It isn't miles per gallon, it is miles per unit of energy.
A gallon of gasoline has the equivalent energy of about 37 kilowatt-hours of energy. If you use that conversion rate, you can easily make a reasonable comparison between gasoline-powered vehicles and electric vehicles.
The efficiency of processing that amount of energy is certainly going to be much better with an electric vehicle, even if the battery charger was operating with an electric generator that burned the gasoline in the first place.
I would agree with most of what you said, with the exeception of one little itty bitty problem:
Why are the investors in Tesla treated any different than the investors of General Motors or Ford?
If anything, Tesla is operating with a much leaner management staff, lacks the problems with trying to fund pensions, and is generally running as a much more efficient company.
Is it really all that much better for public money to be dumped into the other automotive companies and not Tesla too?
I'd rather the government stay out of the game altogether and not give money to any auto company, but I fail to see why lousy investment and management decisions by GM should be singled out as something special... where their investors don't take risks for their screw-ups when profitable companies like Tesla don't have nearly the current burn rate that GM has.
Tesla has gone through the hoops to get their cars into production and passed at least the threshold that Tesla isn't just a vaporware company.
Tesla Motors is in direct competition with General Motors and the Volt. Indeed, there are many places where GM executives have openly stated (including on 60 Minutes and other major media outlets) that they wouldn't have even started the Volt if it weren't for Tesla showing it could be done.
So tell me, why should GM get a special subsidy for building the Volt and Tesla be told to "get lost" and build their car on their own?
The $400m check isn't just a grant, it is a loan that must be repaid. What getting it from the government will do is provide basic capital to build the factories, finance the R&D, and get built the next generation of Tesla vehicles. Tesla even has the manufacturing facility picked out and some of the preliminary designs for that vehicle.
All that Tesla is doing here is to insist that they be treated as an American automotive manufacturer. If GM is getting the subsidy, why not Tesla as well?
So helping General Motors to build a new hybrid Cadillac is going to be a better way for the government to throw its money around than letting Tesla be able to invest into their "Whitestar" vehicle that is targeted for around $50k for around 1/10th the cost that GM is asking for?
I don't get what you are saying here. This isn't Tesla asking for money by itself, but asking to be included with the other companies that also claim to be "American Automotive Manufacturers" and for the Feds to maintain a level playing field. Are you sure the feds should subsidize Ford and Chrysler at the expense of taxing Tesla out of existence?
You can measure both gasoline and electricity in both joules (a unit of energy) and kilowatt-hours. They can be convereted from one unit to the other as it is the same thing.
The question would be.... how do you measure vehicle efficiency in terms of how much energy was needed to create the movement of the vehicle in order to have it travel between two arbitrary points.
Gasoline can be burned much more efficiently as an electric generator, and if that generator doesn't even have to be on the vehicle.... so much the better.
So yes, you can measure electricity to be equivalent to a given number of gallons of gasoline or other sort of fuel that you want to use as a comparison.
No, I'd rather not see $50 billion go to any private business or industry at the expense of other reasonably good ideas. That isn't the role of government to be a bank, and that is unfortunately what the folks in DC are trying to pretend that they are.
I also don't think that NASA is necessarily the best place to throw money either, and my argument here is that NASA isn't necessarily such a fantastic place for the growth of technologies like it used to be.
Going to the Moon required whole new industrial fields to be developed and technologies that simply didn't exist in the late 1950's when NASA was first started. I am arguing that if NASA had a real purpose and was pushing the limits of human endurance and capacity in terms of penetrating ever more hostile environments and going places never seen before, they would be pushing technologies and making things happen.
All that I see from NASA right now is more of the same as what they've done over the past 40 years. That isn't progress, and in fact they are regressing to earlier concepts and losing capabilities.
This is a nice try, and I'll admit that the remote robotic stuff is kind of nice. There are some applications for security robots that are autonomous (including some UAV's) that do their patrols and when the AI picks up something "unusual" they transmit a signal that alerts a human operator.
All this said, NASA remote robotics is the leading edge of this technology. For something really interesting, this TED talk goes into some of the next generation developments in autonomous robots. While there is some sponsorship by NASA, this is a private group that has been developing much of the technology for other purposes besides what they are doing in space. This is about multi-million dollar remote vehicles that can't be easily recovered but are not used in space.
Oh, it isn't the Baby Boomers that will be screwed over. It will be the Gen Xers that follow.
When Boomers get to retirement age, they'll tweak the system so they'll get their "retirement benefits" and live into their "golden years" just fine. Heck, they are already hitting retirement age even now.
The real culprit here is Tip O'Neil and the congress of the 1980's that decided to mix the social security "trust funds" with the main federal budget.... oh, with the sanctioning of that magnificent leader called Ronald Reagan. So much for smaller and more efficient government by conservatives.
Halve the budget? What budge? The U.S. Federal budget?
Military spending in its entirety isn't even a quarter of the federal budget. Item #1 is Social Security and #2 is interest on federal debt (both are going up in a huge way). Social programs such as food stamps, AFDC, HUD grants, and other sorts of direct programs to individual citizens also are as a group much more than military spending as well.
Even if military spending were completely eliminated and abolished, that we got a happy world that would never even touch the USA or anything considered vital to Americans needing a military force of any kind, the U.S. Federal government would be mostly the current bloated self that you know... and we would be without any sort of military protection at all.
