As a Mormon, I don't mind being considered a non-Christian. Mormon doctrine doesn't accept the Nicene Creed, the concept of a unified trinity (as taught in "mainstream" Christianity), offer any special reverence to "the saints" (in LDS-speak, a "saint" is anybody who has been baptized), and several other key doctrinal points. If by rejecting these points I am not a Christian, so be it.
Not only that, I don't mind these traditional Protestants trying to say that I'm not a part of the tradition that caused the Crusades, inflicted the ethnic problems in Bosnia, or caused the centuries of problems in northern Ireland. That these same religious traditions also forced my ancestors to leave the United States of America at the point of a gun strictly due to religious beliefs certainly makes me less enamored to consider myself to be a "Christian" as well.
I accept Jesus as my savior, redeemer, and as the literal son of God. I also consider myself to be "born again", at least so far as is described in the New Testament. If this isn't enough to be considered Christan, so be it. If somebody wants to actually read the words of Jesus and follow his teachings, I don't mind being labeled a fellow believer, but I don't want to be a part of the side that has abused the name of Christ.
Before Google, there was Lycos (one of my early favorites) and several other web search engines. Some of the earliest simply were slight modifications and improvements of ARCHIE and VERONICA... the search engines of Gopher content that was pervasive before http became a common protocol.
Google wasn't really a first mover, but they did have the advantage of doing it somewhat better and had some phenomenally good public relations to get people to try them out and keep them coming back.
This said, web search engines did allow a method to find new content in a hurry and not have to wait for people posting hard links to your content as it was discovered. Search engines still aren't perfect, and nosing your content into the noise of the web isn't as simple as it seems.... although identifying a niche audience does have its advantages.
Unfortunately deflation isn't happening, and I fail to see the real danger of deflation anyway, at least in terms of ordinary people and small businesses that have to deal with consumers.
The real problem is if you have economic contraction coupled with inflation.... such as what did happen in the 1970s under presidents Ford and Carter. Unlike that era and fiscal policies over the past 50 years, the current attitude is to throw huge piles of money and see what happens. This is fundamentally a new philosophy, and one that historically has almost always lead to massive inflation.
This is replacing one mildly bad problem of economic contraction with a worse problem of run-away inflation.... and dumping $3 trillion into the economy when nothing really new has been created is certainly a huge pile of money chasing relatively few goods. I don't see how this can be anything but a horrible future in the mid-term.
The point isn't "getting money flowing", it is that money could be spent on things that accomplish nothing or are even counter-productive to a healthy society.... to which I argue is dangerous thinking and in fact in the long run will damage society.
The money doesn't need to start flowing. People simply need to be allowed to act without government interference in their lives and have reasonable faith in the judicial system that punish folks who abuse ethical boundaries of society. It is called liberty and freedom.
The vested interest in a casino operator.... free of regulations and other bureaucratic red tape... is that they have to have some winners if they want to entice others to come try their games and machines.
While it doesn't take that many slot machines being played to start hearing a nearly continual sound of coins dropping into the tray, that does imply somebody somewhere is winning some money. Also, casinos do gain reputations over time, and if their reputation is such that they are stingy with their payouts, customers will quickly leave them for the competition.
The basic premise still stands that casino operators/owners have a vested interest in maintaining some sort of reasonable balance between cash coming in and money payed out to people playing the games.
For voting machines, on the other hand, it is in the vested interest of the politicians in the majority control of the governmental apparatus to maintain their political control, and to do anything necessary including tampering with the election process in order to control governmental apparatus.
Chicago politics are notorious for this sort of election tampering, and have been for over a century.
My concern is not so much the churning of the money, but the fact that the spending of money is seemingly ignorant of where the value of the money comes from in the first place.
For myself, I'm expecting run-away inflation by the time Obama leaves office, and I wouldn't be surprised at triple digit (> 100%) inflation rates for the U.S. economy. Too much money is chasing too few goods at the moment, and it is being pulled out of the pockets of people that can least afford to give up the money... or simply allocated by fiat with no taxation at all.
The best examples I can think of to compare are the Wiemar that lead to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and Brazil in the 1980's. Having lived in Brazil in the 1980's, I can tell you from personal experience that it was an ugly situation that I hope is not repeated in America..... yet I find the politicians in America to be having similar fiscal policies and similar attitudes about the problem including the issue of foreign debt. That is also the only way I can see this debt being repayed as well.
When minimum wage is $1m per hour due to inflation, it will be easy to pay off a trillion dollars of debt.
Sorry about invoking Godwin's Law here, but I thought it fit the topic.
It's better if you can get them to build roads. But it's better to pay them to dig hole and fill them up THAN doing nothing.
I would have to disagree here. Yes, I know this is off-topic, but I'll bite here.
The fundamental problem here is a presumption that in order for you to earn money, that you have to be an employee and have somebody pay you to do a job in the first place. Where is it written that this must be the case?
The problem with the thinking that it is better to pay somebody to dig holes and then fill them back up is a presumption that the act of performing a task is a goal in and of itself. If the goal is to train people on how to efficiently dig holes, perhaps you might have a point.
Unfortunately, the societal need to have people know how to efficiently dig holes is not all that significant, mining and fence building not withstanding as both are legitimate reasons people do dig holes and then fill them back up afterward. I'm presuming this isn't the intent of the quote.
What I'm addressing here is "make work" projects that are there to simply keep people busy, and presumably government projects like hiring a bunch of people with an ordinary shovel on the end of a stick that is commonly used for home gardening. By having folks like this merely turn over dirt in the same area and repeatedly moving the soil or moving a pile of rocks pointlessly from one place to another serves little purpose, and in the long run is harmful to society.
