A slow drunk driver is not safer than a sober fast driver. It's all about reaction times and control when the driver needs to make a decision (i.e. granny walks in front of the car).
I think you've contradicted yourself here. Faster speeds require shorter reaction times and better control over the vehicle. That is why those driving in professional competition racing indeed have faster reflexes and considerable training before they are allowed on the race course. If you are traveling at slower speeds, you have more time to react and it is mechanically easier for the vehicle to adjust to sudden situations. That is also why speed limits are lower (generally) through residential neighborhoods.
This said, an intoxicated driver (regardless of substance used to get "high" or even legality of the substance) does have even further impaired reaction times above and beyond an ordinary sober individual and is a danger to themselves and others. I don't condone driving while intoxicated, and there are other aspects that cause harm even above and beyond merely the reaction times.
Lyle Hillyard represents my own senate legislative district (Cache Valley) in the State of Utah. I'm sure he'd get a kick out of making it to Slashdot, although I think I'd have to explain to him what/. is in the first place. The guy is an otherwise full-time lawyer (I've used his law firm) and rocks the boat enough to get the ire of his own party from time to time. Republican because Democrats don't have a chance in local elections, and most locals consider the primaries to be the "real" elections around here.
It should be pointed out that this is also due to a high profile situation that happened in Logan where somebody texting while driving killed two researchers who worked for ATK System. The rocket they had been working on, BTW, was the solid rocket core of the Ares I rocket, being developed for future manned NASA missions. The kid who was behind the wheel was arrested and the county prosecutor complained to the state senator that there was a distinct lack of legal options available to prosecute with. Ultimately I think he was charged with automotive manslaughter and the judge gave the kid a sentence to travel around the state to various high schools explaining his story and what dreadful consequences can happen if you text and drive at the same time. This was also ultimately videotaped and sent to all of the Utah high schools on DVD. The "200 hours of community service" mentioned in the original article was this trip around the various high schools.
I think this video is also on You Tube, but I don't know the link. The excerpts I've seen of it are pretty sobering as well.
While I generally like what Senator Hillyard has been doing for Cache Valley, it is nice to see him doing things like this as well. I'd agree it was an appropriate legislative response to a bad situation.
What is concerning about Australia for Americans is that they are a very large country with a relatively small population, a similar history to the USA in terms of how it was established (not completely the same.... I said similar), and certainly the same English common law as the foundation of the legal system for both countries. Generally speaking, until relatively recent history, Australia has been viewed as even more permissive and willing to grant liberty more than even America.
In other words, if Australia is clamping down on stuff like this, we are simply screwed in America if the U.S. government does this too.
I do wonder if you need a government ID card if you want to walk, on foot, across the Australian outback. Some people might think you are crazy to attempt such a task, but is there a reason for the government to prohibit such a task?
I don't know about the particular location on the college campus being referred to (it seem likely it was a dorm rec room) but even the "private property" arguement doesn't hold water here. The GP post suggested he was engaged in an otherwise lawful activity (watching television) with others that he also knew. At the very least, he could have under most normal circumstances claimed to be a "guest" of one of the other students he was with and that should have ended it.
As for the private/public distinction, even that is a little hazy. There is loitering that perhaps could have been asserted as a possible charge of criminal behavior, if it could be documented that the individual in question had no relationship to anybody else at the facility. Also, most college-campus buildings, in cases like this, would have a curfew for when non-residents (at a dorm) or non-students (or even students in most other buildings) must leave. If the officer was saying something like "time's up... time to leave" or something a bit friendlier, asking for IDs may have made more sense. I've had campus police do exactly that and not ask for IDs when involved in a similar activity in the past... essentially, "get lost and when I (the officer) come back I don't want to see you here".
I also find that kind of attitude about a closed college campus restrictive in terms of a university education as a whole. Besides treating college students as adults (maybe young adults with some problems, but adults none the less) goes a long way to get things to happen that can also prevent crime.
Most people forget that a passport is a relatively recent "invention" of governments. Prior to the 20th Century, and even throughout most of the 20th Century, most ordinary citizens did not have a passport when traveling between countries. This was originally a device to indicate some sort of diplomatic status and to certify that status on an official basis.
Countries, even modern industrialized countries with large and very mobile populations with access to cheap transportation methods affordable by ordinary laborers, had citizens that were able to and indeed did travel between other countries... including as mere "tourists". You were pretty much who you claimed to be, and if you packed up and moved elsewhere establishing a new identify, nobody really cared as long as you were law-abiding and generally neighborly.
This said, telling somebody from a law-enforcement agency that they don't need to see your identification is generally frowned upon as those in law enforcement love to be in charge and in control. A lack of ID puts the officer at a distinct disadvantage as they simply don't know how to react to a perfect stranger with no background as to who that person might be. Getting the ID (including passport) implies that the law enforcement agencies and officers can get a database on who you are, how harmless or otherwise you might be, and to track your actions and movements. Information, any information in this case, is power. This data can and will be used against you for any of their purposes... which is why liberty-seeking individuals bristle at the thought of giving ID information for nearly any reason, and then only reluctantly.
You're not getting it. The costs of what you or anyone else have proposed far outweigh any credible gains. Manned space exploration is pointless and colossally expensive. All the dubious dreams expressed in this thread, namely mining asteroids, building infrastructure for Mars colonization in some distant future, etc. can be far more readily and cheaply achieved with unmanned missions. Humans will have no compelling role to play for at least a century. It is just too expensive, unsustainable, and tangential to any desirable short and medium term practical outcomes.
What do you think it cost to get New York City built? Do you think the governments of the Netherlands and Great Britain gave a concern about that cost when they endorsed the initial settlements into North America?
I'll admit that it costs a whole bunch of money to send something from the surface of the Earth and to put that onto the surface of the Moon. In 1620 it was also an incredible expense to send all of the materials and food supplies to build homes and provisions to Boston. Oh, wait, they didn't do that, did they? The materials used for developing North America came from... North America. The same will be done on the Moon.
In terms of being able to get to the Moon in the first place, it shouldn't cost nearly as much as it cost NASA during the Apollo program... and certainly as much as NASA is claiming it should cost for Constellation. A current cost-competitive estimate for performing a circum-lunar flight (duplicating the Apollo 8 experience) has been quoted at USD $100 million (by Space Adventures) per seat. Going from lunar orbit to the surface isn't really all that much more expensive. And that is using strictly current technology and launch vehicles that have been developed at government expense and have no real market studies or production costs from genuine commercial competition that would certainly drive that figure down quite a bit. Yeah, that is still expensive, but it at least gives a ballpark figure to compare to.
I'll admit, however, that there is a serious lack of business ideas that legitimately pay off the return on investment for a private company to go to the Moon... even if you ignore current space law or presume that the legal environment will allow a private company to own a hunk of the Moon for mining or other commercial purposes. No, the "Lunar Embassy" does not count and will be promptly ignored.
