The sad thing about the whole debate is that the health care industry really is in dire need of reform in terms of what government oversight and regulations exist within the industry, and a fundamental rethinking about how healthcare ought to be provided. That debate never happened.
In fact, the real problem with the AHA is that damn little actual debate over the substance of the legislation even happened at all. The utter BS that "you'll find out what is in it when you pass it" is why we got what we got. That isn't even a compromise. I don't even agree with you that the reason it is in the current state is a result of any kind of legislative negotiation.
I even question the need for "universal coverage", but that is a separate debate. Throwing money into a corrupt system is not a solution but a way to make that corrupt system even more corrupt.
The Republicans are already called "racists" any time they oppose or criticise Obama (just tune-in ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS,MSNBC etc) so there would be a massive PR hit for even filing charges against the nation's first black president.
Please re-read the post. I know it would be stupid to file impeachment charges against Obama himself, even if things like Benghazi could be shown as iron clad proof that he deliberately ordered the death of a U.S. ambassador (aka actual 1st degree murder charges if any of that is true not to mention flat out treason). I won't repost what else I've said on this subject, but Barack Obama himself is indeed untouchable and can do pretty much anything he wants and Congress will let him. Ignore the guy at the top and the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Other members of the Obama administration don't have the same level of protection though, particularly as their role is to take the bullets (political or otherwise) aimed at the President. It doesn't even matter if they were ordered to perjure themselves, they have to take the fall. They most certainly can be impeached, particularly if their impeachment will make it so Obama is seen as the good guy and these folks making these false statements are shown as rogue individuals not following the law. It will hardly be the first ones to get kicked out either.
If a junior undersecretary or even Forest Service supervisor was to do something stupid, they most certainly can be impeached and removed from office by Congress and such action would likely be done with bipartisan support (depending on how stupid that action might be). Obviously these members of congress don't mind demanding that this particular presidential assistant is fired and thinks that effectively they have a case to show he is incompetent to perform his job duties. I'm just saying to close that circle and make a realistic attempt at doing the job themselves. If anything, Hillary Clinton got out of the Obama Administration just in time to avoid permanently ruining her potential future career. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic Party will consider her to be damaged goods in 2016 or if she has a real shot at getting the Democratic nomination.
Boldly lying to Congress is usually a good way to get bipartisan support.... to get you slapped in some official manner. There is also the ability to "censure" somebody in the federal government or to offer a "contempt of Congress" resolution as well. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Your statement would be correct if it wasn't for the fact that there were Democrats who signed this letter and that people of both parties are trying to run for cover to get on the popular side of this issue (which also cuts across both parties except for diehard fanatics). Besides, submitting a bill for consideration doesn't require the support of half of the members of any chamber, it only needs a single member of congress to submit the legislation for consideration... and the other co-signers of the letter could simply be co-signers of the legislation instead. If they submitted the legislation and it was held up in committee.... that is something they could similarly use to take back to their constituents and say "I did everything I could to remove this asshat, but the logjam in Washington kept me from getting it done."
I'm saying that the entire notion of begging the President to fire the guy when you have this kind of authority seems stupid and even ignorant on the part of these Congressmen. Sending a letter to the President that you have already submitted such legislation and would like him to preempt such action before it gets to the full House for consideration is IMHO a much stronger message. It is almost as if these guys simply don't want to act at all.
it's not an AI in the story. its a magical ghost spirit.
why the fuck ask AI specialists about it even? and what the fuck, not that far off? sure it is. it's very far off.
I would have to agree. Those who think a proper artificial intelligence is "just around the corner" have been promising this for the past forty years and longer. I've seen computer clock speeds improve over a million times since that has been said, and memory storage devices improve even more in terms of storage size. Yet in spite of all that, they still don't have a clue as to what intelligence actually is (genuine sentience), much less being able to replicate the concept.
There are some useful tools which mimic intelligence, and perhaps I might even agree that a collection of such tools when combined might be useful as an operating system interface. But getting something that doesn't hit the "uncanny valley" where you know in your gut that something is wrong is going to take millennia of computer scientists to figure out, if it ever will be "solved".
My own bet is that it will never be solved and remain just as elusive a thousand years from now. There will also be in a thousand years more shills who are like these "AI researchers" who will be promising it is "just around the corner" to justify why their research budget needs an extra million dollars.
Congress has the authority to remove people from positions in the federal government on their own. Why don't they use it?
And no, it doesn't need to be an impeachment of the President, it can be any officer or person holding a position of trust in the U.S. government. Dozens of impeachment bills are presented every year in Congress, where they seldom get any sort of attention even when they pass as it is usually for obscure offices or minor judges. if these congressmen were serious, they would just start the process and hold that over the head of President Obama to act before they do.
