OK, think more like a black hole with Jupiter's mass. The point I'm trying to make is that the mass of the object is immaterial.
This BTW is a serious problem with other scientific investigations, where some "theories" are offered, but realisticly eliminating extra factors that influence the results is often difficult or impossible to do. The whole issue of global warming, for instance, has so many variables that the one often used conclusion, that human-caused pollution is directly causing global warming and that CO2 production by mankind specifically is the cause, is such a small piece of the overall picture that I don't believe those "researchers" are getting it right. That is but one of litterally hundreds of variables that can influence the overall global temperature.
BTW, this isn't arguging that the temperature of the world isn't going up, which is plainly obvious. The causes of it are what I strongly question, and many factors simply aren't taken into account or are wrongly trivialized. What happens with global warming research is more of a religion rather than a serious scientific inquiry, which is why it always sparks huge debates among participants. When these scientists say we must spend trillions of dollars to do things according to their political agenda exactly as they proclaim, I really start to wonder exactly what their agenda is all about. And yes, for some of the more extreme proposals, it would be trillions of dollars to fix the world according to their viewpoint, with massive relocations of individuals and substantial changes in how human society works. Or mass genocide of historic proportions that make the Jewish Holocaust seem like a minor criminal execution. Such proposals are thus unrealistic and will never happen.
In the case of trying to determine the relationship between mass and gravity, the number of variables is significantly less, which is why Newton suddenly realized and calculated that the gravity of the Earth on the Moon was identical to that of the gravity of the Earth on an Apple, or any other falling object. In fact, he demonstrated and calculated the speed of the moon in a circular orbit and what tangential velocity it would need if it was fighting gravity, and what that speed was in terms of observations. Those numbers turned out to be identical within a margin of error and gave support to Newton's theories.
This was one of the very first concepts that could be scientifically documented as working in places off of the Earth. That knowledge of the universal gravity constant "G" is known to such a pathetically few number of significant digits is one of the current travesties of modern physics.
While I think this whole thread is utter BS, I would point out that when you drop a much more dense object (generally considered "heavy") compared to a substantially less dense object like a feather in an atmosphere, the heavier and more dense object usually drops much faster. Visibly so.
Or the thing to point out is that atmospheric drag is a big deal. As for the miniscule amount that a slightly more massive object would have on gravitaional attraction, it isn't worth worrying about. And if you do the math using Newton's equations, any difference disappears. Dropping Jupiter onto the surface of the Earth falls just as fast as dropping a proton. Seriously. Do the math to prove it.
I think you have your figures wrong for Vandenburg AFB. The main reason for its location is that the only significant hunk of real estate south of there is Antarctica (OK, the Easter Islands, but I digress). That makes polar orbits something very useful, and dangerous to do at Cape Canaveral. Sending spacecraft into equitorial orbits from Vandenburg would either have to be retrograte (where you are fighting the spin of the Earth instead of using it as a boost) or launching over significant populations, including the city of Santa Barbara with a high likelyhood of damaging non-military assetts in the event of a failure, including civilian casualties. That is not something to do if you are interested in positive PR.
This may also be something positive to say about the Cape Breton site, but there is more "stuff" to the south of that site than can be found at Vandenburg, for instance. Still, I can see some regulatory bonuses for putting a launch site in Canada, particularly for Canadian companies.
If that isn't the basis of one damn good SF story, I don't know what one would be. Imagine if some bacterium (this is fiction, so anything is possible) "evolves" for some sort of bizzare sentience (its ancestors snuck into the clean room when the Voyager was being preped) and suddenly discovered that the entire universe is just the Voyager spacecraft, as far as can be detected with any instruments.
I would strongly disagree that this is something that would be very expensive or difficult to reproduce. If you can use a good page scanner to "scan in" a vinyl LP recording and do MP3 digitization of that scan, this would be a piece of cake to do something similar in terms of extracting the information from the tapes and do some heavy signal analysis of that information. That is a very routine process.
The issue would be to find some very sensitive magnetic sensors that would be able to digitally "scan" the video tape at a level of resolution higher than most analog playback equipment would be capable of reproducing the original recording.
I would bet that you could even do some fine tuning and be able to have even better quality reproduction of the recording than the original playback equipment would be able to provide, and be able to "tweak" the performance taking in to account optical distortion of the original camera equipment and do some other fun stuff to the content turning it into something that would be breathtaking even for the original astronauts who were there.
The total cost for the equipment would be about $5000, and that is doing budget busting for a very high end PC platform to do the signal analysis. Even a very cheap and used computer could be used if you really needed to cut corners.
The software development would be the harder part, and yeah, that may be in the range of $50 K to $100 K, but we are talking something that does have intrinsic value beyond even that value for the content alone. If you provided a 50 GB data dump somewhere of the content, I would also suggest that there would be people willing to try and do the processing of the data for free, just as a hobby and as fan of the Apollo Project.
But the point here is that the Davis recall election was perfectly legal, and was not a trivial step to take. If it were trivial to accomplish, there would be a recall election every month in California.