While I don't deny that there is some military spending that is over the top and hugely wasteful, it is specific programs that need to be targeted with this sort of hostility rather than taking it out against the whole of the military establishment.
I've heard horror stories about the National Reconnaissance Office in terms of massively over budget projects and horrific accounting practices that should make any congressmen blush to even think when they've voted for their budget.
Considering that the NRO is mainly about spaceflight and development of space vehicles (mainly spy satellites), it seems to be a good target in terms of a comparison to NASA. Even more: NASA's budget is about half that of the NRO. Now that is a sobering thought.
For farm subsidies, there usually has to be some sort of historical record of previous farming.
Still, I know some farmers involve with soil banks that get checks for not farming certain fields... and that certainly seems like a very bizzare notion at the very least. It sounds like one of those soil-banked lots were a part of this "house" that you are talking about. The original "homestead" is often a legitimate use for such lots that doesn't disqualify them from payments for soil banking.
Most other farm subsidies require legitimate production of food and activities you would normally associate with "farming". I wouldn't get so down on farm subsidies in general, although soil banking is certainly one of those weird FDR New Deal programs that never has been repealed.
The original goal of this program was to drive up food prices (yeah, you can question this one on multiple levels) by taking valuable farmland out of production and paying the farmers what would be a typical expected profit from that land by simply keeping it fallow. But of course only the marginal acreage was pulled out and the most productive land was (usually) kept as an active farm.
If you think that is weird, try to find out who controls the importation of Irish Whiskey into the USA. It is a government monopoly, BTW, and to a rather...er... famous "family" I'm sure you've heard about.
Some of this cuts to the core of why a biased media is ultimately horrible to our republic.
If a political candidate was arguing that this "fuzzy puppy" bill is proof of his opponents corruption, a responsible journalist would point out that the same bill put formaldehyde and arsenic as essential ingredients in school lunches and turn the question right back at the candidate.
Biased media simply reports that the fuzzy puppies continue to get slaughtered. Who cares about Amsterdam... that isn't even in the USA. Besides, wasn't there some joint EU/USA/NATO conference there where an historic trade treaty was signed and ratified simultaneously by all of the respective nations? (what that has to do with the red-light district is obviously irrelevant.)
I agree with your sentiment here, and I would like to see some way in which a non-related rider could be constitutionally (not just against the law) prohibited.
The problem, as I see it, would be the pile of lawyers in congress would take the wording of any such constitutional amendment prohibiting this practice and twist it to the point that omnibus bills would still end up getting passed. Just look at what qualifies as "interstate trade" and "national defense" laws if you don't believe me.
What should be happening is a group of determined congressmen that out right refuse to vote on these things when they come up, but even that doesn't seem to be something likely to happen, much less a President to refuse to sign such bills with so much junk in them.
As much as I am a proponent about spaceflight, and I have even talked about what NASA R&D money has been spent on in the past, I have one huge question to ask about what NASA is today:
What is NASA doing today that is "bleeding" or "leading edge" for any of the technologies they are currently using or planning on using in the next decade or so?
Computers? Hardly. Most NASA computers on spacecraft are not only far from leading edge, they are often worse than what you have on the desktop or laptop you are using to read this/. posting.
Metallurgy? Again, NASA used to be super advanced in this area, but private aerospace companies use materials far more advanced than anything NASA is using or planning on using for the Ares spacecraft.
Rocket Fuel/propellants? Still no. Everything NASA uses is pretty much the same as they've used for the past 40 years... although there are a couple of small exceptions here. NASA doesn't plan on incorporating any of that more exotic propulsion technology into their main stream projects for some time, if ever. Again, private American companies (not to mention others outside of the USA) are doing far more than NASA in this area, both in terms of raw dollars spend and off-the-wall ideas on newer propulsion technologies.
Spacesuit technologies? Again, private companies. If you want to look at some real innovation, check out what is happening for extreme skydiving groups pushing for higher and higher altitudes. NASA isn't leading the way in any of this effort by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll give credit to NASA for their ability to remotely operate vehicles, but the UAV and other robotic programs in the military, much less in private research groups are doing far more complex tasks than anything NASA has been working on. While NASA may be at the front of technology here, they aren't doing anything to really advance anything here.
I could go on, but the point is that while NASA was incredibly useful in the past for building up new technologies, they haven't been that driving force for quite some time. Part of that, and I dare say most of that, is because NASA has become a backwater agency with a pathetic budget, no goals, and has not been doing what it is supposed to be doing: Explore space. Travel to low-earth orbit is a solved problem, together with things like docking, guidance computers, tracking, and communications to low-earth orbit. All I see from NASA is more of the same, and highly paranoid administrators who don't want to take the risks necessary to push space technology beyond its current limits.
If NASA sends astronauts to the Moon much less Mars, within the remaining years of my lifetime, I'll be shocked and floored. I don't see it happening, nor anything really exciting and new beyond exploring a few more moons, asteroids, and perhaps some of the outer planets like Eris. Even a return trip to Titan seems to be out of the running for some time to come.
Show me the vision for the future, and I might be a little more excited. Even this initial request for information by the future Obama administration seems to be like an older truck with its transmission stuck in 2nd gear.
Even the arguments about manned vs. unmanned spaceflight are getting very tiring here and not very exciting.