It just seems that in this case talk is cheap, as if filing a bill is something not in their authority.
I agree with you that there is nothing magical about state & local government.... other than you also have the ability to "vote with your feet" and move to another state or local government if you think they are being too oppressive (like many blacks did in the 1930's-1950's by moving to Chicago & Detroit from the deep south of Mississippi & Alabama) or if you think the tax structure is too out of whack (like many companies are now doing by moving from California to Texas).
I think that counts for something very important, where you can flee tyranny and that governments can be forced into competing for citizens in a way that can cull out the bad governments... bad in the sense that those governments citizens no longer want nor can afford are forced to downsize or reform. The problem with a monolithic federal government that does everything is that you have no place to flee. It is even worse if some sort of world government forms, where the only way to flee is simply death.
Mind you, there is some strength of having a federal government that can act as a curb on abuses of state & local governments, having somebody step in and say "no, you don't do that". Some things like pollution controls (especially when that pollution crosses state lines) and other problems of the tragedy of the commons may be better done on the federal level. The question is how much is too much for the federal government and how do you strip abuses away from a federal authority? The trend at the moment is an aggregation of authority into just a select few, arguably even turning the U.S. Presidency into a dictator... and you think that is a good thing?
That's because the House budgets all included the elimination of the national healthcare mandate: that wasn't a legitimate budget, that was their way of claiming they were just looking for compromise.
Get over the "national healthcare mandate". The Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is hardly what you think it is, but rather a huge corporate welfare program for big insurance companies to be heavily subsidized (all at taxpayer expense) in an attempt to shove additional programs at some targeted voter blocks. It takes the worst aspects of the National Health Service from the UK and combines them with raw kickbacks, costing everybody much more money, and only makes the top managers and board of directors of a few select politically connected insurance companies into billionaires.
Do you really think it is better to concentrate yet more money, especially through legislation, into the hands of political elite as a deliberate act? Yeah, that is real progressive.
You also realize that NZ is protected under the ANZUS treaty. Basically if New Zealand was to be seriously threatened by an invasion from another country, the whole bloody U.S. Marine Corps would be dropping onto whatever offensive was actually taking place (along with the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces).
Yes, I accept your thanks on behalf of my countrymen.
I don't mind the arrangement either, but don't go pretending that 7k people are sufficient for a proper defense by a determined enemy who wants to kick you off of those islands. There are countries who would not hesitate to invade and occupy NZ either if they thought they could get away with it, but realizing that the USA is ready to whoop ass if they try keeps them from getting stupid.
A country which does one better is Costa Rica, who decided to disband their entire military. They have a national police force, but you don't go invading other countries with just cops. Then again that country sort of enjoys the same general protection of America as well, even though it does help their economy substantially to not worry about such things like defense appropriations.
Sure, all it takes is a bunch of warp drive fields that can locally modify the universal gravitational constant, cancel inertia, and redirect those missiles back to their point of origin. Geordi LaForge does it all of the time to help prevent violations of various interstellar treaties or major plot points that are otherwise unsolvable.
Well, that sucks for the American companies. Not so much for non-American companies.
Yes, that is sort of the problem for calling rocket technology a munition. That has been something the ESA (and several European-based manufacturers in addition to the space agency) brag about when they try to land contracts with non-US customers.
Fortunately there is currently enough domestic demand to keep the major American companies (Lockheed-Martin, ATK, Boeing) busy doing at least government contracts that they haven't cared too much. That is also why it was more than a decade from the launch last month of the SES-8 satellite to the previous commercial satellite launched from America. This law ultimately does put American companies at a huge disadvantage and is real pointless as well since the rocket equation isn't exactly a national secret (or for that matter even something invented by an American).
It is about time the provision of this law no longer apply to rocket technology. A certain previous presidential administration gave away the store to the only country that really mattered, which is China.
It WAS ecconomicaly feasible...as long as they could use hydrogen to give buoyancy. Once they woke up to the fact that hydrogen was a bit too flamable, the much rarer (and more expensive) helium alternative made airships impractical. Oh the humanity!
Hydrogen as a lifting gas is not that dangerous, and the safety of Helium is far too overrated as well. Gasoline in an automobile is far more dangerous than Hydrogen, noting also that one of the problems with the Hindenberg is that its skin was essentially made out of a type of rocket propellant and as much of the cause of the disaster (IMHO more likely) than the hydrogen gas itself. The engineers of the dirigibles knew very well how flammable Hydrogen was, and it should be pointed out that the whole accident with the Hindenberg happened not at 10k feet over the Atlantic but just as it was coming in for a landing and debarkation.
What makes Hydrogen so dangerous is when you mix it with Oxygen. Doing that is what constitutes a bomb, but that is not what happened with the Hindenberg where all that really happened is that the Hydrogen simply vented into the atmosphere.... and then caught fire after it had already left the ship. Hydrogen inside of a sealed container is inert and non-flammable, and will certainly not self-combust.