Yeah, I guess a dirty move, but it also gave direct democratic (little-d) control of the issue to the people of California, not just a few Senators as is the case of an impeachment trial.
Thanks for the information. This is certainly an improvement over pure gold tablets, but it does require some more advanced metalugical skills to put stuff like this together. Still, if you were to try and preserve important documents for substantial periods of time, this is the way to go.
I love the comment on the durible.info site that suggests a document lifetime of over a million years... surviving an ice age or two. That is document preservation!
Now to find something worth doing this sort of presevation effort. (Yeah, I can think of something or two).
About the only way I know of to preserve content for long periods of time is to etch the information in clearly legible plain text on gold tablets. This can be done microscopically, but the issue is the same: Find some medium to perserve the data that avoids technology obsolecense.
The only problem with this strategy (and it is something that has been used for thousands of years in the past with great success), is that sometimes the gold itself as bullion is more valuable than the information it contains. That certainly was the case for the Spanish, who melted down thousands of years worth of history into coins and shipped them to Spain, only to have a significant portion of that sink to the bottom of the Carribian due to storms and piracy.
If you can solve that dual issue of making a recording medium that is both incredibly durable and worthless except as a data storage device, you have something useful to contribute to history in a huge way. Price is not as huge of an issue as simply being able to withstand water damage and biological consumption.
Gold does a pretty good job on both of these issues, and has the added bonus of not requiring a high technology level in order to manufacture it. I havn't unfortunately found a modern composite material other than perhaps some exotic ceramics that might fill the same niche. Of course ceramics were also used in the past to preserve records (notably by the Sumerians and Babylonians). Ceramic tablets do suffer from issues of bulkiness, but perhaps some way to make them both thin and durable could be made?
Although you are largely correct that the "spirit" of the old SCO is long gone in the Caldera recration, it still is essentially the same legal entity, much as the current AT&T is still the old AT&T, reborn with another company through mergers and corporate renaming.
The interesting thing would be to see if the SCO trademark could be made available (bought out from Caldera on pennies for the dollar) for another rebirth as a major Linux distro. It would be very interesting to see if IBM would take up that flag or not, and do it the ultimate irony if they win the counter suit.
This is almost as if you think the law is whatever you can sucker a judge into thinking it should be.
What a wonderful concept.
Anybody with half a brain should have evaluated the basis of the lawsuit, and in this case asked both some hardcore IP lawyers and a few Linux gurus about the merits of this before doing some serious investment toward SCO.
Of course that is why this is one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the market at the moment, and why the stock shows any life at all: Everybody who shorted it at $20/share is now covering their short and having to buy the stock back. As soon as all those shorts are covered, it will fall to $0.25/share. Especially when the SEC gets involved.
The problem here is that he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, not the U.S. Senate. It is interesting that they still addressed him in the House as "Mr. President" when talking about him or to him, and defered to him as an elder statesman in other ways as well.
As far as the two-term limit, it was a constitutional ammendment, not a simple statutory law. There is a huge difference here, but I don't want to rehash the argument you have been having about this point. BTW, in the grand scheme of things, only Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bill Clinton have been forced out of office because of the 22nd Ammendment, and it is doubtful that either Eisenhower or Reagan would have continued on in office another four years. Interestingly enough, the 22nd Ammendment explicitly allowed for Truman to be elected to an unlimited number of terms, which he declined.
I would agree. If Japan has independent manned spaceflight capabilities and has done circum-lunar orbits with a touchdown on Tranquility Base with a present brought back for the Americans and a Japanese flag planted next to Neal Armstrong's flag, yeah, it would be news at that point.
I would hardly call Argintina or Brazil to be in the same league of 3rd world nations like Madagascar, Somolia, or perhaps even relatively poor South American countries like Bolivia. Argintina has money and there are educational opportunities to be had if people who live there are willing to take advantage of them, as long as you have some brains and are willing to work hard.
I will admit that there are poor regions of Argintina, just as there are comparatively poor places in the USA. Frankly, I would like to see the one laptop program be extended to places other than so-called 3rd world nations, and get rid of the ruse that this is only for educational purposes.
A solid simple computer that has standard architechture, a basic component structure so it can be repaired easily, and some basic networking capabilities to link multiple computers together would be a good thing to have no matter where you are, or even if you are a student or not. If you are a businessman or somebody who likes living on the bleeding edge of technology, a laptop like this is not going to be for you. However, I think computer manufacturers way overestimate how many people really want bleeding edge technology.
While this is a fine and noble thing to do, and I wish in the bottom of my heart that the folks at MIT would seriously consider this and allow stuff like this to happen, I think it has a snowballs chance in Death Valley, California during the summer at noon before this ever has a good likelyhood of happening.
Don't put your hopes on this thing, and I seriously consider this to be a scam of massive proportions just because they are being so restrictive on how these are going to be sold. Of course, after this huge purchase order, it wouldn't surprise me to see these things being sold on Ebay at a modest markup... perhaps even by these governments that are doing the purchase. The only way to keep them from being sold like that is to flood even 1st world countries with these things at a reasonable price so there is no excuse but to get them from legitimate suppliers.