Even more so, it is better that people are able to keep their own money and spend it where they find their own need. Also, it is placing faith on basic democratic (little "d") concepts that people will pretty much do the right thing when given the freedom to act on their own.
That government regulations and tax laws tend to discourage entrepreneuralism is true, and the compulsory school systems tend to teach people on how to be good employees working for somebody else, with no thought as to who that "somebody else" might be until after you get your diploma/degree.
This is precisely the kind of doublespeak that make most people hate lawyers and politicans. No law can be made means no law can be made.
In terms of McCain-Feingold having nothing to do with political speech..... bullshit! That is entirely what it is about, including how speech can be done, where it can be done, and who can do the speaking. If you don't follow these "laws" that constitutionally congress "shall not make", you can't engage in the exercise of speech under the most obvious and clearly political kind that was the very basis of this clause of the 1st Amendment.
You can rationalize any act and twist the meaning of anything to promote your viewpoint, which is what I guess this all is about. Unfortunately, by only giving lip service to the constitution, it devalues that document to the point that it is worthless. I just mentioned one very unconstitutional act, and it is hardly the only one that exists.
Taking your line of thought further, I don't know of any government in the world today that is seeking to emulate most of the actions of the Nazi government in Germany, or trying to duplicate their path to political power.... or at least those leaders who have publicly acknowledged an affinity to Hitler tend to be folks like Saddam Hussein (who actually preferred Stalin over Hitler) that aren't exactly role models either.
On the other hand, the Roman Republic has been looked upon for millennia as the pinnacle of prosperity and wealth for human culture and civilization. Throughout most of European history (even the "Third Reich" that asserted descendancy from the Roman Empire) there have been repeated attempts to re-create the experience and restore the political and economic power that existed in Rome.
The question that keeps getting asked is to wonder aloud regarding what caused the Roman Republic to finally collapse and give way to Empire, and further concern that even the Empire fell apart... not so much to invading armies of a stronger adversary but rather to internal rot and a political, economic, and military collapse of the whole system at its core.
The concerns of the founders of the American Republic was that it would go through the same cycle, including a worry that it would eventually lead to "bread and circuses" and political leaders more concerned with short term political gains than resolving long term problems.
The problem with this thinking is that it is assuming the lawyers.... while perhaps good at writing and drafting laws... should also be the people making the actual decisions as to if a law should be created in the first place or not.
You mention a bridge being built by an engineer. That is fine and well, but somebody has to make the decision for if the bridge needs to be built in the first place at all. That decision isn't something necessarily done by the engineer, but rather by land owners, and by members of the "community" where the bridge is being built. Business owners who need the bridge for transportation, perhaps replacing a ferry or perhaps an older bridge that does not meet traffic capacity that is needed might suggest the need for a new bridge. There are other factors here as well. You don't need to be an engineer to make the decision to build it in the first place, or even to understand the basics of how the thing works.
The same can be said for governing a country. Members of Congress are there to represent the people of live in the country, and the makeup of that body ought to represent society at large. It is useful to have former CEOs, school teachers, miners, farmers, computer geeks, and others directly in the debate to decide what should be a law.... and those decisions should not be exclusively made by an elite class of individuals who think only along one kind of thinking and mental training.
I'm not saying that government should be run by engineers either (god, please no!) but rather a diversity of thought should go into the decision making process.
BTW, the legislative process is by design non-productive. One of my largest pet peeves of politicians is those who assert that they are highly productive by showing all of the pork or legislation they have produced while in office. To me, that implies they are not doing their job and are instead swapping "favors" to get that pork and approving garbage from their fellow legislators that should never have seen the light of day. Furthermore, by sad experience it has been proven time and again that any legislation that is passed quickly usually ends up as some of the worst and most damaging to the country in the long run. I don't care if this is Obama's omnibus pork bill that was recently passed or the "authorization to use force" bill that was passed during the Bush administration. Neither bill should have been passed as quickly as did happen, and more debate and deliberation should have gone into both of these laws.
Few courts have the balls to interpret "congress shall make no law" to really mean that no law can be recognized. It takes a very strong judge to be able to stand up against a law that the other two branches of the government have said is not only constitutional but should be enforced.
In recent years it has been things like McCain-Feingold (one of the most wretched laws restricting and controlling political speech) that have yet to even be challenged.... yet those affected by such laws must follow such laws even if they are later proven to be unconstitutional in a strict sense of the word. How can political speech be controlled by law when the constitution says no law can be enacted in the first place?
This isn't even the classic yelling fire or anything remotely associated with the fringes of free speech like pornography or the "right" to send spam via e-mail. If something this basic and head-smacking obvious is given a pass, no wonder the rest of the constitution is largely ignored.
Do you think it was any better for the Andrew Jackson administration trying to deal with the "entire Supreme Court" filled with all of the Whig appointees? What about the rest of the Federal bureaucracy that he also inherited in the 1830's?
This is nothing new and complaining that Obama has a unique situation here is forgetting history.
One of the reasons why the choice of president is so critical is explicitly due to the long lasting impact their decisions make. John Marshall is one of those political appointees who far outlasted the presidential administration that appointed him, and set the tone of the judicial system for decades afterward. Heck, the son of John Adams (the person who appointed Marshall) even served as president and left office before Marshall retired. Sound familiar?
In the big omnibus let's put everything we can including the kitchen sink bill that Obama just signed in Denver (also known as HR1 or the "Supplimental Appropriations for Job Preservation and Creation Act") there is section 4206 under the Medicaid provisions for a "study on the availability of open source health care technology systems".
Yeah, this is pretty dense and buried way deep into the bill, but somebody must like open source "technology" in some form or another in congress. I really wonder who shoved this little provision into that bill and even more wonder if anybody else is paying attention to this being a part of that trillion dollars getting spent.