Assuming that kinetic energy launchers can be built on the Moon instead of requiring chemical rockets (for bulk cargo extraction), the cost per kilo for materials sent to a place like lunar orbit or the Lagrangian points could be at around $100/kg. At that price, you could certainly afford to engage in quite a bit of extra-terrestrial construction. That is the infrastructure that is necessary to get anywhere else in the Solar System for a relatively cheap price, and what can ultimately make all of this affordable for ordinary people to get into space in large numbers. $100/kg is cheap enough to send minerals other than He3 from the Moon to the Earth and make a profit when the stuff lands on the Earth.
BTW, in response to the parent post you were responding to, building a greenhouse on the Moon wouldn't be all that expensive... using existing resources that are already found on the Moon. Carbon certainly exists on the Moon in large quantities, as does Oxygen. The primary "missing" components are Nitrogen and Hydrogen that could sustain life in a major way, of which finding substantial quantities of water-ice on the Moon fills in one of those crucial missing elements.
More to the point, this is a matter of money and engineering, not the creation of new physics. Usually if something is possible and there is a desire for somebody to do an activity, a way will eventually be found for that thing to happen. It is that point which was made, including the ability to "terraform" at least portions of the Moon.
I would have to agree with the sentiment of going to the Moon first. We already have the raw technology to get there, and truth be told... nearly everywhere else in the Solar System except for Mars is going to need the kinds of technology that are needed for serious exploration and development of the surface of the Moon.
As far as being close by, that is all that much more of a rationale for going first to the Moon. If there is any kind of emergency for somebody on the Moon, it will be by far and away easier to return to the Earth or be able to send a "rescue mission" to deal with the problems that would happen there. For example, if something akin to the Apollo 13 flight happened to astronauts while on their way to Mars, they would simply be dead. Apollo 13 was close enough to be able to improvise a "new mission" and somehow make it back to the Earth.
Assuming that there are regular flights going to and from the Moon, it would in fact be easier to send somebody who is needing desperate medical treatment or has a unique need to get back home from the Moon than it would be from Antarctica.
And in spite of what some may say, there is a whole lot more to learn about the Moon by doing a serious scientific investigation *at the moon*. This investigation needs to be done by scientists that are there, and not some tele-operated robots. Oh, some tele-operated devices can and should be used as well, but that is in compliment with and not in substitution of manned exploration as well. Besides simply the entire field of "lunar geology" (whatever that term may ultimately be called), there is also studies on what materials can work the best on the Moon, how to build more effective space suits (the Apollo space suits nearly disintegrated after 3 days of use), and the health effects of living in a partial gravitational environment. This is discounting projects like radio astronomy from the "far side" of the Moon that have absolutely no other equivalent.
While I'll admit that Chinese goods are flooding the markets elsewhere in the world, it is a factual point that the USA is China's #1 destination for exports. This even includes a comparison of the EU as a whole compared to the USA.
Surprisingly, China isn't the #1 country for imports into the USA. That is Canada followed by Mexico, and the EU as a whole would be #3 ahead of China. By itself, that also explains some of America's trade policy decisions and how they differ from that of China.
While I will admit that the industrial revolution in America produced some incredibly awful pollution, I can't stand for a moment the assertion that the USA is the most polluting nation on the Earth. That is a flat out lie and an attempt to skew statistics in some anti-America hate that doesn't really know what is happening.
By nearly every possible measure, America is a much cleaner and healthier place to life, raise children, and grow food. Environmental laws that exist within the USA are having an impact... both positive for the environment and negative in terms of business growth. That several American presidential administrations and the various groups of senators over the years have chosen not to get themselves tied up in Euro-centric treaties that would further punish America in ways that doesn't help improve the natural environment may not be nearly as bad as it sounds.
Nearly every possible measure of pollution, from air quality, water quality, concerns about ground water contamination, even radioactive waste disposal and even nuclear weapon testing have shown a significant and positive improvements. While not perfect, the air quality in Los Angeles has improved significantly since I was a young boy. In New York City, you are finding worms rotting out the wooden piers at the docks... something that didn't happen as recently as the 1980's. Beavers are even coming back to Brooklyn and building lodges for the first time since the 1700's. The air in Pittsburgh PA is actually breathable where a hundred years ago the soot and air pollution was so bad that you couldn't see more than a hundred yards (meters) or so due to the steel mills. These are just a few examples and there are hundreds of others.
That there may be other problems you can point to, sure, but on the whole it is disingenuous to assert that America doesn't care about the environment... or that this is strictly a leftist issue either. The issue is how you take stewardship of the resources you have available, and when to do the right thing.
BTW, the exact opposite is true in China. The Yellow River is all but dead for most of its length, and certainly it is unhealthy to use for anything other than as an open sewer. The air quality of Beijing was so bad that during the Olympics they had to do the draconian move of simply shutting down all private automobiles and even most trucks going into and out of the city. Certainly the air quality of Beijing is far and away worse than Los Angeles county ever could have dreamed of and is nearly as bad as it was in Pittsburgh at the beginning of the 20th Century. Due to lousy farm practices, a considerable amount of the Chinese top soil actually lands on my back yard... in America. The dust storms that come from China from time to time are so incredible that the dirt literally is carried completely across the Pacific Ocean.
China simply is not being a sound ecological steward of their environment and it shows in nearly every possible statistic that can legitimate measure pollution. The only reason why China isn't mentioned as the worst polluter on the planet has more to do with official reports than with actual consequences.
I am not ashamed at all of the environmental record of America, and I'll put it up against any other country of the world that has steel mills and is involved in heavy industrial production with as diverse of an industrial base as exists in America.
I like the FairTax bill mainly as a way to revamp the U.S. tax code and start over with a clean sheet. There is no reason for the 10k pages of the internal revenue code, or the 100k pages of interpretations of that code, and the 1m pages of precedence to plow through if you want to try and figure out how much you really owe the government at the end of each year.
That it would also provide a sort of tax haven status for money pouring out of the EU is a side benefit, not to mention that the USA would also be home base to an enormous amount of capital if it happened.
In spite of the presence of the communist government in China, one thing that the Chinese government has learned is that regulations and taxation kill business. Instead of taxing everything, the Chinese government is instead an investor.... and the business policies are often decided on the basis of how good it can be for Chinese business, as the sale of goods to America ends up often going straight into the pocket of the Chinese government.... more often than not the "People's Liberation Army" more directly. Yes, the Chinese Army is running factories that supply goods and services to the U.S. Army on sometimes a very direct fashion.
Nice fanciful things like environmental laws and OSHA are simply non-existent in China as well. In other words, they don't have to worry about carbon tax credits, they don't even have to worry about what happens when they dump toxic waste directly into the Yellow River. Certainly luxuries like concerns over mine safety is something that is also very much missing.... hundreds or even thousands of Chinese miners die each year due to mining accidents that would permanently shut down any American mine. Injuries in factories are no different.
As a result, "the tools that make the tools" like CNC machines, lathes, and other basic machine tools that make more tools are about 10% of the cost as you can buy them in America. They are more labor intensive, but labor isn't something the Chinese are lacking. Skilled labor isn't even a huge problem. So the tools to make the factories are cheaper, they can do eminent domain to build factories at pennies on the dollar compared to what a company would have to do in America, and they have what appears to be an unending supply of peasant labor coming from the rural parts of China.