Far from being able to replicate an environment on "any old PC", I have seen far too many times where you need that actual equipment to completely debug an application that it targeted to a specific platform. And in this case if you are trying to develop software that is for this specific set of requirements and to determine if you are writing something that is too slow for the processing capabiliites.
On the other hand, if you are trying to write a general app that can go many places and do many things, you not only need just one ordinary PC, but several different ones of various capabilities.
Otherwise, all you are writing is some sort of trivial application that isn't worth anything to anybody. For trivial examples like this, like a basic CS instruction project, yeah, you can use any old PC. But at the same time you are writing something that nobody wants.
I guess this post got you worked up somehow. And you do miss several important points about the establishment of the U.S. Constitution that were involved.
One huge point, that you failed to mention or even perhaps realized, is that the people at the U.S. Constitutional Convention were certainly learned by the standards of the day, and in fact made explicit studies of all governmental forms that had been in existance up until that point in time. And this was no trivial matter.
One of the huge things that kept going through their minds and was noted by several comments by members of that convention was on how to avoid some of the problems that hit the Roman Empire. Indeed it was the Roman Senate and Republic that was largly the original model on how to organize the American government, borrowing from the Parlimentary system in England and France, as well as coming up with some unique ideas of their own, notable with the establishment of the Presidency as a strong independent executive authority but lacked the ability to legislate new laws on his own.
In spite of what people say about Bush, he still can't write laws of his own, and needs to work with Congress in order to get anything accomplished that is substantive. Executive Orders are only sufficient for working with members of the Executive Branch, and it isn't his fault that Congress has abdicated so much authority over the years to make such a strong federal exeutive branch.
Along this line of thought, the office of Emperor was only intended to be a temporary position in the Roman government, but once the emperor was established it proved to be impossible to remove him from his authority. And Emperor did have the ability to cut through bureaucratic red tape in a hurry to be able to "Save the Republic", which meant that he had substantial supporters in the Senate who at all time in theory could have ended the reign of the Emperors at any time. Sound familiar here?
As far as wheither the electorial college was set up as a good idea or merely one more experiment among many such experiments in governing a new country, that is debateable. The point I was trying to point out with my original post was that it has become a part of the national political life in America, and is a vestage of the philosohpy that the American Congress and government is really a meeting of various independent soverign states coming together for a common good. If you ignore the fact that smaller states do have proportionally more votes in the presidential races and think you can come up with a better solution to the electorial college for choosing a President, you are automatically going to piss off all of these smaller states who would be unlikely to support a major constitutional reform. The number of states necessary to pass a constitutional ammendment would rise proportionally. I also think it is wishful thinking that people would try to do an "end-run" arround the constituion through a state compact that really should be done through constitutional ammendment processes as well. Ignoring small states this blatantly would result in a successionist movement that has been unknown in the USA since the days of the U.S. Civil War.
This said, I still think that some reforms of the way electorial college delegates are selected should be made. And this needs to be state-initiated actions. As I said earlier, I really like the proposal that Colorado proposed in the last election. There were some flaws particularly with the way it was to be implemented (I think they should not have tied the results of that referendum with the results of that particular election), and it was also a proposal that also indirectly bashed both major political parties leading the potential for major 3rd party candidates to garner electorial votes in a situation that is currently impossible with the winner-take-all system.
Indeed I think it is this state-wide winner take all system, which was never specificed in the U.S. Consitution, nor was it used for the first seve
This is exactly what the U.S. federal system was supposed to be.... a congress of American states. In fact, the Articles of Confederation is really much more like the UN in terms of states sending delegations and each state having just one vote. That was the original American government.
The problem today is that far too many people don't "get" the federal powers should be limited, and that the bulk of governance should happen on the local level.... where citizens presumably have more control over the process. Just reading the/. postings here should be plenty to know that not even semi-intelligent geeks who should know better don't get it either.
Treaties do the same thing, and even have "escape clauses" for nations to withdraw from the treaty. That would be a part of the negotiation between the states on what is acceptable, or even for congress for that matter if they think it would be a bad idea or cause some other problems between other states outside of the compact.
The real point here is that the compact is in force with essentially the same authority as the U.S. Constitution, as that is really all the U.S. Constitution is about: a compact between states for a common authority over themselves. Even the Constitution had a 2/3 activation clause (2/3 of the signing states had to agree before the government would become effective). And there is even a succession clause buried in the Constition, but it requires ratification by Congress in order to occur. I guess South Carolina didn't read that part.
It isn't the Interstate Commerce clause that governs this (although that is a much abused section of the constitution).
Instead, it is Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution that governs this, spelling out what states can't do like coin money or engage in foreign policy.... without consent of congress. With congressional consent, any of this is possible. And it is done, too.
USC Title 4 Chapter 4 deals with the relationship of the Federal government and state governments, and there is a section that deals specifically with compacts that are related to law enforcement, strongly encouraging states to cooperate between each other for going after criminals. Unfortunately state compacts are otherwise not explicitly mentioned in terms of procedural matters of the subject.