I am quite aware of the fact that most money in the world today is "fiat money". Or more specifically, things like the Euro and U.S. Dollar are worth exactly whatever anybody thinks it is worth... no more and no less.
A pile of $1 trillion USD may be enough to buy a medium-sized city or make a huge splash in the stock market. It may also only be worth keeping you warm on a cold night by burning the raw paper. It could even be a huge liability if you live in some cities that have strong fire hazard laws that would force you to put that pile in the dump instead or have laws against burning materials like paper.
BTW, intrinsic currency isn't all that much better, and has some additional problems when there is a definitive shortage of the metal for some reason or another. In situations like that, it can cause deflation on a massive scale, which has its own economic consequences.
It becomes even more of a problem when you have to use multiple metals for currency (for example, gold, silver, and copper) when the value of those metals relative to each other can shift dramatically from one time to another. This becomes a huge problem when you want to "make change" for the most valuable kind of metal. Rarely do you think that the value of a cent is going to be different than 1/100th of a dollar, but the value of a copper "penny" can vary by quite a bit compared to a silver "dollar" or a gold "eagle" in terms of raw bullion even today.
The problem with fiat money is the temptation for governments that run the printing presses to simply keep the presses running for a bit longer and spend the money that was not generated through tax revenue. The larger governmental bodies generally avoid that temptation, but that hasn't always been the case.
Even taxation by itself is an interesting concept when it comes to the government that establishes and regulates the currency being used to pay the taxes.
This is a little more than "touching up" photos here.
Yeah, I'll admit that my senior photo was touched up significantly (I was covered with zits and the photographer who took my photo did an *amazing* job of cleaning that up), but it still isn't the same thing as photo-shopping a background.
Then again, this is something that the television news broadcasters are doing without hardly a second thought. How many "virtual stages" did you see with the election results shows this past year... with the "reporters" standing in front of basically a green screen? That is the proper analogy here, including journalists that are supposedly delivering "legitimate news" in the same way that the AP claims to be doing.
Not that the AP really counts for much integrity any more, but at least it is a start.
Are you sure here? Did the police confiscate the cameras, or did they simply delete the images and hand the cameras back to the protesters as they were escorted outside?
Here the police were "keeping the peace", and certainly pressing the "delete" button to shut up some protesters and to keep them from inciting a riot could be considered justified. Certainly not criminal on the part of the officers involved, unless it is later proven that this would be vital evidence in a formal legal proceeding.
I see nothing to indicate that the protesters were even charged with anything at all... only escorted out. They should be grateful that they weren't charged with at least disturbing the peace or some other similar criminal charge themselves.
Besides, where does it say that you are constitutionally (in India, no less) guaranteed to take a picture anywhere you want, whenever you want, about whatever you want. I don't even see that "right" in the USA, any EU country, or UK commonwealth country.
It was also a stupid and foolish thing for these protesters to even be doing the stuff they were doing here, and being obnoxious and disruptive to the convention. They certainly have very little credibility if they were to go before a judge.
If they have a "battered wife syndrome", it is from a Justice Department and legal system that has refused to take their complaints seriously (Novell did try to sue Microsoft for anti-competitive/monopolistic behavior).
That the road which Novell has taken to transform itself from a proprietary software vendor to an open source contributor and supporter may not be as "pure" as some in the open source movement may like, they still are one of the "good guys" compared to companies like IBM that have legitimately earned their reputation. In spite of IBM's current "blessed" reputation in open source, they are hardly the most perfect company in terms of software patents and running roughshod over "the little guy". Don't let the Nazgul run over your too soon if you piss them off.
Yeah, this one deal between Microsoft and Novell stinks, at least from the viewpoint of garage startup open source projects. All I'm trying to point out is that it was something Novell simply had to do in order to appease their own shareholders, many of whom weren't (and still aren't) avid fans of open source/free software applications.
This doesn't mean that Novell is a puppet company for Microsoft, unlike other companies (SCO, hint, hint).
I think this is mainly a problem by those who can't comprehend that a large group of people would deliberately vote a communist party into power within the framework of a legitimate democratic government (instead of the sham "democracies" like the old USSR and what is currently in the "People's Republic of China").
Communism has a reputation of being brutal, obnoxious, and silencing any and all discussion by those who don't believe in their system with a near religious fervor. Most communist governments throughout the world also have some of the strongest totalitarian states ever created in the history of mankind, not to mention are some of the most brutal in terms of the deaths of its own citizens. For example, between Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler, who killed more of their own citizens in deliberate and officially sanctioned actions (aka like throwing Jews into the gas chambers)? Hitler comes out #3 in this grouping, both in sheer numbers and in proportion to the populations they were ruling over.
The communist party in the USA generally tries to hide its name, as even the term "communist" is considered unhealthy politically. Heck, even "socialist" is considered a dirty word in American politics, even if the term fits the description of what the candidate is advocating (such as what happened in the last U.S. presidential election).
I'd also like to point out that basic tenants of communism involve violent overthrows of their societies, and encourage widespread insurrection of those governments that are not communist. This also tends to make those folks who don't necessarily believe in communism to look with a jaundiced eye toward anybody claiming to be a communist... regardless of if the communist party can actually accomplish anything in a political sense.
The problem here isn't a Novell-Microsoft alliance, but rather the courts that accept the concept of software patents in the first place.