It isn't just the cheaper labor costs, it is the cheaper everything cost in China that has turned that country into America's manufacturing center. And the influx of cash, with a deliberately designed weak currency to keep money flowing in that drives the current relationship between China and America.
This has nothing to do with either Obama, Bush, Reagan, Bush II, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, or anybody even remotely recent. This goes back to the Truman administration, and perhaps even earlier.
The problem is the globalist attitude that has pervaded the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate that is willing to put up with massive trade deficits, budget deficits, bloated military spending on the federal level, and a belief in the social engineering of society through the use of highly complex taxation and regulation codes. You have to go back to the Calviin Coolidge to find a substantially different political philosophy on how the government should be operated. Reagan tried, but many of the programs he would have killed were so firmly entrenched that he could only pay lip service to the ideas of smaller government at best.
This said, I think that Obama has taken these natural tendencies in looking to the government for the "answer" to all of society's ills that he is driving the final nail in the coffin of American business. It has been a long time coming, but the destruction of private initiative is nearly at hand on a much more exhaustive level.
The difference between Obama and Bush: Everybody claimed that "W" Bush wanted to take over as a dictator. Obama actually is succeeding.... Brown shirts and all.
I know this is going waaay off topic, but I beg to differ that modern consumer equipment must be unrepairable.
Oh, I grant you that it is, and that is also something frustrating to me to no end. I'm just suggesting that this is by design, and that some company... if they really want to assert that they are green and not just give lip service... could design equipment to be repaired by an ordinary technician trained at a 2-year community college. Unfortunately that might take more than a simple start-up to get it to work out, and would take a radical change in current manufacturing processes to make it happen.
I worked for a manufacturing company that mostly did business to business products, where the products simply had to be repairable in order to meet the customer's needs. Computer equipment that was over 20 years old continued to live on (running on MS-DOS, interestingly enough... and some early CP/M variant for some of the equipment) and even serviced. The largest problem was simply trying to find chip manufacturers who were even willing to supply parts for stuff that old if it broke. Electronics produced in the 1990's is actually harder to find parts for than stuff made in the 1980's, as it turns out.
The local second hand stores (aka Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc.) stopped any kind of repair program about 20 years ago and have all but stopped even accepting electronics, unless you can turn them on and prove they still work. There are some specialized electronics recyclers, but that is an exception rather than a rule for these stores. This includes more mundane consumer appliances like toasters, televisions, and waffle irons that are even hard to repair any more, but used to be routinely repaired in earlier decades.
This is also why ultimately the Betamax failed..... the porn producers (trying to cut to the most marginal costs... it was cheaper this way) selected the VHS standard for a vast majority of their content. This pushed early video tape adopters into the VHS standard, and ultimately left Sony high and dry with a device format that nobody wanted.
Having been involved with some early DVD-Video authoring efforts (I wrote the authoring software), the porn companies came out of the woodwork and waved millions in the direction of the company I worked for. Needless to say, I'm not a millionaire. As such is life.
In regards to Wikibooks, you will find that for all but the most "popular" books on the site are pretty much a one-man band in terms of a really motivated individual who knows the topic in depth and has taken the time and effort to put the content onto the site. Some of these mostly single-author books have achieved some fairly good polish too, although I'll admit that most of them are half completed projects in need of somebody else to finish the project.
The Wikibooks community, at least the "regulars" who provide the infrastructure and try to battle vandalism and massive abuse, is a relatively small community where nearly everybody knows something about everybody else. There are some sub-communities that have formed, usually around specific book projects, but on the whole it isn't too hard to get connected and familiar or even introduced to everybody else. Perhaps you don't have the time to get involved to that level, but you will find a generally receptive community there.
At the very least, consider Wikibooks as a public archive. For as long as the Wikimedia Founation continues to receive donations, content put onto Wikibooks (particularly extensive contributions such as a whole textbook) is going to be kept and preserved. There have been several other similar books which have been donated to Wikibooks in the past, most notably a series of books that came from the United Nations and are being preserved on Wikibooks to get wider dissemination.
There have also been several "class projects" where assignments were given for students to write a chapter in Wikibooks and try to tie the whole thing together in a coherent book. Most of these have been graduate-level courses, but some have involved undergraduates as well with success. Indeed, I would think that getting a group of graduate level students together to write an undergraduate textbook in their discipline could prove to be useful in a whole bunch of ways, even if it never actually gets used by anybody else when they are finished.
As far as physically printing out a book, there are dozens of printers that you can work with besides Lulu, and there may even be a couple of printers in the town where you are living that would do a pretty good job. At the very least, consider sending students off to Kinko's or some other photocopy place, where such textbooks and supplemental materials used to be purchased and could be again in large numbers... if open sourced textbooks were available for places like that to print up.
I hope that at least for a college-level physics textbook that you have at least considered http://lightandmatter.com/ ?
This text is already the primary introductory physics text that includes chapter problems and has been vetted over the course of several years of experience in actual classroom usage at several colleges. Besides, I happen to like the principle author of the book as well, who has considerable experience in open source textbook publishing.
They don't have to be full of mistakes, and the problem is that most of the content you are referring to is usually the equivalent of a very early preliminary draft that hasn't had the polish that a good editor can provide. Getting the synergy together for putting this level of polish on open source texts is a hard thing to do, as that implies you have a whole community of folks with similar interests that want to see that the content gets the polish that it deserves. This is something that has happened with open source software projects, but seems to be lacking for textbook collaboration.
One additional problem I've seen with the on-line textbook collaborators is that egos get in the way of getting the kind of cooperation that is commonly found with software collaboration. Those with the experience and knowledge that could put the kind of professional spit and polish on open source textbooks usually try to go off on their own and set up a competing website or small group that often isn't a large enough group to get anything of substance accomplished. In the case of Ben Crowell (from Light and Matter), he stayed focused on one topic and aimed to maintain the quality on that topic. Such an effort takes years, and perhaps even decades to accomplish, and certainly writing a book is a much more complex task than trying to write a simple article like something found on Wikipedia.
I love NASM... I really do. What Wikibooks offers that is different is to provide a repository of several open source texts on one place, on a wide variety of topics. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/
Having written a few wikibooks myself, throwing up some documentation and trying to turn it into a real textbook are two different tasks, even though they are related. Getting good, well written content is an important step, and without the content is it hard to create the textbook. But unfortunately you are only at about the 40% mark of getting the textbook into a polished form once the content is fully written and you have created or identified all of the illustrations for that book.
Wikibooks closes the gap by another 10% with some PDF publishing tools that are being used by some of the advanced users on the site. I like to hand tweak the text myself using a word processor like Open Office, but the automated tools on Wikibooks are getting better and can use the wiki markup language more directly to get the desired results (via templates and some other cute tricks).
My experience with book publishing is that, in general, a 10x increase in printing volume causes a 2x increase in costs. The reverse is also true in general. On demand printing of PDF files can skew that for smaller print runs, but that is a good general rule.
As for comparisons between one printer and another, there are issues like paper quality, colors used, printing processes, and even technical quality of the printer themselves.