I can't find much more about this at house.gov, although there are dozens of bills and laws that mention the state compacts as well. The current "hot button" related issue right now is a state compact with an American Indian tribe covering legal gambling. Doing a Google search will pull up a bunch more related bills and mentions of this topic.
The whole debate of small vs. large states was always on the mind of the authors of the U.S. Consitution. In fact, it was an issue that very nearly ended the convention without a government of any kind. To suggest that the electorial college was strictly about the one issue of insulating the election of a President from the "common citizens" is missing a critical piece of what was really happening, and some of the issues surrounding the development of the constitution.
This is exactly the reason why a senator from Alaska has the same political pull as a senator from California, or even why senators from small states (like Henry Reid from Nevada) tend to be even more prominent on the national scene. This is exactly by design.
And more to the point, small states won't give up the extra representation in the electorial college shy of a major civil war or complete overthrow of the U.S. Government. It is that big of a deal.
I actually went through the stats with Utah (a strongly republican state) and noted that Democrats would not only gain electorial votes from Utah with a proportional voting system in place, but with just a tiny amount of additional effort they would have also gained additional electorial votes simply by trying appeal to the voters. Most Utah voters that are Democratic (and many Republicans for that matter) don't even bother to vote for President simply because they already know the conclusion - it is going to go Republican every time.
The same thing could be said about many other states. If Democrats are worried about losing electorial votes, it is because the political machines are rotting away and they are failing to get their message out and convince people to vote for them. It is not because the mechanics of the election are working against them.
It is a sad state that such raw politics such as "who is going to get the most votes" prevails rather than trying to inject true political debate into the process and encourage democratic participation. Or as important, to provide opportunities for more people thinking that their vote counts and can make a difference. The current electorial college fails miserably on this count.
Seriously, that is all I ask. The fantasy dreams of industrial welfare clients indeed should be something left as something of the past. That is people like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing should not be holding out their hands for another Apollo-type project going to Mars.
On that I would agree. Companies like that have held back development of space as a frontier anyway.
Keep in mind that a "state compact" really is a treaty, but between American states instead of between countries. Actually, a state compact can also include a foriegn government as well.
The one thing that keeps them under control and from getting out of hand is that all state compacts must not only be approved by all state legislatures involved, but also by the U.S. Congress.... keeping the U.S. Consitutional issues in hand.
These compacts are usually done for rather mundane tasks like highway construction projects that cross state lines, school districts that take in kids from just across the state line, or other issues that would involve multiple states. Some good compacts I've seen allowed "in-state" tuition at a group of universities in a specific region. Minnesota in particular established seperate compacts to do just that with all of the neighboring states.
Even more bizzare was a compact between Minnesota and Mantoba, where an airport on the U.S./Canadian border was more cheaply extended across the international border by 1000 feet. It wasn't a huge airport, but the need was there to build the extra length of runway and make a joint state/province authority over the expanded airport. The state and provincial governments ran the airport, but it also needed federal authority from both national governments in order to get this to work.
Once states enter into a compact like this, it becomes enforceable almost like the U.S. Consitution, and states simply can't back out of it shy of fully repealing the compact by agreement with all of the people participating in that compact. Indeed, something like this ultimately has even more authority in fact than the U.S. Constitution as trying to get the whole thing renegotiated all over again after the compact is in legal force would be something next to impossible to accomplish. All told, I think a constitutional ammendment would be easier to negotiate because of this problem. SCOTUS doesn't let states get away with the same garbage that would be routine for the World Court.
One thing this proposal totally misses is the fact that the U.S. Constitution specifically set up the opportunity to disproportionally represent voters in smaller states over those in larger states, so that a Presidential candidate would have to appeal to voters of those smaller states like Wyoming, Hawaii, and Delaware in addition to major voting hubs like New York, Texas, Florida, and California.
There is no way a state compact could ever be made that would ignore this issue.
Of the various electorial vote distribution systems that have been proposed, I like Colorado's idea (that was voted down) as the best of the bunch, although the Nebraska & Maine system of having each congressional district determine their own "vote" does seem at least as an alternative. The current "winner takes all" approach that most of the other states use is really the source of some of the current problems.
Colorado actually proposed proportional electorial votes based on percentages of votes cast. That would mean states doing this would still get attention even if there was a huge percentage of voters in that state voting for one candidate, but one candidate could still just collect a few thousand more votes in order to get one more electorial vote from that state. Interestingly enough, Al Gore would have won in 2000 had this system been used in most states, and it is the democrats who don't want it changed.
It should be noted that the Bush campaign comittee specifically targeted the smaller states for electorial votes and it was a part of their strategy to win these "neglected by the Democrats" parts of the USA in order to win the presidential election. This strategy was specifically encouraged by design by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
I'll tell you what. I'll move my kids and grandkids off this hunk of rock to elsewhere in this Solar System, and you can stay behind right here where you are nice and cozy.
If something happens here on the Earth, I won't care and you can try to live with it. Just don't try to stop me from leaving with a bunch of bureaucratic BS in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, think more like a black hole with Jupiter's mass. The point I'm trying to make is that the mass of the object is immaterial.