If software patents didn't exist, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place. For myself, I really fail to understand what possible benefit patents like this could have other than to encourage companies like Microsoft to expand their legal rights to mediocre software that only seems to work 80% of the time anyway.
I hate Microsoft... mainly because what they produce is crap. At least a good portion of what Novell produces actually works, and in fact that was the reputation Novell was striving for until Microsoft all but killed off their company.
If Novell started as an open source company and the patent agreement was a part of a larger trend moving to a more closed-source model, I would be concerned. However, the patent negotiation with Microsoft really was a way to convince Novell shareholders that a move into greater participation with the open source movement was a sound business decision, and in fact enabled that company to do precisely what they are doing now with their support of open source software.
For Novell to be a Microsoft sleeper agent, they certainly have been shafted by Microsoft enough to make you wonder what they do to true enemies if this is what they do to "friends".
The history of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell is rather long, complex, and rather technical. Some of this goes all the way back to Gary Kildall and Digital Research, with the original IBM-PC, as well as the later acquisition of Digital Research's DR-DOS by Novell. I could also cite deliberate engineering by Microsoft to subvert Novell products and crash computers using Novell software.
There is so much here that to give specifics "in a rational and unemotional way" simply becomes so tedious that it isn't worth the effort to folks who aren't interested in facts.
More to the point, there are a great many organizations in this world that do much more harm to humanity than Novell, and it is debatable that Novell is even being a problem at all. Boycotts usually backfire by promoting the company indirectly, and in this case I think the added publicity Novell is going to get from just this story on/. will cause more sales than any who might actually listen to the anti-Novell people and not purchase these products.
Heck, Novell might even think about donating to their organization as a thanks for the publicity.
Were cameras even permitted at this venue in the first place? What else was photographed besides the "protest"?
Law enforcement officers routinely have to step in and make quick judgment calls like this, and even "execute the sentence" in a great many situations as well. They are the first line of criminal law community, and often have to make the call to make decisions that afterward an "armchair quarterback" might disagree with.
More importantly, how much did these guys resist reasonable attempts by organizers of the conference to simply "take it outside" and attempt to resolve the situation peaceably? From a law enforcement perspective, even the act of taking the photos was something to cause further unrest, and in the interest of public safety the deletion of the photos could be considered a sound decision.
This is something I would have expected to see in a great many other places besides India, and may have been done in almost any other country with a similar kind of conference, including having the photos deleted.
Yes, I understand that you have some vitriolic hatred toward Mono and consider developers working on it to be a source of wasted talent on what you consider to be a useless piece of software. So what? Others disagree and happen to like Mono for whatever other reason.
Novell is in an interesting position, where they started out as proprietary software developers and developed a rather rock solid business model that gave them some huge piles of cash for awhile. The world shifted and frankly Mircosoft is largely to blame for the fact that the earlier businesses that Novell was involved with died a hard death. Novell even tried to compete with offering a better product and using hard-nosed sound engineering principles, only to get shafted by Microsoft when they deliberately put in software that would screw up the Novell network protocols into their Windows OS suites.
I could get into more, but Novell certainly isn't "in bed with Microsoft", and in fact has found a rather interesting way to insulate itself from Microsoft's tactics: embrace and join with the open source software movement. I think it is a stinking genius move on their part, and without moving to supporting open source software, Novell would no longer even exist as a company... or certainly would be looking at auctioning off most of their office furniture (as they already have).
Novell here is the victim of Microsoft harassment, and the reason they are acting they way that they do is precisely out of sheer survival and based on their history.
Furthermore, this still doesn't justify why it was necessary for these protesters to be jerks and disrupt a conference, exhibiting behavior that wouldn't be acceptable in any other "free" country elsewhere in the world either. If this had happened at a technology conference in Las Vegas, I wouldn't have expected anything different (or perhaps the LVPD would be a little more rough).
If you are being a jerk, don't be surprised if you are treated like a jerk.
Sometimes these protesters get exactly what they are asking for, and in this case it sounds like they were begging and asking for a violent confrontation.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, I think the physical force used "to silence the other side of the debate" was properly used.
It was the protesters who were doing the unethical behavior in this instance. There is a whole lot more to the story than what was published. I could give analogies, but this is something like going to a UK Soccer match wearing the colors of the visiting team and yelling obscenities about the home team.... in the middle of a bunch of drunken fans.
Well, not quite, but they certainly should have been aware of the fact that what they (the protesters at this conference) were doing wasn't welcome and may not be tolerated by the other participants. There certainly are a great many analogies to apply here to show this was a stupid idea.
It seems that here's an irreconcilable difference in perspective between Americans and Europeans. While Americans may believe that free speech is almost absolute, they also seem to believe in the right to legislate morality.
This all fits with what you consider to be morality. The laws about hate speech and denying the holocaust certainly sound like attempts to legislate morality to me.
Texas is its own strange state with a very independent streak in its legal code. Just because something is legal nor not legal in Texas has little to do with anything in the rest of America.
Or to put this in a "sound bite" or "bumper sticker slogan":
Texas: Bigger than France.
I think that sums it up rather clearly. And it is. The population of Texas is about a third of France, but who is quibbling over details here. It would still be a major world power (and a nuclear power at that) if it were an independent nation.
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It isn't miles per gallon, it is miles per unit of energy.