The technology does exist for printing large volumes of books on a one-off basis (aka a printer that can print many books at the same time, but the contents of the book is completely different for each individual copy). This is mostly done at the moment with the mail-print industry (aka the companies who print out invoices/bills for people like utility companies and credit card services). In theory, a one-off on demand 300 page paperback book could be printed for about $5 per copy, including postage. Potentially less but postage costs start to eat into the figure. The problem is that trying to get a publishing sales team together to be able to feed such a monster printing press is not a trivial thing.
I do believe that there are limits to constitutional guarantees such as the 1st Ammendment. Many of those limits have even formal legal opinions on them, including limits explicitly mentioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The real question being raised here is if in this particular case a private citizen has gone too far by following the actions of this particular task force. Clearly there is a long tradition of individuals doing this sort of "stalking" or extensive review of nearly every aspect of an organization, including governmental units like a police task force. When done by traditional media outlets, this has been called "Muckraking" and is a time-honored tradition among journalists. Government (and corporate) officials of any type are quite uncomfortable to have this kind of review of their actions, and have often used legal means to try and block even more traditional media outlets from getting in the way or uncovering corruption.
The real difference here is that a traditional small-town newspaper wouldn't have assigned a reporter to work full-time on covering this task force.... particularly if it turns out that they are pretty much doing their job correctly and according to well established public policy. There would be essentially no story to be told, and the reporter would have been reassigned. In the era of a citizen-journalist, things such as pay and motivation are changed slightly, where perhaps there is a beef on the part of this citizen-journalist (aka "blogger") to push back against some perceived injustice.
IMHO, from the perspective of a commander of such a task force, I would have tried to find out what the real grievance of this blogger was... to try and fix the situation if possible. Also, to welcome such review as long as don't violate the private lives of these officers. Mentioning the names of the children of the officers, pictures of their pets, and other similar things IMHO is crossing the line, but this was also not something reported in the blog either. Perhaps the picture of the house of the officer is a bit too much, but that by itself is usually a matter of public record somewhere, and can often be found in public directories like phone books or Google Earth.
Yes, I am implying that "the cops didn't shot her" or do something worse (yes, it can be worse than even that).
As for a police department getting away with murder, I'll admit that would be corruption on a grand scale and something that I would hope would be investigated by the relevant governing authorities, but not something completely unknown even within America.
BTW, it isn't just law enforcement that routinely use firearms and other weapons on a daily basis, and generally speaking it isn't wise to piss them off either without a good reason to believe that you have just cause to uncover corruption or other wrong-doing... and then have extra protection in place just in case as well. There are enough mentally unstable people in these positions that when pushed into a corner, they may come back shooting even if under normal circumstances they are fine and upstanding citizens otherwise doing the job they normally do.
Clearly the original blog writer was pushing a bit hard back at the police, and pushing them into a proverbial corner as well.
The Plame affair would be akin to somebody serving on the municipal council or in the mayor's office that revealed information about the undercover police officer. That would indeed be a security violation, and subject to applicable laws. In this case it was a private citizen using open sources.
Spot on here, on noting the differences.
The whole point of the blog was to put the media spotlight on the actions and affairs of this particular task forces, on the assumption that they were corrupt and needing to be monitored. It is precisely for this purpose that the 1st amendment of the U.S. Constitution was written, to give those who might be reporting this sort of information some sort of legal protection. This is clearly political speech, and the arrest was made explicitly to squelch this kind of speech.
If I were an officer, would I want my life put under this sort of detailed scrutiny? Having had police officers examine my own life in this sort of detail, I guess I don't mind having the tables turned a bit. I am certain that this task force has at least examined some of their potential suspects on more than one occasion with at least this much detail, and perhaps more using tools available only to law enforcement personnel.
Still, I can understand why these officers are pissed, and getting somebody who routinely carries a gun to be pissed at you is never a good thing to do under any circumstances. That they choose to invoke the law instead of doing something more drastic is mainly a matter of training and temperament in this case.
Considering that the reason why Glen Larson was given a green light back in the late 1970's to produce the original Battlestar Galactica was to put George Lucas' masterpiece on the small screen, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to do just that.
Heck, Fox Studios even sued Universal Pictures over the miniatures used in the production of the original series. Apparently the design for the original Cylon basestar and the Viper had some strong design similarities to stuff made at Industrial Light and Magic, and the actual production shared some of the same special effects crew that jumped ship after Episode IV:ANH was released.
As a side-note.. wtf is with changing the name to "SyFy"?
Usually it is quoted as "SciFi", but in fairness, few television series, much less motion pictures do anything resembling "science" in these "futuristic dramas".
When what is seen bears so little resemblance to the writings of Hugo Gernsback, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and Lester Del Ray (much less folks like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke), you can hardly call it science fiction.
Point being, SyFy seems to be just about appropriate in terms of the spelling in comparison to real science fiction.
BTW, if you want to see what some folks could do with some real hard core science fiction, check out the radio dramas of X-minus-one that includes dramatizations of some of the classic science fiction authors. If only something that good made it to television. Star Trek, on very rare occasions, can get this good (on a "best of" episode).
In fairness to GM, they aren't even new to the business of electric vehicles either.
The EV-1 while it had a whole bunch of problems and was ultimately killed by the GM CEO before the corporate takeover by Obama, the experience from the deployment of that vehicle and the engineers involved with its design have been involved with the Volt as well.
Now you might be willing to complain that this is yet another crappy vehicle along similar lines to a company like Microsoft putting out a new version of their operating system. This company certainly has the money, talent, and resources to put out something of value, but the history of the company is enough to at least pause and want to see how it actually works before putting a deposit down on a new vehicle.
The sad thing now is that GM seems to have bet the future of their company on this vehicle, even though it was started as an afterthought based on seeing a prototype of the Tesla Roadster.
The real game change here for Tesla is that they have produced the first standard production electric automobile that has met all of the U.S. Department of Transportation safety and stability requirements for production automobiles that will travel at highway speeds. I dare you or anybody else to show another company who has accomplish this task (although there are a couple others who are trying).
The other electric automobiles are either kit cars, experimental prototypes, golf carts, concept cars, or conversion kits for existing vehicles (that tend to void the warranty of the original vehicle). None of these have really passed any side-impact safety tests or the other numerous tests required for highway speed vehicles, and try to squeeze their way in through loopholes that can and do compromise safety or are not really ready for massive production lines for sale to large numbers of consumers.
As for the financing required of Tesla, that is a major issue. There are several groups of investors with some big bucks that have already invested into Tesla, and it remains to be seen if Tesla will be able to meet the requirements to "go public" and be traded on the major stock exchanges for larger amounts of capital.
This is one of the first major independent automobile companies to come forward in America, after disappointing failures like DeLorean Motors and Tucker Motors. As to if Tesla will follow in that pattern is something that can be argued, but they seem to be going slow and aiming at the right market niche to at least gain a foothold.... and this profitable past month at least gives hope that they can do what the other American automobile companies currently aren't doing: making money.