This BTW is a serious problem with other scientific investigations, where some "theories" are offered, but realisticly eliminating extra factors that influence the results is often difficult or impossible to do. The whole issue of global warming, for instance, has so many variables that the one often used conclusion, that human-caused pollution is directly causing global warming and that CO2 production by mankind specifically is the cause, is such a small piece of the overall picture that I don't believe those "researchers" are getting it right. That is but one of litterally hundreds of variables that can influence the overall global temperature.
BTW, this isn't arguging that the temperature of the world isn't going up, which is plainly obvious. The causes of it are what I strongly question, and many factors simply aren't taken into account or are wrongly trivialized. What happens with global warming research is more of a religion rather than a serious scientific inquiry, which is why it always sparks huge debates among participants. When these scientists say we must spend trillions of dollars to do things according to their political agenda exactly as they proclaim, I really start to wonder exactly what their agenda is all about. And yes, for some of the more extreme proposals, it would be trillions of dollars to fix the world according to their viewpoint, with massive relocations of individuals and substantial changes in how human society works. Or mass genocide of historic proportions that make the Jewish Holocaust seem like a minor criminal execution. Such proposals are thus unrealistic and will never happen.
In the case of trying to determine the relationship between mass and gravity, the number of variables is significantly less, which is why Newton suddenly realized and calculated that the gravity of the Earth on the Moon was identical to that of the gravity of the Earth on an Apple, or any other falling object. In fact, he demonstrated and calculated the speed of the moon in a circular orbit and what tangential velocity it would need if it was fighting gravity, and what that speed was in terms of observations. Those numbers turned out to be identical within a margin of error and gave support to Newton's theories.
This was one of the very first concepts that could be scientifically documented as working in places off of the Earth. That knowledge of the universal gravity constant "G" is known to such a pathetically few number of significant digits is one of the current travesties of modern physics.
While I think this whole thread is utter BS, I would point out that when you drop a much more dense object (generally considered "heavy") compared to a substantially less dense object like a feather in an atmosphere, the heavier and more dense object usually drops much faster. Visibly so.
Or the thing to point out is that atmospheric drag is a big deal. As for the miniscule amount that a slightly more massive object would have on gravitaional attraction, it isn't worth worrying about. And if you do the math using Newton's equations, any difference disappears. Dropping Jupiter onto the surface of the Earth falls just as fast as dropping a proton. Seriously. Do the math to prove it.
I think you have your figures wrong for Vandenburg AFB. The main reason for its location is that the only significant hunk of real estate south of there is Antarctica (OK, the Easter Islands, but I digress). That makes polar orbits something very useful, and dangerous to do at Cape Canaveral. Sending spacecraft into equitorial orbits from Vandenburg would either have to be retrograte (where you are fighting the spin of the Earth instead of using it as a boost) or launching over significant populations, including the city of Santa Barbara with a high likelyhood of damaging non-military assetts in the event of a failure, including civilian casualties. That is not something to do if you are interested in positive PR.
This may also be something positive to say about the Cape Breton site, but there is more "stuff" to the south of that site than can be found at Vandenburg, for instance. Still, I can see some regulatory bonuses for putting a launch site in Canada, particularly for Canadian companies.
If that isn't the basis of one damn good SF story, I don't know what one would be. Imagine if some bacterium (this is fiction, so anything is possible) "evolves" for some sort of bizzare sentience (its ancestors snuck into the clean room when the Voyager was being preped) and suddenly discovered that the entire universe is just the Voyager spacecraft, as far as can be detected with any instruments.
Food for thought.
I would strongly disagree that this is something that would be very expensive or difficult to reproduce. If you can use a good page scanner to "scan in" a vinyl LP recording and do MP3 digitization of that scan, this would be a piece of cake to do something similar in terms of extracting the information from the tapes and do some heavy signal analysis of that information. That is a very routine process.
The issue would be to find some very sensitive magnetic sensors that would be able to digitally "scan" the video tape at a level of resolution higher than most analog playback equipment would be capable of reproducing the original recording.
I would bet that you could even do some fine tuning and be able to have even better quality reproduction of the recording than the original playback equipment would be able to provide, and be able to "tweak" the performance taking in to account optical distortion of the original camera equipment and do some other fun stuff to the content turning it into something that would be breathtaking even for the original astronauts who were there.
The total cost for the equipment would be about $5000, and that is doing budget busting for a very high end PC platform to do the signal analysis. Even a very cheap and used computer could be used if you really needed to cut corners.
The software development would be the harder part, and yeah, that may be in the range of $50 K to $100 K, but we are talking something that does have intrinsic value beyond even that value for the content alone. If you provided a 50 GB data dump somewhere of the content, I would also suggest that there would be people willing to try and do the processing of the data for free, just as a hobby and as fan of the Apollo Project.
But the point here is that the Davis recall election was perfectly legal, and was not a trivial step to take. If it were trivial to accomplish, there would be a recall election every month in California.
Yeah, I guess a dirty move, but it also gave direct democratic (little-d) control of the issue to the people of California, not just a few Senators as is the case of an impeachment trial.