A gallon of gasoline has the equivalent energy of about 37 kilowatt-hours of energy. If you use that conversion rate, you can easily make a reasonable comparison between gasoline-powered vehicles and electric vehicles.
The efficiency of processing that amount of energy is certainly going to be much better with an electric vehicle, even if the battery charger was operating with an electric generator that burned the gasoline in the first place.
So no, the Roadster doesn't have infinite mpg.
I would agree with most of what you said, with the exeception of one little itty bitty problem:
Why are the investors in Tesla treated any different than the investors of General Motors or Ford?
If anything, Tesla is operating with a much leaner management staff, lacks the problems with trying to fund pensions, and is generally running as a much more efficient company.
Is it really all that much better for public money to be dumped into the other automotive companies and not Tesla too?
I'd rather the government stay out of the game altogether and not give money to any auto company, but I fail to see why lousy investment and management decisions by GM should be singled out as something special... where their investors don't take risks for their screw-ups when profitable companies like Tesla don't have nearly the current burn rate that GM has.
Tesla has gone through the hoops to get their cars into production and passed at least the threshold that Tesla isn't just a vaporware company.
Tesla Motors is in direct competition with General Motors and the Volt. Indeed, there are many places where GM executives have openly stated (including on 60 Minutes and other major media outlets) that they wouldn't have even started the Volt if it weren't for Tesla showing it could be done.
So tell me, why should GM get a special subsidy for building the Volt and Tesla be told to "get lost" and build their car on their own?
The $400m check isn't just a grant, it is a loan that must be repaid. What getting it from the government will do is provide basic capital to build the factories, finance the R&D, and get built the next generation of Tesla vehicles. Tesla even has the manufacturing facility picked out and some of the preliminary designs for that vehicle.
All that Tesla is doing here is to insist that they be treated as an American automotive manufacturer. If GM is getting the subsidy, why not Tesla as well?
So helping General Motors to build a new hybrid Cadillac is going to be a better way for the government to throw its money around than letting Tesla be able to invest into their "Whitestar" vehicle that is targeted for around $50k for around 1/10th the cost that GM is asking for?
I don't get what you are saying here. This isn't Tesla asking for money by itself, but asking to be included with the other companies that also claim to be "American Automotive Manufacturers" and for the Feds to maintain a level playing field. Are you sure the feds should subsidize Ford and Chrysler at the expense of taxing Tesla out of existence?
You can measure both gasoline and electricity in both joules (a unit of energy) and kilowatt-hours. They can be convereted from one unit to the other as it is the same thing.
The question would be.... how do you measure vehicle efficiency in terms of how much energy was needed to create the movement of the vehicle in order to have it travel between two arbitrary points.
Gasoline can be burned much more efficiently as an electric generator, and if that generator doesn't even have to be on the vehicle.... so much the better.
So yes, you can measure electricity to be equivalent to a given number of gallons of gasoline or other sort of fuel that you want to use as a comparison.
No, I'd rather not see $50 billion go to any private business or industry at the expense of other reasonably good ideas. That isn't the role of government to be a bank, and that is unfortunately what the folks in DC are trying to pretend that they are.
I also don't think that NASA is necessarily the best place to throw money either, and my argument here is that NASA isn't necessarily such a fantastic place for the growth of technologies like it used to be.
Going to the Moon required whole new industrial fields to be developed and technologies that simply didn't exist in the late 1950's when NASA was first started. I am arguing that if NASA had a real purpose and was pushing the limits of human endurance and capacity in terms of penetrating ever more hostile environments and going places never seen before, they would be pushing technologies and making things happen.
All that I see from NASA right now is more of the same as what they've done over the past 40 years. That isn't progress, and in fact they are regressing to earlier concepts and losing capabilities.
This is a nice try, and I'll admit that the remote robotic stuff is kind of nice. There are some applications for security robots that are autonomous (including some UAV's) that do their patrols and when the AI picks up something "unusual" they transmit a signal that alerts a human operator.
All this said, NASA remote robotics is the leading edge of this technology. For something really interesting, this TED talk goes into some of the next generation developments in autonomous robots. While there is some sponsorship by NASA, this is a private group that has been developing much of the technology for other purposes besides what they are doing in space. This is about multi-million dollar remote vehicles that can't be easily recovered but are not used in space.
Oh, it isn't the Baby Boomers that will be screwed over. It will be the Gen Xers that follow.
When Boomers get to retirement age, they'll tweak the system so they'll get their "retirement benefits" and live into their "golden years" just fine. Heck, they are already hitting retirement age even now.
The real culprit here is Tip O'Neil and the congress of the 1980's that decided to mix the social security "trust funds" with the main federal budget.... oh, with the sanctioning of that magnificent leader called Ronald Reagan. So much for smaller and more efficient government by conservatives.
Halve the budget? What budge? The U.S. Federal budget?
Military spending in its entirety isn't even a quarter of the federal budget. Item #1 is Social Security and #2 is interest on federal debt (both are going up in a huge way). Social programs such as food stamps, AFDC, HUD grants, and other sorts of direct programs to individual citizens also are as a group much more than military spending as well.
Even if military spending were completely eliminated and abolished, that we got a happy world that would never even touch the USA or anything considered vital to Americans needing a military force of any kind, the U.S. Federal government would be mostly the current bloated self that you know... and we would be without any sort of military protection at all.