Slashdot Mirror
"Slower" does not equal "Safer"
A slow drunk driver is not safer than a sober fast driver. It's all about reaction times and control when the driver needs to make a decision (i.e. granny walks in front of the car).
I think you've contradicted yourself here. Faster speeds require shorter reaction times and better control over the vehicle. That is why those driving in professional competition racing indeed have faster reflexes and considerable training before they are allowed on the race course. If you are traveling at slower speeds, you have more time to react and it is mechanically easier for the vehicle to adjust to sudden situations. That is also why speed limits are lower (generally) through residential neighborhoods.
This said, an intoxicated driver (regardless of substance used to get "high" or even legality of the substance) does have even further impaired reaction times above and beyond an ordinary sober individual and is a danger to themselves and others. I don't condone driving while intoxicated, and there are other aspects that cause harm even above and beyond merely the reaction times.
Lyle Hillyard represents my own senate legislative district (Cache Valley) in the State of Utah. I'm sure he'd get a kick out of making it to Slashdot, although I think I'd have to explain to him what /. is in the first place. The guy is an otherwise full-time lawyer (I've used his law firm) and rocks the boat enough to get the ire of his own party from time to time. Republican because Democrats don't have a chance in local elections, and most locals consider the primaries to be the "real" elections around here.
It should be pointed out that this is also due to a high profile situation that happened in Logan where somebody texting while driving killed two researchers who worked for ATK System. The rocket they had been working on, BTW, was the solid rocket core of the Ares I rocket, being developed for future manned NASA missions. The kid who was behind the wheel was arrested and the county prosecutor complained to the state senator that there was a distinct lack of legal options available to prosecute with. Ultimately I think he was charged with automotive manslaughter and the judge gave the kid a sentence to travel around the state to various high schools explaining his story and what dreadful consequences can happen if you text and drive at the same time. This was also ultimately videotaped and sent to all of the Utah high schools on DVD. The "200 hours of community service" mentioned in the original article was this trip around the various high schools.
I think this video is also on You Tube, but I don't know the link. The excerpts I've seen of it are pretty sobering as well.
While I generally like what Senator Hillyard has been doing for Cache Valley, it is nice to see him doing things like this as well. I'd agree it was an appropriate legislative response to a bad situation.
What is concerning about Australia for Americans is that they are a very large country with a relatively small population, a similar history to the USA in terms of how it was established (not completely the same.... I said similar), and certainly the same English common law as the foundation of the legal system for both countries. Generally speaking, until relatively recent history, Australia has been viewed as even more permissive and willing to grant liberty more than even America.
In other words, if Australia is clamping down on stuff like this, we are simply screwed in America if the U.S. government does this too.
I do wonder if you need a government ID card if you want to walk, on foot, across the Australian outback. Some people might think you are crazy to attempt such a task, but is there a reason for the government to prohibit such a task?
I don't know about the particular location on the college campus being referred to (it seem likely it was a dorm rec room) but even the "private property" arguement doesn't hold water here. The GP post suggested he was engaged in an otherwise lawful activity (watching television) with others that he also knew. At the very least, he could have under most normal circumstances claimed to be a "guest" of one of the other students he was with and that should have ended it.
As for the private/public distinction, even that is a little hazy. There is loitering that perhaps could have been asserted as a possible charge of criminal behavior, if it could be documented that the individual in question had no relationship to anybody else at the facility. Also, most college-campus buildings, in cases like this, would have a curfew for when non-residents (at a dorm) or non-students (or even students in most other buildings) must leave. If the officer was saying something like "time's up... time to leave" or something a bit friendlier, asking for IDs may have made more sense. I've had campus police do exactly that and not ask for IDs when involved in a similar activity in the past... essentially, "get lost and when I (the officer) come back I don't want to see you here".
I also find that kind of attitude about a closed college campus restrictive in terms of a university education as a whole. Besides treating college students as adults (maybe young adults with some problems, but adults none the less) goes a long way to get things to happen that can also prevent crime.
Most people forget that a passport is a relatively recent "invention" of governments. Prior to the 20th Century, and even throughout most of the 20th Century, most ordinary citizens did not have a passport when traveling between countries. This was originally a device to indicate some sort of diplomatic status and to certify that status on an official basis.
Countries, even modern industrialized countries with large and very mobile populations with access to cheap transportation methods affordable by ordinary laborers, had citizens that were able to and indeed did travel between other countries... including as mere "tourists". You were pretty much who you claimed to be, and if you packed up and moved elsewhere establishing a new identify, nobody really cared as long as you were law-abiding and generally neighborly.
This said, telling somebody from a law-enforcement agency that they don't need to see your identification is generally frowned upon as those in law enforcement love to be in charge and in control. A lack of ID puts the officer at a distinct disadvantage as they simply don't know how to react to a perfect stranger with no background as to who that person might be. Getting the ID (including passport) implies that the law enforcement agencies and officers can get a database on who you are, how harmless or otherwise you might be, and to track your actions and movements. Information, any information in this case, is power. This data can and will be used against you for any of their purposes... which is why liberty-seeking individuals bristle at the thought of giving ID information for nearly any reason, and then only reluctantly.
You're not getting it. The costs of what you or anyone else have proposed far outweigh any credible gains. Manned space exploration is pointless and colossally expensive. All the dubious dreams expressed in this thread, namely mining asteroids, building infrastructure for Mars colonization in some distant future, etc. can be far more readily and cheaply achieved with unmanned missions. Humans will have no compelling role to play for at least a century. It is just too expensive, unsustainable, and tangential to any desirable short and medium term practical outcomes.
What do you think it cost to get New York City built? Do you think the governments of the Netherlands and Great Britain gave a concern about that cost when they endorsed the initial settlements into North America?
I'll admit that it costs a whole bunch of money to send something from the surface of the Earth and to put that onto the surface of the Moon. In 1620 it was also an incredible expense to send all of the materials and food supplies to build homes and provisions to Boston. Oh, wait, they didn't do that, did they? The materials used for developing North America came from... North America. The same will be done on the Moon.
In terms of being able to get to the Moon in the first place, it shouldn't cost nearly as much as it cost NASA during the Apollo program... and certainly as much as NASA is claiming it should cost for Constellation. A current cost-competitive estimate for performing a circum-lunar flight (duplicating the Apollo 8 experience) has been quoted at USD $100 million (by Space Adventures) per seat. Going from lunar orbit to the surface isn't really all that much more expensive. And that is using strictly current technology and launch vehicles that have been developed at government expense and have no real market studies or production costs from genuine commercial competition that would certainly drive that figure down quite a bit. Yeah, that is still expensive, but it at least gives a ballpark figure to compare to.
I'll admit, however, that there is a serious lack of business ideas that legitimately pay off the return on investment for a private company to go to the Moon... even if you ignore current space law or presume that the legal environment will allow a private company to own a hunk of the Moon for mining or other commercial purposes. No, the "Lunar Embassy" does not count and will be promptly ignored.