Thanks for the information. This is certainly an improvement over pure gold tablets, but it does require some more advanced metalugical skills to put stuff like this together. Still, if you were to try and preserve important documents for substantial periods of time, this is the way to go.
I love the comment on the durible.info site that suggests a document lifetime of over a million years... surviving an ice age or two. That is document preservation!
Now to find something worth doing this sort of presevation effort. (Yeah, I can think of something or two).
About the only way I know of to preserve content for long periods of time is to etch the information in clearly legible plain text on gold tablets. This can be done microscopically, but the issue is the same: Find some medium to perserve the data that avoids technology obsolecense.
The only problem with this strategy (and it is something that has been used for thousands of years in the past with great success), is that sometimes the gold itself as bullion is more valuable than the information it contains. That certainly was the case for the Spanish, who melted down thousands of years worth of history into coins and shipped them to Spain, only to have a significant portion of that sink to the bottom of the Carribian due to storms and piracy.
If you can solve that dual issue of making a recording medium that is both incredibly durable and worthless except as a data storage device, you have something useful to contribute to history in a huge way. Price is not as huge of an issue as simply being able to withstand water damage and biological consumption.
Gold does a pretty good job on both of these issues, and has the added bonus of not requiring a high technology level in order to manufacture it. I havn't unfortunately found a modern composite material other than perhaps some exotic ceramics that might fill the same niche. Of course ceramics were also used in the past to preserve records (notably by the Sumerians and Babylonians). Ceramic tablets do suffer from issues of bulkiness, but perhaps some way to make them both thin and durable could be made?
Although you are largely correct that the "spirit" of the old SCO is long gone in the Caldera recration, it still is essentially the same legal entity, much as the current AT&T is still the old AT&T, reborn with another company through mergers and corporate renaming.
The interesting thing would be to see if the SCO trademark could be made available (bought out from Caldera on pennies for the dollar) for another rebirth as a major Linux distro. It would be very interesting to see if IBM would take up that flag or not, and do it the ultimate irony if they win the counter suit.
This is almost as if you think the law is whatever you can sucker a judge into thinking it should be.
What a wonderful concept.
Anybody with half a brain should have evaluated the basis of the lawsuit, and in this case asked both some hardcore IP lawyers and a few Linux gurus about the merits of this before doing some serious investment toward SCO.
Of course that is why this is one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the market at the moment, and why the stock shows any life at all: Everybody who shorted it at $20/share is now covering their short and having to buy the stock back. As soon as all those shorts are covered, it will fall to $0.25/share. Especially when the SEC gets involved.
I didn't know about Andrew Johnson, but one other that you forgot:
John Quincy Adams
The problem here is that he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, not the U.S. Senate. It is interesting that they still addressed him in the House as "Mr. President" when talking about him or to him, and defered to him as an elder statesman in other ways as well.
As far as the two-term limit, it was a constitutional ammendment, not a simple statutory law. There is a huge difference here, but I don't want to rehash the argument you have been having about this point. BTW, in the grand scheme of things, only Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bill Clinton have been forced out of office because of the 22nd Ammendment, and it is doubtful that either Eisenhower or Reagan would have continued on in office another four years. Interestingly enough, the 22nd Ammendment explicitly allowed for Truman to be elected to an unlimited number of terms, which he declined.
I would agree. If Japan has independent manned spaceflight capabilities and has done circum-lunar orbits with a touchdown on Tranquility Base with a present brought back for the Americans and a Japanese flag planted next to Neal Armstrong's flag, yeah, it would be news at that point.
Until then, this is vaporware and nothing more.
I would hardly call Argintina or Brazil to be in the same league of 3rd world nations like Madagascar, Somolia, or perhaps even relatively poor South American countries like Bolivia. Argintina has money and there are educational opportunities to be had if people who live there are willing to take advantage of them, as long as you have some brains and are willing to work hard.
I will admit that there are poor regions of Argintina, just as there are comparatively poor places in the USA. Frankly, I would like to see the one laptop program be extended to places other than so-called 3rd world nations, and get rid of the ruse that this is only for educational purposes.
A solid simple computer that has standard architechture, a basic component structure so it can be repaired easily, and some basic networking capabilities to link multiple computers together would be a good thing to have no matter where you are, or even if you are a student or not. If you are a businessman or somebody who likes living on the bleeding edge of technology, a laptop like this is not going to be for you. However, I think computer manufacturers way overestimate how many people really want bleeding edge technology.
While this is a fine and noble thing to do, and I wish in the bottom of my heart that the folks at MIT would seriously consider this and allow stuff like this to happen, I think it has a snowballs chance in Death Valley, California during the summer at noon before this ever has a good likelyhood of happening.
Don't put your hopes on this thing, and I seriously consider this to be a scam of massive proportions just because they are being so restrictive on how these are going to be sold. Of course, after this huge purchase order, it wouldn't surprise me to see these things being sold on Ebay at a modest markup... perhaps even by these governments that are doing the purchase. The only way to keep them from being sold like that is to flood even 1st world countries with these things at a reasonable price so there is no excuse but to get them from legitimate suppliers.