I sure would like to read that study when it comes back, and it specifically is to compare open source vs. proprietary software.
Too bad this had to be buried in a law that nobody is going to be reading.
Look - any discussion of EULAs needs to be made with consideration of the fact that software involves two independent types of property. You've purchased the tangible CD and have full rights to that - that's one contract. You've also contracted for a license to use the intangible copyrighted work, and that's an entirely separate contract. You can refuse to enter into that contract, even after purchasing the physical CD. The manufacturer will then refund your CD purchase under their express warranty in your first contract.
This is a fault argument on a number of levels. First of all, it is not two different types of property.... it is only one type.... the physical medium with which you purchased or obtained for other considerations (generally money). There is no reason why a book is any different than a DVD, CD, vinyl 45, or piece of sheet music.... or even a piece of computer software. Electronically transmitted software is a bit peculiar in this respect, but it still is stored on some sort of tangible medium and the contract to obtain those bits is generally not covered under an EULA... at least until after they have been placed on your hard drive. Software vendors certainly could force you to enter into a legitimate contract prior to allowing you to download software that has a stronger basis in law than an EULA as a pre-condition to downloading that software (including requiring a purchase transaction to be completed first).
If you have legally obtained the software through whatever means it happened, you own the physical medium... and has been mentioned earlier there has been a previous contract to obtain the software media in some other context as well for most software purchases. I have signed extended contracts of various types in a conventional retail setting for purchases of various item... so the argument that a proper contract couldn't be required from a retailer is a faulty premise as well. I do that for every credit card purchase, for example, that even includes fine print like "I agree to repay this amount according to my card holder's agreement (blah blah)" that sometimes is quite extensive.
The first sale doctrine is what applies here, where a person is free to use a copyrighted article as much as they want and however they want. The principle of fair-use also applies here, where you can even extract portions of a copyrighted work for various purposes, not the least of which is critical commentary or scholarly studies. None of this is covered by contract but rather by statutory law that can't even be waived. Ignore for a moment constitutional law that even applies specifically to copyright law that the supremes seem to ignore (term limits and other similar issues). First sale doctrine is the reason why books can be shared by a public library, and even why computer software can be shared by a library (really setting the terms of an EULA on its head here).
The point of a license is to define and grant conditions under which a copyrighted article may be copied and used by 3rd parties. Commercial licensing agreements are done for stock photos and various kinds of music, where you have a right to use the content for projects of various types that you will in turn sell to 3rd parties. The GPL is one sort of license of this type, but hardly the only one. EULAs attempt to wrap themselves in this type of language and pretending to be this sort of license, and using the laws and language of duplication licenses under the guise of being oriented towards an end user.
On top of all that, and the point of using a cat to "sign" the license, is to document the identity of the person who has entered into the contract. There is no reasonable means currently employed by most EULAs to even remotely identify the individual who has entered into the "contract". Did the software publisher check the ID of the user? Is the user even logged is? Is the person behind the computer even the user being claimed in the log-in if it was don
If you drew up original house plans and had your house built to specification, could you make a copyright claim about photos of your house under U.S. Copyright law, as a "3-D work of art"?
Better yet, if you took photos of your house and made a deposit of those photos together with the blueprints, would the Library of Congress accept the copyright registration (for statutory damages)?
Just thinking this couple didn't think creatively enough here for the proper law that could be used for a suit.
Heck, patent the driveway of your home (this was about Google using a private road to get a view of their house) and get a lawsuit on Google for patent infringement for duplicating the "aesthetics" of the driveway design into Google Earth, including form and function.
This is a bit disturbing in terms of people entering professional programs and becoming business and political leaders who have practically no background at all in science in general or physical science in particular. I'm not saying that it is any better in the USA in terms of political leaders understanding scientific issues (like global warming, stem cell research, genetic engineering, and other similar issues) but if you can provide some basic training into the scientific thought processes, it might have a long-term impact on non-scientists being able to grasp these issues a little bit better and at least make informed choices when it matters.
I appreciate what you are suggesting here in term of students already specializing in engineering or science that doing something like this would be considered an underachiever and not really trying to push themselves. Point taken.
The truly inspiring rockets would be the multi-stage ones that can get to an altitude of a couple thousand feet (about 700 meters or so). Deliberate targeting could hit about a kilometer away.... something I bet Scotland Yard would be interested in investigating if it happened to fall on Downing Street or some other embarrassing place. Still, that would be engineering and not necessarily science, although you would have to use some science to achieve some good results.
If the students have to research out the plans and engineer the experiments in the first place (rather than simply using some apparatus already set up by some teaching assistant or high school teacher), you may be surprised that the 3 hour experiment will take you more than 36 hours or even 72 hours to put together.
Even reproducing Galileo's ramp experiments could take longer than 36 hours in terms of going to the lumber store to get the supplies, digging up tools to cut lumber or other pieces in the apparatus, painting and then finishing up the experiment, and trying to come up with the presentation format for the data that you obtain from the experiment. Heck, you are going to spend more than a couple hours debating over what experiment that you want to work on.
The question here is if this is for students to genuinely be doing something original or if they are going to be repeating the same series of experiments that have been done by students over the past couple decades. You are certainly taking for granted here the effort that the professor/grad students went through to put together the experiment in the first place. Making a good lab experiment isn't nearly as easy as you make it seem.
Better yet, have the single electron land on a CCD array, and then plot the interference pattern one electron at a time, showing the position of the electron together with the completed view as you collect hundreds to thousands of plots on a computer.... and can "go back in time" and show the building of that pattern.
In fairness, physics and engineering go hand in hand. You really can't do one without the other.