Assuming that kinetic energy launchers can be built on the Moon instead of requiring chemical rockets (for bulk cargo extraction), the cost per kilo for materials sent to a place like lunar orbit or the Lagrangian points could be at around $100/kg. At that price, you could certainly afford to engage in quite a bit of extra-terrestrial construction. That is the infrastructure that is necessary to get anywhere else in the Solar System for a relatively cheap price, and what can ultimately make all of this affordable for ordinary people to get into space in large numbers. $100/kg is cheap enough to send minerals other than He3 from the Moon to the Earth and make a profit when the stuff lands on the Earth.
BTW, in response to the parent post you were responding to, building a greenhouse on the Moon wouldn't be all that expensive... using existing resources that are already found on the Moon. Carbon certainly exists on the Moon in large quantities, as does Oxygen. The primary "missing" components are Nitrogen and Hydrogen that could sustain life in a major way, of which finding substantial quantities of water-ice on the Moon fills in one of those crucial missing elements.
More to the point, this is a matter of money and engineering, not the creation of new physics. Usually if something is possible and there is a desire for somebody to do an activity, a way will eventually be found for that thing to happen. It is that point which was made, including the ability to "terraform" at least portions of the Moon.
I would have to agree with the sentiment of going to the Moon first. We already have the raw technology to get there, and truth be told... nearly everywhere else in the Solar System except for Mars is going to need the kinds of technology that are needed for serious exploration and development of the surface of the Moon.
As far as being close by, that is all that much more of a rationale for going first to the Moon. If there is any kind of emergency for somebody on the Moon, it will be by far and away easier to return to the Earth or be able to send a "rescue mission" to deal with the problems that would happen there. For example, if something akin to the Apollo 13 flight happened to astronauts while on their way to Mars, they would simply be dead. Apollo 13 was close enough to be able to improvise a "new mission" and somehow make it back to the Earth.
Assuming that there are regular flights going to and from the Moon, it would in fact be easier to send somebody who is needing desperate medical treatment or has a unique need to get back home from the Moon than it would be from Antarctica.
And in spite of what some may say, there is a whole lot more to learn about the Moon by doing a serious scientific investigation *at the moon*. This investigation needs to be done by scientists that are there, and not some tele-operated robots. Oh, some tele-operated devices can and should be used as well, but that is in compliment with and not in substitution of manned exploration as well. Besides simply the entire field of "lunar geology" (whatever that term may ultimately be called), there is also studies on what materials can work the best on the Moon, how to build more effective space suits (the Apollo space suits nearly disintegrated after 3 days of use), and the health effects of living in a partial gravitational environment. This is discounting projects like radio astronomy from the "far side" of the Moon that have absolutely no other equivalent.
While I'll admit that Chinese goods are flooding the markets elsewhere in the world, it is a factual point that the USA is China's #1 destination for exports. This even includes a comparison of the EU as a whole compared to the USA.
Surprisingly, China isn't the #1 country for imports into the USA. That is Canada followed by Mexico, and the EU as a whole would be #3 ahead of China. By itself, that also explains some of America's trade policy decisions and how they differ from that of China.
While I will admit that the industrial revolution in America produced some incredibly awful pollution, I can't stand for a moment the assertion that the USA is the most polluting nation on the Earth. That is a flat out lie and an attempt to skew statistics in some anti-America hate that doesn't really know what is happening.
By nearly every possible measure, America is a much cleaner and healthier place to life, raise children, and grow food. Environmental laws that exist within the USA are having an impact... both positive for the environment and negative in terms of business growth. That several American presidential administrations and the various groups of senators over the years have chosen not to get themselves tied up in Euro-centric treaties that would further punish America in ways that doesn't help improve the natural environment may not be nearly as bad as it sounds.
Nearly every possible measure of pollution, from air quality, water quality, concerns about ground water contamination, even radioactive waste disposal and even nuclear weapon testing have shown a significant and positive improvements. While not perfect, the air quality in Los Angeles has improved significantly since I was a young boy. In New York City, you are finding worms rotting out the wooden piers at the docks... something that didn't happen as recently as the 1980's. Beavers are even coming back to Brooklyn and building lodges for the first time since the 1700's. The air in Pittsburgh PA is actually breathable where a hundred years ago the soot and air pollution was so bad that you couldn't see more than a hundred yards (meters) or so due to the steel mills. These are just a few examples and there are hundreds of others.
That there may be other problems you can point to, sure, but on the whole it is disingenuous to assert that America doesn't care about the environment... or that this is strictly a leftist issue either. The issue is how you take stewardship of the resources you have available, and when to do the right thing.
BTW, the exact opposite is true in China. The Yellow River is all but dead for most of its length, and certainly it is unhealthy to use for anything other than as an open sewer. The air quality of Beijing was so bad that during the Olympics they had to do the draconian move of simply shutting down all private automobiles and even most trucks going into and out of the city. Certainly the air quality of Beijing is far and away worse than Los Angeles county ever could have dreamed of and is nearly as bad as it was in Pittsburgh at the beginning of the 20th Century. Due to lousy farm practices, a considerable amount of the Chinese top soil actually lands on my back yard... in America. The dust storms that come from China from time to time are so incredible that the dirt literally is carried completely across the Pacific Ocean.
China simply is not being a sound ecological steward of their environment and it shows in nearly every possible statistic that can legitimate measure pollution. The only reason why China isn't mentioned as the worst polluter on the planet has more to do with official reports than with actual consequences.
I am not ashamed at all of the environmental record of America, and I'll put it up against any other country of the world that has steel mills and is involved in heavy industrial production with as diverse of an industrial base as exists in America.
I like the FairTax bill mainly as a way to revamp the U.S. tax code and start over with a clean sheet. There is no reason for the 10k pages of the internal revenue code, or the 100k pages of interpretations of that code, and the 1m pages of precedence to plow through if you want to try and figure out how much you really owe the government at the end of each year.
That it would also provide a sort of tax haven status for money pouring out of the EU is a side benefit, not to mention that the USA would also be home base to an enormous amount of capital if it happened.
In spite of the presence of the communist government in China, one thing that the Chinese government has learned is that regulations and taxation kill business. Instead of taxing everything, the Chinese government is instead an investor .... and the business policies are often decided on the basis of how good it can be for Chinese business, as the sale of goods to America ends up often going straight into the pocket of the Chinese government.... more often than not the "People's Liberation Army" more directly. Yes, the Chinese Army is running factories that supply goods and services to the U.S. Army on sometimes a very direct fashion.
Nice fanciful things like environmental laws and OSHA are simply non-existent in China as well. In other words, they don't have to worry about carbon tax credits, they don't even have to worry about what happens when they dump toxic waste directly into the Yellow River. Certainly luxuries like concerns over mine safety is something that is also very much missing.... hundreds or even thousands of Chinese miners die each year due to mining accidents that would permanently shut down any American mine. Injuries in factories are no different.
As a result, "the tools that make the tools" like CNC machines, lathes, and other basic machine tools that make more tools are about 10% of the cost as you can buy them in America. They are more labor intensive, but labor isn't something the Chinese are lacking. Skilled labor isn't even a huge problem. So the tools to make the factories are cheaper, they can do eminent domain to build factories at pennies on the dollar compared to what a company would have to do in America, and they have what appears to be an unending supply of peasant labor coming from the rural parts of China.