Far from being able to replicate an environment on "any old PC", I have seen far too many times where you need that actual equipment to completely debug an application that it targeted to a specific platform. And in this case if you are trying to develop software that is for this specific set of requirements and to determine if you are writing something that is too slow for the processing capabiliites.
On the other hand, if you are trying to write a general app that can go many places and do many things, you not only need just one ordinary PC, but several different ones of various capabilities.
Otherwise, all you are writing is some sort of trivial application that isn't worth anything to anybody. For trivial examples like this, like a basic CS instruction project, yeah, you can use any old PC. But at the same time you are writing something that nobody wants.
I guess this post got you worked up somehow. And you do miss several important points about the establishment of the U.S. Constitution that were involved.
One huge point, that you failed to mention or even perhaps realized, is that the people at the U.S. Constitutional Convention were certainly learned by the standards of the day, and in fact made explicit studies of all governmental forms that had been in existance up until that point in time. And this was no trivial matter.
One of the huge things that kept going through their minds and was noted by several comments by members of that convention was on how to avoid some of the problems that hit the Roman Empire. Indeed it was the Roman Senate and Republic that was largly the original model on how to organize the American government, borrowing from the Parlimentary system in England and France, as well as coming up with some unique ideas of their own, notable with the establishment of the Presidency as a strong independent executive authority but lacked the ability to legislate new laws on his own.
In spite of what people say about Bush, he still can't write laws of his own, and needs to work with Congress in order to get anything accomplished that is substantive. Executive Orders are only sufficient for working with members of the Executive Branch, and it isn't his fault that Congress has abdicated so much authority over the years to make such a strong federal exeutive branch.
Along this line of thought, the office of Emperor was only intended to be a temporary position in the Roman government, but once the emperor was established it proved to be impossible to remove him from his authority. And Emperor did have the ability to cut through bureaucratic red tape in a hurry to be able to "Save the Republic", which meant that he had substantial supporters in the Senate who at all time in theory could have ended the reign of the Emperors at any time. Sound familiar here?
As far as wheither the electorial college was set up as a good idea or merely one more experiment among many such experiments in governing a new country, that is debateable. The point I was trying to point out with my original post was that it has become a part of the national political life in America, and is a vestage of the philosohpy that the American Congress and government is really a meeting of various independent soverign states coming together for a common good. If you ignore the fact that smaller states do have proportionally more votes in the presidential races and think you can come up with a better solution to the electorial college for choosing a President, you are automatically going to piss off all of these smaller states who would be unlikely to support a major constitutional reform. The number of states necessary to pass a constitutional ammendment would rise proportionally. I also think it is wishful thinking that people would try to do an "end-run" arround the constituion through a state compact that really should be done through constitutional ammendment processes as well. Ignoring small states this blatantly would result in a successionist movement that has been unknown in the USA since the days of the U.S. Civil War.
This said, I still think that some reforms of the way electorial college delegates are selected should be made. And this needs to be state-initiated actions. As I said earlier, I really like the proposal that Colorado proposed in the last election. There were some flaws particularly with the way it was to be implemented (I think they should not have tied the results of that referendum with the results of that particular election), and it was also a proposal that also indirectly bashed both major political parties leading the potential for major 3rd party candidates to garner electorial votes in a situation that is currently impossible with the winner-take-all system.
Indeed I think it is this state-wide winner take all system, which was never specificed in the U.S. Consitution, nor was it used for the first seve
This is exactly what the U.S. federal system was supposed to be.... a congress of American states. In fact, the Articles of Confederation is really much more like the UN in terms of states sending delegations and each state having just one vote. That was the original American government.
/. postings here should be plenty to know that not even semi-intelligent geeks who should know better don't get it either.
The problem today is that far too many people don't "get" the federal powers should be limited, and that the bulk of governance should happen on the local level.... where citizens presumably have more control over the process. Just reading the
Treaties do the same thing, and even have "escape clauses" for nations to withdraw from the treaty. That would be a part of the negotiation between the states on what is acceptable, or even for congress for that matter if they think it would be a bad idea or cause some other problems between other states outside of the compact.
The real point here is that the compact is in force with essentially the same authority as the U.S. Constitution, as that is really all the U.S. Constitution is about: a compact between states for a common authority over themselves. Even the Constitution had a 2/3 activation clause (2/3 of the signing states had to agree before the government would become effective). And there is even a succession clause buried in the Constition, but it requires ratification by Congress in order to occur. I guess South Carolina didn't read that part.
It isn't the Interstate Commerce clause that governs this (although that is a much abused section of the constitution).
Instead, it is Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution that governs this, spelling out what states can't do like coin money or engage in foreign policy.... without consent of congress. With congressional consent, any of this is possible. And it is done, too.
USC Title 4 Chapter 4 deals with the relationship of the Federal government and state governments, and there is a section that deals specifically with compacts that are related to law enforcement, strongly encouraging states to cooperate between each other for going after criminals. Unfortunately state compacts are otherwise not explicitly mentioned in terms of procedural matters of the subject.