Still, engineers are more interested in how something works and making it work, while scientists are more interested in learning why it works and don't really care if it works.... as that presents yet another data point to figure out what didn't work.
I actually did an undergraduate experiment using a specialized CCD cell that did just this sort of counting. What we were measuring was light from suspected variable stars, but the same principle applies here as well.
At the time, the device we used cost about $2000, and CCD technology has become quite a bit cheaper since then. The telescope was a 24 inch at an older observatory in the middle of the campus, where the professional astronomers had a much nicer toy up on a mountain about 10 miles away. This was strictly for student research projects.
Light pollution was an issue, but you can still do some real science that is even worthy of a peer-reviewed journal if you do it right. It isn't easy and it does require some hard book-research and political maneuvering through your university physics/astronomy department, but it can be done.
Depends on the quality of the students you are talking about. If you are talking 1st year college students who are trying to pound out a physics class to earn their science credit in a liberal arts literature or journalism degree, I would strongly suggest they don't have a clue about trigonometry or the fundamental laws of motion.
We are not necessarily talking engineering students here, and discussion of the fundamental laws of motion is something expected out of students at this level of physics instruction.
Do you really think that it would be out of line to ask 1st year students to derive the functions as they apply to rocket motion based on experimental data? Most students at this level think that science is something you get from a textbook, and not from actually studying the world.
Also, the difference between "year 11 high school students" and 1st year college/university students is a matter of about a year. Do you really think teenagers mature that much in just a year or so?
72 man-hours is a trivial amount of time and not really sufficient to get too far into really complex projects.
Yes, I understand that this is something that is done on a middle school level (aka 7th grade in the USA), but frankly most science classes that I've seen do this have done a shoddy job, and the science teachers are doing it just to have some cool toys to play with and don't teach much actual science.
I'm talking real investigative science, and if you turn in a project/report that looks like a 7th grader did it, you deserve the F that comes from such a pile of crud (unless you really are in 7th grade).
I happen to know somebody to earned a master's degree in physics, where their thesis was based upon determining the operating parameters of this class of rocketry and clearly defining all of the variables involved. Real science can be derived from this experiment and give meaningful insight.
More to the point, Physics is a study of observing basic principles and repeating them. Some of the best experiments are ones that are really simple to set up, where you make tiny variation in the parameters. This particular experiment has multiple parameters in an experimental realm that still could use some basic research.
There is also no reason why a community college should have a science program any less difficult than a full university... especially for a freshman-level class. The only difference is that you have an actual professor doing the labs rather than some graduate assistant whose English is so horrible that you can only understand one out of five words they are saying.
In terms of physics experiments, I can't imagine something that would both capture the interest of the students, be cheap enough to have a school with a limited budget be able to afford, and allows for multiple variable parameters to be adjusted. It is also a great summer time project.
Yes, this is sending up a 2 liter plastic bottle (or whatever is handy) by filling it up with water and pressurizing it with compressed air to see how high it can go.
There are all kinds of things that you can measure and document, including thrust (including ISP if you want to get that technical), altitude, learning about trigonometry (to measure altitude), payload mass, and even learning about the basics of the laws of motion through a hands-on experiment. Knowing the altitude and how long it takes to fall from the apogee, you can also calculate the local acceleration factor due to gravity (which can vary from one place to another).
There are also a number of variables that can be adjusted in a controlled manner, such as water volume, air pressure, atmospheric conditions (do rockets fly higher in cooler weather vs. hot weather?), rocket shape, nozzle shape, and rocket size (2 liter vs. 1 liter bottles). You can observe conditions, develop formulas from experimental data, and make predictive theories for what happens when you adjust the variables.
For the really ambitious, there are some 2-stage rocket plans available if you dig up using search engines, but a simple rocket is comparatively easy to build. Be careful with the multi-stage rockets, as you can get enough altitude that you may need to file a flight plan with your local airport under experimental rocketry procedures.
I think the #1 drawback from h2g2 is the commercial license of the content and the crazy way that you give up ownership of the content. Wikipedia wisely started out with the GNU Free Document License... while imperfect in a number of ways at least kept ownership of the content with the contributors.
Similar projects of other kinds have been started by a number of other groups, of which one of them started just a little while after Wikipedia was a user-contributed encyclopedia done by the Open Directory Project folks using the same software as the ODP. That project never really got anywhere, in part because it didn't offer anything new or original that wasn't already being done elsewhere.
That really would have to be the selling point for an alternative to Wikipedia: It would have to offer something that would be obviously of much greater value to the contributors that Wikipedia already doesn't offer. I don't know what that might possibly be.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the soft underbelly of Wikipedia right now. The WMF board does seem to be responsive to the needs of the Wikipedia community (and the other sister projects), and there are some policies in place to help keep that responsiveness as well. Still, if there were to be a board that the community didn't like, a fork in the community could easily happen. I very nearly lead a fork of the Wikibooks community due to problems with the WMF board, but the problems were eventually dealt with and overcome. The Spanish language edition of Wikipedia did have a major fork occur.... a fork that seems to continue even today with even some mild antagonism between the two groups.
This sounds more like a Wikipedia editor who is violating the "WP:OWN" standards in an aggressive manner. It happens far more often than many Wikipedians care to admit, but for some types of articles it can be a real pain to get changes to happen.
Writing on Wikipedia does take a bit of a thick skin and strongly defending your contributions to a certain extent. When you have a POV pusher or somebody who is upset with changes to "their" article, it can be even worse.
Knowing your argumentative style here on Slashdot, it doesn't surprise me that other users on Wikipedia may have found you to be a little rough to work with as well. Still, that by itself isn't a reason to completely revert edits by somebody trying to make meaningful contributions.
