sure, you can build demonstrator projects that can show the principles of the system... you've already suggested that has been done repeatedly so the initial statement "why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days" should be painfully obvious: because nobody can afford to build the system necessary to get it to work out. For what is by definition an untried and unproven system (these things don't just scale up to larger sizes) not only are private businesses unwilling to spend money on something that may not bring any sort of financial return, governments are equally unwilling to spend that kind of money on an untried and unproven system too.
Rockets at least can be built in somebody's garage at the price a mere mortal can afford, even if you happen to be an independently wealthy millionaire to start out with. They can make it out into space, and have done so by multiple groups of people in multiple countries around the world. I don't know what a man-rated railgun system that would be capable of putting an astronaut into low-earth orbit would cost right off the top of my head, but it is at least in the hundred billion dollar or larger size budget if I had to guess, possibly trillions of dollars. Even a purely cargo system carrying just fuel or water (which can be turned into fuel when in orbit) would hardly be cheap.
Such a railgun system might be more economically feasible than a space elevator or some other kind of crazy systems that have been proposed, but I would dare argue you don't even know the engineering questions that need to be asked if you build such a system. There are certainly a great many reasons why it hasn't been built, and the Marshall Islands would be in particular a lousy place to build such a system, for a great many reasons.
BTW, why the latest US Air Force "Shuttle", X-37, was launched using Russian engines?
Because they are cheap. They meet reliability standards and can certainly be able to take the rigor necessary for spaceflight, but have been produced at a cost which makes it hard to justify creating a new engine that would arguably cost more and do less. The production lines for some of those Russian spacecraft engines are still running, so some American spacecraft manufacturers are using Russian engines as a cost-savings move. They still have to meet the safety requirements and other related issues for flight status and I think there is little doubt that those engines can get the job done.
I will say that I've been rather impressed with the overall Soyuz safety record, and they have been able to demonstrate through actual usage of their launch escape system including one rather spectacular "flight" where the cosmonauts needed the LES to kick in on the launch pad itself. That a total loss of vehicle on the launch pad was non-fatal (to the passengers.... I'm not so sure about the ground crew, but that can be dealt with through a well crafted safety procedure) is an excellent sign of robustness.
The earlier Vostok program had several fatalities including a couple of simply stupid mistakes and prior to the Shuttle disasters represented the bulk of human life lost in space, including astronaut accidents like Apollo 1 (which was a ground test failure unrelated to the rocket itself) and some astronauts who died flying the T-38s prior to their scheduled flights.
Had this particular Indian spacecraft been manned, it too might have been survivable had a proper LES system been in place. Those astronauts sure would have been angry, but they would have been alive to talk about it. Keep in mind that this rocket was deliberately destroyed to keep the loss of life or property to a minimum.
My largest complaint about standardized tests is that the teachers/instructors teach for the test itself, and in fact spend far too much time talking about testing strategies and how to physically take the test itself or concentrating on trying to push the students to get a high score on the test rather than trying to teach the material actually covered by the test.
If you want students to regurgitate rote answers that come from a multiple-guess testing service, I suppose that helps. While that may assay the raw information that a student may possess, it does little to show that the student can apply that knowledge in any reasonable form.
Then again I'm a big fan of essay tests or better yet, as appropriate, some sort of demonstration of the knowledge such a a "final project" or something of substance which can be used to show that the student has been able to assemble the knowledge from the class in a reasonable manner. A "term paper" is another good example of this. It is much harder on the instructor to go this route as it requires evaluating the students more directly on their knowledge and more importantly their comprehension of the topic.
This particular paper that was published in Biology Letters is precisely the kind of "final project" that to me ought to be routine for even elementary schools, even if it doesn't necessarily get published in a formal journal of this nature. Showing kids that they are certainly capable of doing real science and pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge is something that ought to be a part of science education in particular. I applaud this particular teacher, and I hope that this example can be used to encourage other bright students to at the very least build a science fair exhibit of the quality which goes beyond the volcano models that I see far too often.