I can't find much more about this at house.gov, although there are dozens of bills and laws that mention the state compacts as well. The current "hot button" related issue right now is a state compact with an American Indian tribe covering legal gambling. Doing a Google search will pull up a bunch more related bills and mentions of this topic.
The whole debate of small vs. large states was always on the mind of the authors of the U.S. Consitution. In fact, it was an issue that very nearly ended the convention without a government of any kind. To suggest that the electorial college was strictly about the one issue of insulating the election of a President from the "common citizens" is missing a critical piece of what was really happening, and some of the issues surrounding the development of the constitution.
This is exactly the reason why a senator from Alaska has the same political pull as a senator from California, or even why senators from small states (like Henry Reid from Nevada) tend to be even more prominent on the national scene. This is exactly by design.
And more to the point, small states won't give up the extra representation in the electorial college shy of a major civil war or complete overthrow of the U.S. Government. It is that big of a deal.
I actually went through the stats with Utah (a strongly republican state) and noted that Democrats would not only gain electorial votes from Utah with a proportional voting system in place, but with just a tiny amount of additional effort they would have also gained additional electorial votes simply by trying appeal to the voters. Most Utah voters that are Democratic (and many Republicans for that matter) don't even bother to vote for President simply because they already know the conclusion - it is going to go Republican every time.
The same thing could be said about many other states. If Democrats are worried about losing electorial votes, it is because the political machines are rotting away and they are failing to get their message out and convince people to vote for them. It is not because the mechanics of the election are working against them.
It is a sad state that such raw politics such as "who is going to get the most votes" prevails rather than trying to inject true political debate into the process and encourage democratic participation. Or as important, to provide opportunities for more people thinking that their vote counts and can make a difference. The current electorial college fails miserably on this count.
Seriously, that is all I ask. The fantasy dreams of industrial welfare clients indeed should be something left as something of the past. That is people like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing should not be holding out their hands for another Apollo-type project going to Mars.
On that I would agree. Companies like that have held back development of space as a frontier anyway.
Keep in mind that a "state compact" really is a treaty, but between American states instead of between countries. Actually, a state compact can also include a foriegn government as well.
The one thing that keeps them under control and from getting out of hand is that all state compacts must not only be approved by all state legislatures involved, but also by the U.S. Congress.... keeping the U.S. Consitutional issues in hand.
These compacts are usually done for rather mundane tasks like highway construction projects that cross state lines, school districts that take in kids from just across the state line, or other issues that would involve multiple states. Some good compacts I've seen allowed "in-state" tuition at a group of universities in a specific region. Minnesota in particular established seperate compacts to do just that with all of the neighboring states.
Even more bizzare was a compact between Minnesota and Mantoba, where an airport on the U.S./Canadian border was more cheaply extended across the international border by 1000 feet. It wasn't a huge airport, but the need was there to build the extra length of runway and make a joint state/province authority over the expanded airport. The state and provincial governments ran the airport, but it also needed federal authority from both national governments in order to get this to work.
Once states enter into a compact like this, it becomes enforceable almost like the U.S. Consitution, and states simply can't back out of it shy of fully repealing the compact by agreement with all of the people participating in that compact. Indeed, something like this ultimately has even more authority in fact than the U.S. Constitution as trying to get the whole thing renegotiated all over again after the compact is in legal force would be something next to impossible to accomplish. All told, I think a constitutional ammendment would be easier to negotiate because of this problem. SCOTUS doesn't let states get away with the same garbage that would be routine for the World Court.
One thing this proposal totally misses is the fact that the U.S. Constitution specifically set up the opportunity to disproportionally represent voters in smaller states over those in larger states, so that a Presidential candidate would have to appeal to voters of those smaller states like Wyoming, Hawaii, and Delaware in addition to major voting hubs like New York, Texas, Florida, and California.
There is no way a state compact could ever be made that would ignore this issue.
Of the various electorial vote distribution systems that have been proposed, I like Colorado's idea (that was voted down) as the best of the bunch, although the Nebraska & Maine system of having each congressional district determine their own "vote" does seem at least as an alternative. The current "winner takes all" approach that most of the other states use is really the source of some of the current problems.
Colorado actually proposed proportional electorial votes based on percentages of votes cast. That would mean states doing this would still get attention even if there was a huge percentage of voters in that state voting for one candidate, but one candidate could still just collect a few thousand more votes in order to get one more electorial vote from that state. Interestingly enough, Al Gore would have won in 2000 had this system been used in most states, and it is the democrats who don't want it changed.
It should be noted that the Bush campaign comittee specifically targeted the smaller states for electorial votes and it was a part of their strategy to win these "neglected by the Democrats" parts of the USA in order to win the presidential election. This strategy was specifically encouraged by design by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
I'll tell you what. I'll move my kids and grandkids off this hunk of rock to elsewhere in this Solar System, and you can stay behind right here where you are nice and cozy.
If something happens here on the Earth, I won't care and you can try to live with it. Just don't try to stop me from leaving with a bunch of bureaucratic BS in the process.