The military history guys that I've dealt with seem to be a pretty level headed bunch, with some of them having incredible depth to their experience and knowledge of the topics they have written about. You might be surprised if you came back to see who is involved with these articles right now. Often all it takes is to stand up to the more belligerent editors and calling their bluff.
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As a Mormon, I don't mind being considered a non-Christian. Mormon doctrine doesn't accept the Nicene Creed, the concept of a unified trinity (as taught in "mainstream" Christianity), offer any special reverence to "the saints" (in LDS-speak, a "saint" is anybody who has been baptized), and several other key doctrinal points. If by rejecting these points I am not a Christian, so be it.
Not only that, I don't mind these traditional Protestants trying to say that I'm not a part of the tradition that caused the Crusades, inflicted the ethnic problems in Bosnia, or caused the centuries of problems in northern Ireland. That these same religious traditions also forced my ancestors to leave the United States of America at the point of a gun strictly due to religious beliefs certainly makes me less enamored to consider myself to be a "Christian" as well.
I accept Jesus as my savior, redeemer, and as the literal son of God. I also consider myself to be "born again", at least so far as is described in the New Testament. If this isn't enough to be considered Christan, so be it. If somebody wants to actually read the words of Jesus and follow his teachings, I don't mind being labeled a fellow believer, but I don't want to be a part of the side that has abused the name of Christ.
Before Google, there was Lycos (one of my early favorites) and several other web search engines. Some of the earliest simply were slight modifications and improvements of ARCHIE and VERONICA... the search engines of Gopher content that was pervasive before http became a common protocol.
Google wasn't really a first mover, but they did have the advantage of doing it somewhat better and had some phenomenally good public relations to get people to try them out and keep them coming back.
This said, web search engines did allow a method to find new content in a hurry and not have to wait for people posting hard links to your content as it was discovered. Search engines still aren't perfect, and nosing your content into the noise of the web isn't as simple as it seems.... although identifying a niche audience does have its advantages.
Unfortunately deflation isn't happening, and I fail to see the real danger of deflation anyway, at least in terms of ordinary people and small businesses that have to deal with consumers.
The real problem is if you have economic contraction coupled with inflation.... such as what did happen in the 1970s under presidents Ford and Carter. Unlike that era and fiscal policies over the past 50 years, the current attitude is to throw huge piles of money and see what happens. This is fundamentally a new philosophy, and one that historically has almost always lead to massive inflation.
This is replacing one mildly bad problem of economic contraction with a worse problem of run-away inflation.... and dumping $3 trillion into the economy when nothing really new has been created is certainly a huge pile of money chasing relatively few goods. I don't see how this can be anything but a horrible future in the mid-term.
The point isn't "getting money flowing", it is that money could be spent on things that accomplish nothing or are even counter-productive to a healthy society.... to which I argue is dangerous thinking and in fact in the long run will damage society.
The money doesn't need to start flowing. People simply need to be allowed to act without government interference in their lives and have reasonable faith in the judicial system that punish folks who abuse ethical boundaries of society. It is called liberty and freedom.
The vested interest in a casino operator.... free of regulations and other bureaucratic red tape... is that they have to have some winners if they want to entice others to come try their games and machines.
While it doesn't take that many slot machines being played to start hearing a nearly continual sound of coins dropping into the tray, that does imply somebody somewhere is winning some money. Also, casinos do gain reputations over time, and if their reputation is such that they are stingy with their payouts, customers will quickly leave them for the competition.
The basic premise still stands that casino operators/owners have a vested interest in maintaining some sort of reasonable balance between cash coming in and money payed out to people playing the games.
For voting machines, on the other hand, it is in the vested interest of the politicians in the majority control of the governmental apparatus to maintain their political control, and to do anything necessary including tampering with the election process in order to control governmental apparatus.
Chicago politics are notorious for this sort of election tampering, and have been for over a century.
My concern is not so much the churning of the money, but the fact that the spending of money is seemingly ignorant of where the value of the money comes from in the first place.
For myself, I'm expecting run-away inflation by the time Obama leaves office, and I wouldn't be surprised at triple digit (> 100%) inflation rates for the U.S. economy. Too much money is chasing too few goods at the moment, and it is being pulled out of the pockets of people that can least afford to give up the money... or simply allocated by fiat with no taxation at all.
The best examples I can think of to compare are the Wiemar that lead to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and Brazil in the 1980's. Having lived in Brazil in the 1980's, I can tell you from personal experience that it was an ugly situation that I hope is not repeated in America..... yet I find the politicians in America to be having similar fiscal policies and similar attitudes about the problem including the issue of foreign debt. That is also the only way I can see this debt being repayed as well.
When minimum wage is $1m per hour due to inflation, it will be easy to pay off a trillion dollars of debt.
Sorry about invoking Godwin's Law here, but I thought it fit the topic.
It's better if you can get them to build roads.
But it's better to pay them to dig hole and fill them up THAN doing nothing.
I would have to disagree here. Yes, I know this is off-topic, but I'll bite here.
The fundamental problem here is a presumption that in order for you to earn money, that you have to be an employee and have somebody pay you to do a job in the first place. Where is it written that this must be the case?
The problem with the thinking that it is better to pay somebody to dig holes and then fill them back up is a presumption that the act of performing a task is a goal in and of itself. If the goal is to train people on how to efficiently dig holes, perhaps you might have a point.
Unfortunately, the societal need to have people know how to efficiently dig holes is not all that significant, mining and fence building not withstanding as both are legitimate reasons people do dig holes and then fill them back up afterward. I'm presuming this isn't the intent of the quote.
What I'm addressing here is "make work" projects that are there to simply keep people busy, and presumably government projects like hiring a bunch of people with an ordinary shovel on the end of a stick that is commonly used for home gardening. By having folks like this merely turn over dirt in the same area and repeatedly moving the soil or moving a pile of rocks pointlessly from one place to another serves little purpose, and in the long run is harmful to society.