Even assuming that the lifting gasses for these airships were completely free, the economics of airship transportation on a widespread basis simply aren't justified.
I think the government space program has had an overall fatality rate of something not quite 10%. It's reasonable considering just what they've been doing, but even if commercial space flight is 10 X more safe than the program NASA developed, that's still going to be some guaranteed casualties for any widely implemented program. It's certainly nothing you would tolerate coming from an air liner. Anyone going up is going to have to be acknowledging the not-utterly-unlikely possibility of their death
The actual number of people who have died as a direct result of being in a spacecraft which malfunctioned or somehow caused the death of the occupant is a fair bit lower than you are suggesting. See also:
Of the total number just more than 500 people who have been in space, 22 people have died. While certainly worse than what you would expect for air transportation, it is not a figure to simply pull out of your behind. It is important to note that these are also pioneers with this form of transportation, where at least for the early travellers they literally had no idea what to expect when they even got into space and the designers of these vehicles really didn't know what to anticipate either.
When compared to the deaths of early aviators and even the deaths of passengers in aviation for the first 50 years of air travel, this is dong pretty damn well and has a surprisingly low casualty rate all things considered.
Ahh, in true AC style, you get pretty much everything wrong...
ESA launches their satellites from Kourou, in French Guiana, South America.
Which is also politically and culturally a part of France itself. People in French Guiana vote in all national elections. Essentially think of it more like the relationship that Hawaii has with America and you get a pretty good idea what the relationship is between French Guiana and the rest of France. It is even considered a part of the European Union.
Yeah, that is some backward 3rd world nation, unless you think France is that backward nation itself.
The loss of the Hindenberg did not stop airship travel. It was the technology itself that basically sucked wind and was far too costly to continue any further investment. While for a time there was some huge concern about the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas, even that I find as a side argument to the much larger problems that come from any lighter than air vehicles.
The U.S. Navy had several air ships as commissioned ships and made some serious attempts to make them useful including an attempt to turn them into aircraft carriers in the sky or to use them for lifting large numbers of bombs over a target. Unfortunately they are extremely slow, hard to handle on the ground when they land, and are just plain costly to operate needing hundreds of people just to load & unload the vehicle. Far more people than are needed even today for a container ship and certainly more than are needed to unload a 747 or A380 today.
It was the large aircraft that was the final nail in the coffin of airships, in terms of widespread usage. They still have a niche role for wealthy tourists who want to do something different, for television aerial shots (especially at sports arenas), and for some advertising applications. Airships definitely can't compete against other forms of transportation for general distribution of bulk goods or even passenger travel that is anything more than an exotic alternative which is the draw all by itself.
Part of that is due to its earlier history when it was directly under the Secretary of Transportation, but instead it is now a part of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Google isn't free and does cost high bandwidth users. I think that is where the $10k annual fee mentioned in the GP comes from (for that specific application). Google slows down the serving of images coming from the same website and does other games if you aren't paying for it. Some customers are cheap and expect freebies all of the time, but you should tell prospective customers that there is no free lunch. Serving images costs at least bandwidth even if the images themselves are free. Comparing what it costs a serious data user to some hobby website is not even a valid comparison as Google does serve up images for free to low bandwidth usages, but beware that your website may get cut off if you have a slashdot effect or something similar.
Admittedly the issue is what commercial model can you use in order to freely serve up to date map images for OSM? What you need to sell a customer in this case is a custom rendering solution to the open map data in a way that you currently can't get from Google. There is additional data already above and beyond anything found on Google Maps, and you need to emphasize that anything added to the database won't be captured and resold shutting the customer out either (such as what happened to Grace Note with CDDB that went commercial and "stole" thousands of volunteer hours in a commercial endeavor). This is a hard sell though because Google Maps does have a bunch of nice add on features too.
Or if anyone knows of any good providers of Open Steet map data please mention 'em!
It is the rendering of the maps that is the big deal, not the data provider. There are some open source map providers who take the Open Street Map data and offers it to the world under CC and related licenses, but it may not be sufficient for your needs. If your application is a bandwidth hog you should try to offer to host that data service for your users/clients anyway just in the spirit of paying for what you use instead of living off of the supposed charity of Google (where they instead sell your client's data for purposes like to the NSA for tracking purposes.... and you really want that?) If you take that data and re-render it as maps for your own purposes, you can sell those maps or give it away as a public service as you see fit... breaking the stranglehold from Google.