While I don't deny that there is some military spending that is over the top and hugely wasteful, it is specific programs that need to be targeted with this sort of hostility rather than taking it out against the whole of the military establishment.
I've heard horror stories about the National Reconnaissance Office in terms of massively over budget projects and horrific accounting practices that should make any congressmen blush to even think when they've voted for their budget.
Considering that the NRO is mainly about spaceflight and development of space vehicles (mainly spy satellites), it seems to be a good target in terms of a comparison to NASA. Even more: NASA's budget is about half that of the NRO. Now that is a sobering thought.
The NRO: America's other space agency.
Want some real fun? Check out NRO junior, and find out what they really do!
For farm subsidies, there usually has to be some sort of historical record of previous farming.
Still, I know some farmers involve with soil banks that get checks for not farming certain fields... and that certainly seems like a very bizzare notion at the very least. It sounds like one of those soil-banked lots were a part of this "house" that you are talking about. The original "homestead" is often a legitimate use for such lots that doesn't disqualify them from payments for soil banking.
Most other farm subsidies require legitimate production of food and activities you would normally associate with "farming". I wouldn't get so down on farm subsidies in general, although soil banking is certainly one of those weird FDR New Deal programs that never has been repealed.
The original goal of this program was to drive up food prices (yeah, you can question this one on multiple levels) by taking valuable farmland out of production and paying the farmers what would be a typical expected profit from that land by simply keeping it fallow. But of course only the marginal acreage was pulled out and the most productive land was (usually) kept as an active farm.
If you think that is weird, try to find out who controls the importation of Irish Whiskey into the USA. It is a government monopoly, BTW, and to a rather...er... famous "family" I'm sure you've heard about.
Some of this cuts to the core of why a biased media is ultimately horrible to our republic.
If a political candidate was arguing that this "fuzzy puppy" bill is proof of his opponents corruption, a responsible journalist would point out that the same bill put formaldehyde and arsenic as essential ingredients in school lunches and turn the question right back at the candidate.
Biased media simply reports that the fuzzy puppies continue to get slaughtered. Who cares about Amsterdam... that isn't even in the USA. Besides, wasn't there some joint EU/USA/NATO conference there where an historic trade treaty was signed and ratified simultaneously by all of the respective nations? (what that has to do with the red-light district is obviously irrelevant.)
I agree with your sentiment here, and I would like to see some way in which a non-related rider could be constitutionally (not just against the law) prohibited.
The problem, as I see it, would be the pile of lawyers in congress would take the wording of any such constitutional amendment prohibiting this practice and twist it to the point that omnibus bills would still end up getting passed. Just look at what qualifies as "interstate trade" and "national defense" laws if you don't believe me.
What should be happening is a group of determined congressmen that out right refuse to vote on these things when they come up, but even that doesn't seem to be something likely to happen, much less a President to refuse to sign such bills with so much junk in them.
Very appropriate answer to this question. As is this one:
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." - George Santayan
As much as I am a proponent about spaceflight, and I have even talked about what NASA R&D money has been spent on in the past, I have one huge question to ask about what NASA is today:
What is NASA doing today that is "bleeding" or "leading edge" for any of the technologies they are currently using or planning on using in the next decade or so?
Computers? Hardly. Most NASA computers on spacecraft are not only far from leading edge, they are often worse than what you have on the desktop or laptop you are using to read this /. posting.
Metallurgy? Again, NASA used to be super advanced in this area, but private aerospace companies use materials far more advanced than anything NASA is using or planning on using for the Ares spacecraft.
Rocket Fuel/propellants? Still no. Everything NASA uses is pretty much the same as they've used for the past 40 years... although there are a couple of small exceptions here. NASA doesn't plan on incorporating any of that more exotic propulsion technology into their main stream projects for some time, if ever. Again, private American companies (not to mention others outside of the USA) are doing far more than NASA in this area, both in terms of raw dollars spend and off-the-wall ideas on newer propulsion technologies.
Spacesuit technologies? Again, private companies. If you want to look at some real innovation, check out what is happening for extreme skydiving groups pushing for higher and higher altitudes. NASA isn't leading the way in any of this effort by any stretch of the imagination.
I'll give credit to NASA for their ability to remotely operate vehicles, but the UAV and other robotic programs in the military, much less in private research groups are doing far more complex tasks than anything NASA has been working on. While NASA may be at the front of technology here, they aren't doing anything to really advance anything here.
I could go on, but the point is that while NASA was incredibly useful in the past for building up new technologies, they haven't been that driving force for quite some time. Part of that, and I dare say most of that, is because NASA has become a backwater agency with a pathetic budget, no goals, and has not been doing what it is supposed to be doing: Explore space. Travel to low-earth orbit is a solved problem, together with things like docking, guidance computers, tracking, and communications to low-earth orbit. All I see from NASA is more of the same, and highly paranoid administrators who don't want to take the risks necessary to push space technology beyond its current limits.
If NASA sends astronauts to the Moon much less Mars, within the remaining years of my lifetime, I'll be shocked and floored. I don't see it happening, nor anything really exciting and new beyond exploring a few more moons, asteroids, and perhaps some of the outer planets like Eris. Even a return trip to Titan seems to be out of the running for some time to come.
Show me the vision for the future, and I might be a little more excited. Even this initial request for information by the future Obama administration seems to be like an older truck with its transmission stuck in 2nd gear.