Even more so, it is better that people are able to keep their own money and spend it where they find their own need. Also, it is placing faith on basic democratic (little "d") concepts that people will pretty much do the right thing when given the freedom to act on their own.
That government regulations and tax laws tend to discourage entrepreneuralism is true, and the compulsory school systems tend to teach people on how to be good employees working for somebody else, with no thought as to who that "somebody else" might be until after you get your diploma/degree.
This is precisely the kind of doublespeak that make most people hate lawyers and politicans. No law can be made means no law can be made.
In terms of McCain-Feingold having nothing to do with political speech..... bullshit! That is entirely what it is about, including how speech can be done, where it can be done, and who can do the speaking. If you don't follow these "laws" that constitutionally congress "shall not make", you can't engage in the exercise of speech under the most obvious and clearly political kind that was the very basis of this clause of the 1st Amendment.
You can rationalize any act and twist the meaning of anything to promote your viewpoint, which is what I guess this all is about. Unfortunately, by only giving lip service to the constitution, it devalues that document to the point that it is worthless. I just mentioned one very unconstitutional act, and it is hardly the only one that exists.
Taking your line of thought further, I don't know of any government in the world today that is seeking to emulate most of the actions of the Nazi government in Germany, or trying to duplicate their path to political power.... or at least those leaders who have publicly acknowledged an affinity to Hitler tend to be folks like Saddam Hussein (who actually preferred Stalin over Hitler) that aren't exactly role models either.
On the other hand, the Roman Republic has been looked upon for millennia as the pinnacle of prosperity and wealth for human culture and civilization. Throughout most of European history (even the "Third Reich" that asserted descendancy from the Roman Empire) there have been repeated attempts to re-create the experience and restore the political and economic power that existed in Rome.
The question that keeps getting asked is to wonder aloud regarding what caused the Roman Republic to finally collapse and give way to Empire, and further concern that even the Empire fell apart... not so much to invading armies of a stronger adversary but rather to internal rot and a political, economic, and military collapse of the whole system at its core.
The concerns of the founders of the American Republic was that it would go through the same cycle, including a worry that it would eventually lead to "bread and circuses" and political leaders more concerned with short term political gains than resolving long term problems.
The problem with this thinking is that it is assuming the lawyers.... while perhaps good at writing and drafting laws... should also be the people making the actual decisions as to if a law should be created in the first place or not.
You mention a bridge being built by an engineer. That is fine and well, but somebody has to make the decision for if the bridge needs to be built in the first place at all. That decision isn't something necessarily done by the engineer, but rather by land owners, and by members of the "community" where the bridge is being built. Business owners who need the bridge for transportation, perhaps replacing a ferry or perhaps an older bridge that does not meet traffic capacity that is needed might suggest the need for a new bridge. There are other factors here as well. You don't need to be an engineer to make the decision to build it in the first place, or even to understand the basics of how the thing works.
The same can be said for governing a country. Members of Congress are there to represent the people of live in the country, and the makeup of that body ought to represent society at large. It is useful to have former CEOs, school teachers, miners, farmers, computer geeks, and others directly in the debate to decide what should be a law.... and those decisions should not be exclusively made by an elite class of individuals who think only along one kind of thinking and mental training.
I'm not saying that government should be run by engineers either (god, please no!) but rather a diversity of thought should go into the decision making process.
BTW, the legislative process is by design non-productive. One of my largest pet peeves of politicians is those who assert that they are highly productive by showing all of the pork or legislation they have produced while in office. To me, that implies they are not doing their job and are instead swapping "favors" to get that pork and approving garbage from their fellow legislators that should never have seen the light of day. Furthermore, by sad experience it has been proven time and again that any legislation that is passed quickly usually ends up as some of the worst and most damaging to the country in the long run. I don't care if this is Obama's omnibus pork bill that was recently passed or the "authorization to use force" bill that was passed during the Bush administration. Neither bill should have been passed as quickly as did happen, and more debate and deliberation should have gone into both of these laws.
Few courts have the balls to interpret "congress shall make no law" to really mean that no law can be recognized. It takes a very strong judge to be able to stand up against a law that the other two branches of the government have said is not only constitutional but should be enforced.
In recent years it has been things like McCain-Feingold (one of the most wretched laws restricting and controlling political speech) that have yet to even be challenged.... yet those affected by such laws must follow such laws even if they are later proven to be unconstitutional in a strict sense of the word. How can political speech be controlled by law when the constitution says no law can be enacted in the first place?
This isn't even the classic yelling fire or anything remotely associated with the fringes of free speech like pornography or the "right" to send spam via e-mail. If something this basic and head-smacking obvious is given a pass, no wonder the rest of the constitution is largely ignored.
Do you think it was any better for the Andrew Jackson administration trying to deal with the "entire Supreme Court" filled with all of the Whig appointees? What about the rest of the Federal bureaucracy that he also inherited in the 1830's?
This is nothing new and complaining that Obama has a unique situation here is forgetting history.
One of the reasons why the choice of president is so critical is explicitly due to the long lasting impact their decisions make. John Marshall is one of those political appointees who far outlasted the presidential administration that appointed him, and set the tone of the judicial system for decades afterward. Heck, the son of John Adams (the person who appointed Marshall) even served as president and left office before Marshall retired. Sound familiar?
In the big omnibus let's put everything we can including the kitchen sink bill that Obama just signed in Denver (also known as HR1 or the "Supplimental Appropriations for Job Preservation and Creation Act") there is section 4206 under the Medicaid provisions for a "study on the availability of open source health care technology systems".