It isn't just the cheaper labor costs, it is the cheaper everything cost in China that has turned that country into America's manufacturing center. And the influx of cash, with a deliberately designed weak currency to keep money flowing in that drives the current relationship between China and America.
This has nothing to do with either Obama, Bush, Reagan, Bush II, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, or anybody even remotely recent. This goes back to the Truman administration, and perhaps even earlier.
The problem is the globalist attitude that has pervaded the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate that is willing to put up with massive trade deficits, budget deficits, bloated military spending on the federal level, and a belief in the social engineering of society through the use of highly complex taxation and regulation codes. You have to go back to the Calviin Coolidge to find a substantially different political philosophy on how the government should be operated. Reagan tried, but many of the programs he would have killed were so firmly entrenched that he could only pay lip service to the ideas of smaller government at best.
This said, I think that Obama has taken these natural tendencies in looking to the government for the "answer" to all of society's ills that he is driving the final nail in the coffin of American business. It has been a long time coming, but the destruction of private initiative is nearly at hand on a much more exhaustive level.
The difference between Obama and Bush: Everybody claimed that "W" Bush wanted to take over as a dictator. Obama actually is succeeding.... Brown shirts and all.
I know this is going waaay off topic, but I beg to differ that modern consumer equipment must be unrepairable.
Oh, I grant you that it is, and that is also something frustrating to me to no end. I'm just suggesting that this is by design, and that some company... if they really want to assert that they are green and not just give lip service... could design equipment to be repaired by an ordinary technician trained at a 2-year community college. Unfortunately that might take more than a simple start-up to get it to work out, and would take a radical change in current manufacturing processes to make it happen.
I worked for a manufacturing company that mostly did business to business products, where the products simply had to be repairable in order to meet the customer's needs. Computer equipment that was over 20 years old continued to live on (running on MS-DOS, interestingly enough... and some early CP/M variant for some of the equipment) and even serviced. The largest problem was simply trying to find chip manufacturers who were even willing to supply parts for stuff that old if it broke. Electronics produced in the 1990's is actually harder to find parts for than stuff made in the 1980's, as it turns out.
The local second hand stores (aka Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc.) stopped any kind of repair program about 20 years ago and have all but stopped even accepting electronics, unless you can turn them on and prove they still work. There are some specialized electronics recyclers, but that is an exception rather than a rule for these stores. This includes more mundane consumer appliances like toasters, televisions, and waffle irons that are even hard to repair any more, but used to be routinely repaired in earlier decades.
This is also why ultimately the Betamax failed..... the porn producers (trying to cut to the most marginal costs... it was cheaper this way) selected the VHS standard for a vast majority of their content. This pushed early video tape adopters into the VHS standard, and ultimately left Sony high and dry with a device format that nobody wanted.
Having been involved with some early DVD-Video authoring efforts (I wrote the authoring software), the porn companies came out of the woodwork and waved millions in the direction of the company I worked for. Needless to say, I'm not a millionaire. As such is life.
In regards to Wikibooks, you will find that for all but the most "popular" books on the site are pretty much a one-man band in terms of a really motivated individual who knows the topic in depth and has taken the time and effort to put the content onto the site. Some of these mostly single-author books have achieved some fairly good polish too, although I'll admit that most of them are half completed projects in need of somebody else to finish the project.
The Wikibooks community, at least the "regulars" who provide the infrastructure and try to battle vandalism and massive abuse, is a relatively small community where nearly everybody knows something about everybody else. There are some sub-communities that have formed, usually around specific book projects, but on the whole it isn't too hard to get connected and familiar or even introduced to everybody else. Perhaps you don't have the time to get involved to that level, but you will find a generally receptive community there.
At the very least, consider Wikibooks as a public archive. For as long as the Wikimedia Founation continues to receive donations, content put onto Wikibooks (particularly extensive contributions such as a whole textbook) is going to be kept and preserved. There have been several other similar books which have been donated to Wikibooks in the past, most notably a series of books that came from the United Nations and are being preserved on Wikibooks to get wider dissemination.
There have also been several "class projects" where assignments were given for students to write a chapter in Wikibooks and try to tie the whole thing together in a coherent book. Most of these have been graduate-level courses, but some have involved undergraduates as well with success. Indeed, I would think that getting a group of graduate level students together to write an undergraduate textbook in their discipline could prove to be useful in a whole bunch of ways, even if it never actually gets used by anybody else when they are finished.
As far as physically printing out a book, there are dozens of printers that you can work with besides Lulu, and there may even be a couple of printers in the town where you are living that would do a pretty good job. At the very least, consider sending students off to Kinko's or some other photocopy place, where such textbooks and supplemental materials used to be purchased and could be again in large numbers... if open sourced textbooks were available for places like that to print up.
I hope that at least for a college-level physics textbook that you have at least considered http://lightandmatter.com/ ?
This text is already the primary introductory physics text that includes chapter problems and has been vetted over the course of several years of experience in actual classroom usage at several colleges. Besides, I happen to like the principle author of the book as well, who has considerable experience in open source textbook publishing.
They don't have to be full of mistakes, and the problem is that most of the content you are referring to is usually the equivalent of a very early preliminary draft that hasn't had the polish that a good editor can provide. Getting the synergy together for putting this level of polish on open source texts is a hard thing to do, as that implies you have a whole community of folks with similar interests that want to see that the content gets the polish that it deserves. This is something that has happened with open source software projects, but seems to be lacking for textbook collaboration.
One additional problem I've seen with the on-line textbook collaborators is that egos get in the way of getting the kind of cooperation that is commonly found with software collaboration. Those with the experience and knowledge that could put the kind of professional spit and polish on open source textbooks usually try to go off on their own and set up a competing website or small group that often isn't a large enough group to get anything of substance accomplished. In the case of Ben Crowell (from Light and Matter), he stayed focused on one topic and aimed to maintain the quality on that topic. Such an effort takes years, and perhaps even decades to accomplish, and certainly writing a book is a much more complex task than trying to write a simple article like something found on Wikipedia.
I love NASM... I really do. What Wikibooks offers that is different is to provide a repository of several open source texts on one place, on a wide variety of topics. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/
Having written a few wikibooks myself, throwing up some documentation and trying to turn it into a real textbook are two different tasks, even though they are related. Getting good, well written content is an important step, and without the content is it hard to create the textbook. But unfortunately you are only at about the 40% mark of getting the textbook into a polished form once the content is fully written and you have created or identified all of the illustrations for that book.
Wikibooks closes the gap by another 10% with some PDF publishing tools that are being used by some of the advanced users on the site. I like to hand tweak the text myself using a word processor like Open Office, but the automated tools on Wikibooks are getting better and can use the wiki markup language more directly to get the desired results (via templates and some other cute tricks).
My experience with book publishing is that, in general, a 10x increase in printing volume causes a 2x increase in costs. The reverse is also true in general. On demand printing of PDF files can skew that for smaller print runs, but that is a good general rule.