Even the arguments about manned vs. unmanned spaceflight are getting very tiring here and not very exciting.
I am quite aware of the fact that most money in the world today is "fiat money". Or more specifically, things like the Euro and U.S. Dollar are worth exactly whatever anybody thinks it is worth... no more and no less.
A pile of $1 trillion USD may be enough to buy a medium-sized city or make a huge splash in the stock market. It may also only be worth keeping you warm on a cold night by burning the raw paper. It could even be a huge liability if you live in some cities that have strong fire hazard laws that would force you to put that pile in the dump instead or have laws against burning materials like paper.
BTW, intrinsic currency isn't all that much better, and has some additional problems when there is a definitive shortage of the metal for some reason or another. In situations like that, it can cause deflation on a massive scale, which has its own economic consequences.
It becomes even more of a problem when you have to use multiple metals for currency (for example, gold, silver, and copper) when the value of those metals relative to each other can shift dramatically from one time to another. This becomes a huge problem when you want to "make change" for the most valuable kind of metal. Rarely do you think that the value of a cent is going to be different than 1/100th of a dollar, but the value of a copper "penny" can vary by quite a bit compared to a silver "dollar" or a gold "eagle" in terms of raw bullion even today.
The problem with fiat money is the temptation for governments that run the printing presses to simply keep the presses running for a bit longer and spend the money that was not generated through tax revenue. The larger governmental bodies generally avoid that temptation, but that hasn't always been the case.
Even taxation by itself is an interesting concept when it comes to the government that establishes and regulates the currency being used to pay the taxes.
This is a little more than "touching up" photos here.
Yeah, I'll admit that my senior photo was touched up significantly (I was covered with zits and the photographer who took my photo did an *amazing* job of cleaning that up), but it still isn't the same thing as photo-shopping a background.
Then again, this is something that the television news broadcasters are doing without hardly a second thought. How many "virtual stages" did you see with the election results shows this past year... with the "reporters" standing in front of basically a green screen? That is the proper analogy here, including journalists that are supposedly delivering "legitimate news" in the same way that the AP claims to be doing.
Not that the AP really counts for much integrity any more, but at least it is a start.
Are you sure here? Did the police confiscate the cameras, or did they simply delete the images and hand the cameras back to the protesters as they were escorted outside?
Here the police were "keeping the peace", and certainly pressing the "delete" button to shut up some protesters and to keep them from inciting a riot could be considered justified. Certainly not criminal on the part of the officers involved, unless it is later proven that this would be vital evidence in a formal legal proceeding.
I see nothing to indicate that the protesters were even charged with anything at all... only escorted out. They should be grateful that they weren't charged with at least disturbing the peace or some other similar criminal charge themselves.
Besides, where does it say that you are constitutionally (in India, no less) guaranteed to take a picture anywhere you want, whenever you want, about whatever you want. I don't even see that "right" in the USA, any EU country, or UK commonwealth country.
It was also a stupid and foolish thing for these protesters to even be doing the stuff they were doing here, and being obnoxious and disruptive to the convention. They certainly have very little credibility if they were to go before a judge.
If they have a "battered wife syndrome", it is from a Justice Department and legal system that has refused to take their complaints seriously (Novell did try to sue Microsoft for anti-competitive/monopolistic behavior).
That the road which Novell has taken to transform itself from a proprietary software vendor to an open source contributor and supporter may not be as "pure" as some in the open source movement may like, they still are one of the "good guys" compared to companies like IBM that have legitimately earned their reputation. In spite of IBM's current "blessed" reputation in open source, they are hardly the most perfect company in terms of software patents and running roughshod over "the little guy". Don't let the Nazgul run over your too soon if you piss them off.
Yeah, this one deal between Microsoft and Novell stinks, at least from the viewpoint of garage startup open source projects. All I'm trying to point out is that it was something Novell simply had to do in order to appease their own shareholders, many of whom weren't (and still aren't) avid fans of open source/free software applications.
This doesn't mean that Novell is a puppet company for Microsoft, unlike other companies (SCO, hint, hint).
I think this is mainly a problem by those who can't comprehend that a large group of people would deliberately vote a communist party into power within the framework of a legitimate democratic government (instead of the sham "democracies" like the old USSR and what is currently in the "People's Republic of China").
Communism has a reputation of being brutal, obnoxious, and silencing any and all discussion by those who don't believe in their system with a near religious fervor. Most communist governments throughout the world also have some of the strongest totalitarian states ever created in the history of mankind, not to mention are some of the most brutal in terms of the deaths of its own citizens. For example, between Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler, who killed more of their own citizens in deliberate and officially sanctioned actions (aka like throwing Jews into the gas chambers)? Hitler comes out #3 in this grouping, both in sheer numbers and in proportion to the populations they were ruling over.
The communist party in the USA generally tries to hide its name, as even the term "communist" is considered unhealthy politically. Heck, even "socialist" is considered a dirty word in American politics, even if the term fits the description of what the candidate is advocating (such as what happened in the last U.S. presidential election).
I'd also like to point out that basic tenants of communism involve violent overthrows of their societies, and encourage widespread insurrection of those governments that are not communist. This also tends to make those folks who don't necessarily believe in communism to look with a jaundiced eye toward anybody claiming to be a communist... regardless of if the communist party can actually accomplish anything in a political sense.