Yeah, this is pretty dense and buried way deep into the bill, but somebody must like open source "technology" in some form or another in congress. I really wonder who shoved this little provision into that bill and even more wonder if anybody else is paying attention to this being a part of that trillion dollars getting spent.
I sure would like to read that study when it comes back, and it specifically is to compare open source vs. proprietary software.
Too bad this had to be buried in a law that nobody is going to be reading.
This is a fault argument on a number of levels. First of all, it is not two different types of property.... it is only one type.... the physical medium with which you purchased or obtained for other considerations (generally money). There is no reason why a book is any different than a DVD, CD, vinyl 45, or piece of sheet music.... or even a piece of computer software. Electronically transmitted software is a bit peculiar in this respect, but it still is stored on some sort of tangible medium and the contract to obtain those bits is generally not covered under an EULA... at least until after they have been placed on your hard drive. Software vendors certainly could force you to enter into a legitimate contract prior to allowing you to download software that has a stronger basis in law than an EULA as a pre-condition to downloading that software (including requiring a purchase transaction to be completed first).
If you have legally obtained the software through whatever means it happened, you own the physical medium... and has been mentioned earlier there has been a previous contract to obtain the software media in some other context as well for most software purchases. I have signed extended contracts of various types in a conventional retail setting for purchases of various item... so the argument that a proper contract couldn't be required from a retailer is a faulty premise as well. I do that for every credit card purchase, for example, that even includes fine print like "I agree to repay this amount according to my card holder's agreement (blah blah)" that sometimes is quite extensive.
The first sale doctrine is what applies here, where a person is free to use a copyrighted article as much as they want and however they want. The principle of fair-use also applies here, where you can even extract portions of a copyrighted work for various purposes, not the least of which is critical commentary or scholarly studies. None of this is covered by contract but rather by statutory law that can't even be waived. Ignore for a moment constitutional law that even applies specifically to copyright law that the supremes seem to ignore (term limits and other similar issues). First sale doctrine is the reason why books can be shared by a public library, and even why computer software can be shared by a library (really setting the terms of an EULA on its head here).
The point of a license is to define and grant conditions under which a copyrighted article may be copied and used by 3rd parties. Commercial licensing agreements are done for stock photos and various kinds of music, where you have a right to use the content for projects of various types that you will in turn sell to 3rd parties. The GPL is one sort of license of this type, but hardly the only one. EULAs attempt to wrap themselves in this type of language and pretending to be this sort of license, and using the laws and language of duplication licenses under the guise of being oriented towards an end user.
On top of all that, and the point of using a cat to "sign" the license, is to document the identity of the person who has entered into the contract. There is no reasonable means currently employed by most EULAs to even remotely identify the individual who has entered into the "contract". Did the software publisher check the ID of the user? Is the user even logged is? Is the person behind the computer even the user being claimed in the log-in if it was don
If you drew up original house plans and had your house built to specification, could you make a copyright claim about photos of your house under U.S. Copyright law, as a "3-D work of art"?
Better yet, if you took photos of your house and made a deposit of those photos together with the blueprints, would the Library of Congress accept the copyright registration (for statutory damages)?
Just thinking this couple didn't think creatively enough here for the proper law that could be used for a suit.
Heck, patent the driveway of your home (this was about Google using a private road to get a view of their house) and get a lawsuit on Google for patent infringement for duplicating the "aesthetics" of the driveway design into Google Earth, including form and function.
This is a bit disturbing in terms of people entering professional programs and becoming business and political leaders who have practically no background at all in science in general or physical science in particular. I'm not saying that it is any better in the USA in terms of political leaders understanding scientific issues (like global warming, stem cell research, genetic engineering, and other similar issues) but if you can provide some basic training into the scientific thought processes, it might have a long-term impact on non-scientists being able to grasp these issues a little bit better and at least make informed choices when it matters.
I appreciate what you are suggesting here in term of students already specializing in engineering or science that doing something like this would be considered an underachiever and not really trying to push themselves. Point taken.
The truly inspiring rockets would be the multi-stage ones that can get to an altitude of a couple thousand feet (about 700 meters or so). Deliberate targeting could hit about a kilometer away.... something I bet Scotland Yard would be interested in investigating if it happened to fall on Downing Street or some other embarrassing place. Still, that would be engineering and not necessarily science, although you would have to use some science to achieve some good results.
If the students have to research out the plans and engineer the experiments in the first place (rather than simply using some apparatus already set up by some teaching assistant or high school teacher), you may be surprised that the 3 hour experiment will take you more than 36 hours or even 72 hours to put together.
Even reproducing Galileo's ramp experiments could take longer than 36 hours in terms of going to the lumber store to get the supplies, digging up tools to cut lumber or other pieces in the apparatus, painting and then finishing up the experiment, and trying to come up with the presentation format for the data that you obtain from the experiment. Heck, you are going to spend more than a couple hours debating over what experiment that you want to work on.
The question here is if this is for students to genuinely be doing something original or if they are going to be repeating the same series of experiments that have been done by students over the past couple decades. You are certainly taking for granted here the effort that the professor/grad students went through to put together the experiment in the first place. Making a good lab experiment isn't nearly as easy as you make it seem.
Better yet, have the single electron land on a CCD array, and then plot the interference pattern one electron at a time, showing the position of the electron together with the completed view as you collect hundreds to thousands of plots on a computer.... and can "go back in time" and show the building of that pattern.
In fairness, physics and engineering go hand in hand. You really can't do one without the other.
Still, engineers are more interested in how something works and making it work, while scientists are more interested in learning why it works and don't really care if it works.... as that presents yet another data point to figure out what didn't work.
I actually did an undergraduate experiment using a specialized CCD cell that did just this sort of counting. What we were measuring was light from suspected variable stars, but the same principle applies here as well.