As for comparisons between one printer and another, there are issues like paper quality, colors used, printing processes, and even technical quality of the printer themselves.
The technology does exist for printing large volumes of books on a one-off basis (aka a printer that can print many books at the same time, but the contents of the book is completely different for each individual copy). This is mostly done at the moment with the mail-print industry (aka the companies who print out invoices/bills for people like utility companies and credit card services). In theory, a one-off on demand 300 page paperback book could be printed for about $5 per copy, including postage. Potentially less but postage costs start to eat into the figure. The problem is that trying to get a publishing sales team together to be able to feed such a monster printing press is not a trivial thing.
I do believe that there are limits to constitutional guarantees such as the 1st Ammendment. Many of those limits have even formal legal opinions on them, including limits explicitly mentioned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The real question being raised here is if in this particular case a private citizen has gone too far by following the actions of this particular task force. Clearly there is a long tradition of individuals doing this sort of "stalking" or extensive review of nearly every aspect of an organization, including governmental units like a police task force. When done by traditional media outlets, this has been called "Muckraking" and is a time-honored tradition among journalists. Government (and corporate) officials of any type are quite uncomfortable to have this kind of review of their actions, and have often used legal means to try and block even more traditional media outlets from getting in the way or uncovering corruption.
The real difference here is that a traditional small-town newspaper wouldn't have assigned a reporter to work full-time on covering this task force.... particularly if it turns out that they are pretty much doing their job correctly and according to well established public policy. There would be essentially no story to be told, and the reporter would have been reassigned. In the era of a citizen-journalist, things such as pay and motivation are changed slightly, where perhaps there is a beef on the part of this citizen-journalist (aka "blogger") to push back against some perceived injustice.
IMHO, from the perspective of a commander of such a task force, I would have tried to find out what the real grievance of this blogger was... to try and fix the situation if possible. Also, to welcome such review as long as don't violate the private lives of these officers. Mentioning the names of the children of the officers, pictures of their pets, and other similar things IMHO is crossing the line, but this was also not something reported in the blog either. Perhaps the picture of the house of the officer is a bit too much, but that by itself is usually a matter of public record somewhere, and can often be found in public directories like phone books or Google Earth.
Yes, I am implying that "the cops didn't shot her" or do something worse (yes, it can be worse than even that).
As for a police department getting away with murder, I'll admit that would be corruption on a grand scale and something that I would hope would be investigated by the relevant governing authorities, but not something completely unknown even within America.
BTW, it isn't just law enforcement that routinely use firearms and other weapons on a daily basis, and generally speaking it isn't wise to piss them off either without a good reason to believe that you have just cause to uncover corruption or other wrong-doing... and then have extra protection in place just in case as well. There are enough mentally unstable people in these positions that when pushed into a corner, they may come back shooting even if under normal circumstances they are fine and upstanding citizens otherwise doing the job they normally do.
Clearly the original blog writer was pushing a bit hard back at the police, and pushing them into a proverbial corner as well.
The Plame affair would be akin to somebody serving on the municipal council or in the mayor's office that revealed information about the undercover police officer. That would indeed be a security violation, and subject to applicable laws. In this case it was a private citizen using open sources.
Spot on here, on noting the differences.
The whole point of the blog was to put the media spotlight on the actions and affairs of this particular task forces, on the assumption that they were corrupt and needing to be monitored. It is precisely for this purpose that the 1st amendment of the U.S. Constitution was written, to give those who might be reporting this sort of information some sort of legal protection. This is clearly political speech, and the arrest was made explicitly to squelch this kind of speech.
If I were an officer, would I want my life put under this sort of detailed scrutiny? Having had police officers examine my own life in this sort of detail, I guess I don't mind having the tables turned a bit. I am certain that this task force has at least examined some of their potential suspects on more than one occasion with at least this much detail, and perhaps more using tools available only to law enforcement personnel.
Still, I can understand why these officers are pissed, and getting somebody who routinely carries a gun to be pissed at you is never a good thing to do under any circumstances. That they choose to invoke the law instead of doing something more drastic is mainly a matter of training and temperament in this case.
Considering that the reason why Glen Larson was given a green light back in the late 1970's to produce the original Battlestar Galactica was to put George Lucas' masterpiece on the small screen, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to do just that.
Heck, Fox Studios even sued Universal Pictures over the miniatures used in the production of the original series. Apparently the design for the original Cylon basestar and the Viper had some strong design similarities to stuff made at Industrial Light and Magic, and the actual production shared some of the same special effects crew that jumped ship after Episode IV:ANH was released.
As a side-note.. wtf is with changing the name to "SyFy"?
Usually it is quoted as "SciFi", but in fairness, few television series, much less motion pictures do anything resembling "science" in these "futuristic dramas".
When what is seen bears so little resemblance to the writings of Hugo Gernsback, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and Lester Del Ray (much less folks like Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke), you can hardly call it science fiction.
Point being, SyFy seems to be just about appropriate in terms of the spelling in comparison to real science fiction.
BTW, if you want to see what some folks could do with some real hard core science fiction, check out the radio dramas of X-minus-one that includes dramatizations of some of the classic science fiction authors. If only something that good made it to television. Star Trek, on very rare occasions, can get this good (on a "best of" episode).
In fairness to GM, they aren't even new to the business of electric vehicles either.
The EV-1 while it had a whole bunch of problems and was ultimately killed by the GM CEO before the corporate takeover by Obama, the experience from the deployment of that vehicle and the engineers involved with its design have been involved with the Volt as well.
Now you might be willing to complain that this is yet another crappy vehicle along similar lines to a company like Microsoft putting out a new version of their operating system. This company certainly has the money, talent, and resources to put out something of value, but the history of the company is enough to at least pause and want to see how it actually works before putting a deposit down on a new vehicle.
The sad thing now is that GM seems to have bet the future of their company on this vehicle, even though it was started as an afterthought based on seeing a prototype of the Tesla Roadster.
The real game change here for Tesla is that they have produced the first standard production electric automobile that has met all of the U.S. Department of Transportation safety and stability requirements for production automobiles that will travel at highway speeds. I dare you or anybody else to show another company who has accomplish this task (although there are a couple others who are trying).
The other electric automobiles are either kit cars, experimental prototypes, golf carts, concept cars, or conversion kits for existing vehicles (that tend to void the warranty of the original vehicle). None of these have really passed any side-impact safety tests or the other numerous tests required for highway speed vehicles, and try to squeeze their way in through loopholes that can and do compromise safety or are not really ready for massive production lines for sale to large numbers of consumers.
As for the financing required of Tesla, that is a major issue. There are several groups of investors with some big bucks that have already invested into Tesla, and it remains to be seen if Tesla will be able to meet the requirements to "go public" and be traded on the major stock exchanges for larger amounts of capital.
This is one of the first major independent automobile companies to come forward in America, after disappointing failures like DeLorean Motors and Tucker Motors. As to if Tesla will follow in that pattern is something that can be argued, but they seem to be going slow and aiming at the right market niche to at least gain a foothold.... and this profitable past month at least gives hope that they can do what the other American automobile companies currently aren't doing: making money.