The problem here isn't a Novell-Microsoft alliance, but rather the courts that accept the concept of software patents in the first place.
If software patents didn't exist, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place. For myself, I really fail to understand what possible benefit patents like this could have other than to encourage companies like Microsoft to expand their legal rights to mediocre software that only seems to work 80% of the time anyway.
I hate Microsoft... mainly because what they produce is crap. At least a good portion of what Novell produces actually works, and in fact that was the reputation Novell was striving for until Microsoft all but killed off their company.
If Novell started as an open source company and the patent agreement was a part of a larger trend moving to a more closed-source model, I would be concerned. However, the patent negotiation with Microsoft really was a way to convince Novell shareholders that a move into greater participation with the open source movement was a sound business decision, and in fact enabled that company to do precisely what they are doing now with their support of open source software.
For Novell to be a Microsoft sleeper agent, they certainly have been shafted by Microsoft enough to make you wonder what they do to true enemies if this is what they do to "friends".
The history of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell is rather long, complex, and rather technical. Some of this goes all the way back to Gary Kildall and Digital Research, with the original IBM-PC, as well as the later acquisition of Digital Research's DR-DOS by Novell. I could also cite deliberate engineering by Microsoft to subvert Novell products and crash computers using Novell software.
There is so much here that to give specifics "in a rational and unemotional way" simply becomes so tedious that it isn't worth the effort to folks who aren't interested in facts.
More to the point, there are a great many organizations in this world that do much more harm to humanity than Novell, and it is debatable that Novell is even being a problem at all. Boycotts usually backfire by promoting the company indirectly, and in this case I think the added publicity Novell is going to get from just this story on /. will cause more sales than any who might actually listen to the anti-Novell people and not purchase these products.
Heck, Novell might even think about donating to their organization as a thanks for the publicity.
Were cameras even permitted at this venue in the first place? What else was photographed besides the "protest"?
Law enforcement officers routinely have to step in and make quick judgment calls like this, and even "execute the sentence" in a great many situations as well. They are the first line of criminal law community, and often have to make the call to make decisions that afterward an "armchair quarterback" might disagree with.
More importantly, how much did these guys resist reasonable attempts by organizers of the conference to simply "take it outside" and attempt to resolve the situation peaceably? From a law enforcement perspective, even the act of taking the photos was something to cause further unrest, and in the interest of public safety the deletion of the photos could be considered a sound decision.
This is something I would have expected to see in a great many other places besides India, and may have been done in almost any other country with a similar kind of conference, including having the photos deleted.
I really don't see why this is being modded up.
Yes, I understand that you have some vitriolic hatred toward Mono and consider developers working on it to be a source of wasted talent on what you consider to be a useless piece of software. So what? Others disagree and happen to like Mono for whatever other reason.
Novell is in an interesting position, where they started out as proprietary software developers and developed a rather rock solid business model that gave them some huge piles of cash for awhile. The world shifted and frankly Mircosoft is largely to blame for the fact that the earlier businesses that Novell was involved with died a hard death. Novell even tried to compete with offering a better product and using hard-nosed sound engineering principles, only to get shafted by Microsoft when they deliberately put in software that would screw up the Novell network protocols into their Windows OS suites.
I could get into more, but Novell certainly isn't "in bed with Microsoft", and in fact has found a rather interesting way to insulate itself from Microsoft's tactics: embrace and join with the open source software movement. I think it is a stinking genius move on their part, and without moving to supporting open source software, Novell would no longer even exist as a company... or certainly would be looking at auctioning off most of their office furniture (as they already have).
Novell here is the victim of Microsoft harassment, and the reason they are acting they way that they do is precisely out of sheer survival and based on their history.
Furthermore, this still doesn't justify why it was necessary for these protesters to be jerks and disrupt a conference, exhibiting behavior that wouldn't be acceptable in any other "free" country elsewhere in the world either. If this had happened at a technology conference in Las Vegas, I wouldn't have expected anything different (or perhaps the LVPD would be a little more rough).
If you are being a jerk, don't be surprised if you are treated like a jerk.
Sometimes these protesters get exactly what they are asking for, and in this case it sounds like they were begging and asking for a violent confrontation.
Unless there is evidence to the contrary, I think the physical force used "to silence the other side of the debate" was properly used.
It was the protesters who were doing the unethical behavior in this instance. There is a whole lot more to the story than what was published. I could give analogies, but this is something like going to a UK Soccer match wearing the colors of the visiting team and yelling obscenities about the home team.... in the middle of a bunch of drunken fans.
Well, not quite, but they certainly should have been aware of the fact that what they (the protesters at this conference) were doing wasn't welcome and may not be tolerated by the other participants. There certainly are a great many analogies to apply here to show this was a stupid idea.
This all fits with what you consider to be morality. The laws about hate speech and denying the holocaust certainly sound like attempts to legislate morality to me.
Texas is its own strange state with a very independent streak in its legal code. Just because something is legal nor not legal in Texas has little to do with anything in the rest of America.
Or to put this in a "sound bite" or "bumper sticker slogan":
Texas: Bigger than France.
I think that sums it up rather clearly. And it is. The population of Texas is about a third of France, but who is quibbling over details here. It would still be a major world power (and a nuclear power at that) if it were an independent nation.