At the time, the device we used cost about $2000, and CCD technology has become quite a bit cheaper since then. The telescope was a 24 inch at an older observatory in the middle of the campus, where the professional astronomers had a much nicer toy up on a mountain about 10 miles away. This was strictly for student research projects.
Light pollution was an issue, but you can still do some real science that is even worthy of a peer-reviewed journal if you do it right. It isn't easy and it does require some hard book-research and political maneuvering through your university physics/astronomy department, but it can be done.
Depends on the quality of the students you are talking about. If you are talking 1st year college students who are trying to pound out a physics class to earn their science credit in a liberal arts literature or journalism degree, I would strongly suggest they don't have a clue about trigonometry or the fundamental laws of motion.
We are not necessarily talking engineering students here, and discussion of the fundamental laws of motion is something expected out of students at this level of physics instruction.
Do you really think that it would be out of line to ask 1st year students to derive the functions as they apply to rocket motion based on experimental data? Most students at this level think that science is something you get from a textbook, and not from actually studying the world.
Also, the difference between "year 11 high school students" and 1st year college/university students is a matter of about a year. Do you really think teenagers mature that much in just a year or so?
72 man-hours is a trivial amount of time and not really sufficient to get too far into really complex projects.
Yes, I understand that this is something that is done on a middle school level (aka 7th grade in the USA), but frankly most science classes that I've seen do this have done a shoddy job, and the science teachers are doing it just to have some cool toys to play with and don't teach much actual science.
I'm talking real investigative science, and if you turn in a project/report that looks like a 7th grader did it, you deserve the F that comes from such a pile of crud (unless you really are in 7th grade).
I happen to know somebody to earned a master's degree in physics, where their thesis was based upon determining the operating parameters of this class of rocketry and clearly defining all of the variables involved. Real science can be derived from this experiment and give meaningful insight.
More to the point, Physics is a study of observing basic principles and repeating them. Some of the best experiments are ones that are really simple to set up, where you make tiny variation in the parameters. This particular experiment has multiple parameters in an experimental realm that still could use some basic research.
There is also no reason why a community college should have a science program any less difficult than a full university... especially for a freshman-level class. The only difference is that you have an actual professor doing the labs rather than some graduate assistant whose English is so horrible that you can only understand one out of five words they are saying.
In terms of physics experiments, I can't imagine something that would both capture the interest of the students, be cheap enough to have a school with a limited budget be able to afford, and allows for multiple variable parameters to be adjusted. It is also a great summer time project.
Yes, this is sending up a 2 liter plastic bottle (or whatever is handy) by filling it up with water and pressurizing it with compressed air to see how high it can go.
There are all kinds of things that you can measure and document, including thrust (including ISP if you want to get that technical), altitude, learning about trigonometry (to measure altitude), payload mass, and even learning about the basics of the laws of motion through a hands-on experiment. Knowing the altitude and how long it takes to fall from the apogee, you can also calculate the local acceleration factor due to gravity (which can vary from one place to another).
There are also a number of variables that can be adjusted in a controlled manner, such as water volume, air pressure, atmospheric conditions (do rockets fly higher in cooler weather vs. hot weather?), rocket shape, nozzle shape, and rocket size (2 liter vs. 1 liter bottles). You can observe conditions, develop formulas from experimental data, and make predictive theories for what happens when you adjust the variables.
For the really ambitious, there are some 2-stage rocket plans available if you dig up using search engines, but a simple rocket is comparatively easy to build. Be careful with the multi-stage rockets, as you can get enough altitude that you may need to file a flight plan with your local airport under experimental rocketry procedures.
I think the #1 drawback from h2g2 is the commercial license of the content and the crazy way that you give up ownership of the content. Wikipedia wisely started out with the GNU Free Document License... while imperfect in a number of ways at least kept ownership of the content with the contributors.
Similar projects of other kinds have been started by a number of other groups, of which one of them started just a little while after Wikipedia was a user-contributed encyclopedia done by the Open Directory Project folks using the same software as the ODP. That project never really got anywhere, in part because it didn't offer anything new or original that wasn't already being done elsewhere.
That really would have to be the selling point for an alternative to Wikipedia: It would have to offer something that would be obviously of much greater value to the contributors that Wikipedia already doesn't offer. I don't know what that might possibly be.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the soft underbelly of Wikipedia right now. The WMF board does seem to be responsive to the needs of the Wikipedia community (and the other sister projects), and there are some policies in place to help keep that responsiveness as well. Still, if there were to be a board that the community didn't like, a fork in the community could easily happen. I very nearly lead a fork of the Wikibooks community due to problems with the WMF board, but the problems were eventually dealt with and overcome. The Spanish language edition of Wikipedia did have a major fork occur.... a fork that seems to continue even today with even some mild antagonism between the two groups.
This sounds more like a Wikipedia editor who is violating the "WP:OWN" standards in an aggressive manner. It happens far more often than many Wikipedians care to admit, but for some types of articles it can be a real pain to get changes to happen.
Writing on Wikipedia does take a bit of a thick skin and strongly defending your contributions to a certain extent. When you have a POV pusher or somebody who is upset with changes to "their" article, it can be even worse.
Knowing your argumentative style here on Slashdot, it doesn't surprise me that other users on Wikipedia may have found you to be a little rough to work with as well. Still, that by itself isn't a reason to completely revert edits by somebody trying to make meaningful contributions.
The military history guys that I've dealt with seem to be a pretty level headed bunch, with some of them having incredible depth to their experience and knowledge of the topics they have written about. You might be surprised if you came back to see who is involved with these articles right now. Often all it takes is to stand up to the more belligerent editors and calling their bluff.