If you are wanting to do the GPU generation, yes you need to get some 3rd party support (for now). Then again, this is open source software and if you have the technical skills you can put that stuff into the main stream software app too.
At the moment the cuda-enabled clients really ought to be considered experimental, even if it happens to be an incredibly useful experiment.
You are also missing the point with what this is for, which is as a medium of exchange. To the general public, they are likely not to be using the cutting edge generation and their more pressing concern is to be able to buy stuff or sell stuff. You don't need to generate bitcoins to sell something for bitcoins, and in fact you are far more likely to make something useful and sell it for bitcoins than you are to make money putting together a server farm with GPUs and create bitcoin. Make some wooden train sets or something else you are good at, unless you happen to like putting together computer systems as a hobby and have access to cheap computer equipment and cheap electricity with a really good broadband backhaul.
If you have bitcoins, it is easy to spend them as a donation and to me about as easy or easier than traditional payment methods. It certainly is as easy as PayPal, where you are forgetting what it takes to put money into PayPal in the first place. The hard part is to put dollars in or to take them out, and due to the chargebacks most people trading bitcoins for credit card payment usually decide to drop the business as an unprofitable enterprise. Those who've tried lost their shirt. There are other ways to get dollars defined electronically, and bank transfers do work and are being done, both ways.
If you use bitcoins, however, treat it as its own currency and it makes life a whole lot easier. The only problem there is simply trying to find something to do with them.
I agreed with you until you started to criticize the "congratulatory legislation" as I find it is mostly harmless and doesn't really cost that much to do either.
Keep in mind that one of the purposes of a committee as opposed to a single "king" is to slow down the legislative process so no single person can adversely impact the country as a whole. It is deliberately inefficient. I don't send congressmen to represent me by making lots of legislation, but rather to oppose all of the other junk made up by the rest of congress.
That is also why I hate omnibus bills, as they become something for everybody so nobody really "wins".
I don't see how to junk the party system. It stinks and it causes problems, but political parties are a part of being human. They may go by different names, but they end up appearing in any group larger than about 5 people. The real trick isn't to abolish them, but rather make it disgustingly easy to start one and to set up a culture that is willing to abandon a party when they drift from the rank and file members. This said, I don't think political party leaders ought to get any sort of official recognition such as a party whip, majority/minority leaders, and other "positions". Parties are a voluntary association that can freely be abandoned and sometimes should be too.
As for the electoral college, I support a reform of that system but I think it does a whole bunch of good too. It also helps balance the interests of small states vs. large states, something most alternatives fail to take into account. It also provides a fail safe if a major problem comes up with the presidency.... and should be the ultimate court to decide presidential elections. The U.S. Supreme Court interfering in the election in 2000 with Bush v. Gore is a total tragedy.
All this said, I think laws should be simple, read aloud, and covering one simple concept that is either something new or a change. If laws are so complex that those involved refuse to read the laws before they get enacted, something is certainly wrong with the law. Most laws ought to be a single page in length, in part to be comprehended by ordinary citizens.
Interestingly, the next congress is proposing that appropriations legislation will be done on an agency by agency basis next year. It will be interesting to see how that works out, where there will need to be at least one appropriations bill each week and sometimes more.
Beer
How is discussing already leaked documents a suicide pact? Sure, those who leak the documents can be prosecuted and have all sort of torture or even be executed.
The role of being able to discuss, quote, or organize "leaked documents" is that it is impossible to distinguish between secrets which are being held because they are politically damaging and those secrets which are intended to protect the lives or liberty of those mentioned in the memos. The issue really is one of what to do once the information has been leaked. Wikileaks may be facilitating those leaks after a fashion, but how is that different than somebody sending a similar cache of classified documents to the Washington Post or New York Times?
Similarly there were a series of documents which incriminated politicians and ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein working with the Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their effort instead of prison time. Other than the fact that these two reporters didn't end up sleeping with random strangers while their story was making national headlines, how is what Wikileaks doing any different at all? And yes, they did publish "classified" documents without permission of the federal government.