I'm also confused as to why a 32GB server must cost $800/month. You can easily buy a server for $800 (pay just for electricity), stick it in a closet, and then worry just about bandwidth costs. That isn't much data (at the moment) when TB hard drives are starting to be common. I guess upgrade as necessary for your application, and if you are paying Google $10k-$20k per year it must be a pretty hefty application. If you can't hire an intern or devote one of your developers part-time to this task to undercut the cost to Google, perhaps you need to stick with your current arrangement. I am saying that a hobbyist could certainly get a small scale operation or proof of concept for relatively cheap and certainly wouldn't cost what you are suggesting here.
Running for the presidency is a full time job now, and it really does take at least eight years of running to be successful. If anything, Barack Obama should be congratulated for showing it doesn't need to take that long, but most other successful campaigns easily took that long or longer including a failed bid earlier. To look at two examples, just look at Ronald Reagan (who lost the nomination in 1976 as a sort of warm up to his 1980 campaign) and George W. Bush (who was arguably running for President at the same time he was running as Governor of Texas). Even Bill Clinton took far longer than four years before he became President. Richard Nixon took almost 30 years to become President from when he started his campaign (including eight years serving as VP). Jimmy Carter pretty much started his campaign right when the Watergate scandals were going on.
It doesn't surprise me to see Chris Christie trying to follow that and get his foot in the door, as if his presence at the last Republican National Convention wasn't enough to show that he wanted to be a major contender. If somebody doesn't already have their campaign already well financed and organized right now, there is no way they will become President in 2016. That isn't to say that people like Mr. Christie will be safe, and if anything it is stuff like this bridge that will cause campaigns to implode.
I agree that Ted Cruz should be seen as ineligible for the Presidency.... and just as much as Arnold Schwarzenegger should be seen as ineligible for the same reasons.
I hope it makes people in the so-called Tea Party get angry, and good for them when they have this crammed down their throat.
And, a powerful private sector with highly centralized wealth will always be able to corrupt and control the public sector
Which is where your argument breaks down. Laws can and should be enacted to keep any organization from threatening your liberty, and small organizations in general work best so no single person or group can impose their views upon anybody else. While Adam Smith wrote much about how capitalism is a good thing and how it can help solve a whole bunch of societies problems, he also wrote extensively about the evils of monopolies too.
Monopolies are just as bad for society as incompetent and out of control governments. Both need to be scaled down and made manageable so ordinary people can fight back against them. If that was the point of your rant, I agree.
I agree with you on this sentiment. The Manhattan Project and arguably the Apollo missions were situations where the contractors involved simply didn't even know what was needed in order to get those respective projects completed. But let's be serious on this point: Do we really not understand the scope and task involved needed to get a spacecraft launched into orbit? Why is a cost-plus contract still being used in rocket development for orbital spacecraft like the SLS? Is the scope of knowledge needed to build telescopes really not well defined and understood for something like the James Webb Telescope?
As for your fusion plant example, I do know of some private companies who are doing fusion research on a for profit basis, but in those cases it is a speculative investment that people making such an investment know it very likely won't work out but are hoping it does. Bankruptcy is the way to clear out those approaches which fail to deliver and ensures that those bureaucracies disappear when that happens. There is no similar mechanism if a government bureaucracy fails as the solution is to simply pour more money into that organization hoping that in spite of repeatedly bad results something will change.
You are wrong on so many things with this post that all I can say is that you are just misinformed as to what charter schools really are. Some are certainly for-profit, and others run by non-profit foundations. Some do cherry pick their students, but a great many don't. More over, you simply miss the point of charter schools.
The students who are struggling are the ones who need the best resources/teaching/etc. If charter schools are as great as they are made out to be - they should be VOLUNTEERING to take students who are struggling academically, not shunning them like lepers.
I not only think this should be the case, but I know of charter schools which are set up explicitly to take on struggling students. My kids are attending just such a school even though they aren't attending for that reason. It is also a really good school that has graduated students with college degrees if those students are willing to put in the work.
Don't paint charter schools with a common brush thinking just because you've seen one such school that all of them are alike. There is far more diversity among charter schools than what you even see with public schools.... which even there you can't say all schools are alike with the same policies and standards even in the same state.
The big thing about how your state is implementing the charter school system is to ask this general question: Can you get a group of concerned parents together, hire some teachers as a group, and form a charter school or are the steps to forming that school too restrictive? What kinds of other parental involvement is required by the state chartering laws in terms of the operation of that school? If you can't answer these questions, you don't really understand charter schools in your state and it is entirely possible that your state has a skewed system of charter schools that isn't effective in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing about the whole debate is that the health care industry really is in dire need of reform in terms of what government oversight and regulations exist within the industry, and a fundamental rethinking about how healthcare ought to be provided. That debate never happened.
In fact, the real problem with the AHA is that damn little actual debate over the substance of the legislation even happened at all. The utter BS that "you'll find out what is in it when you pass it" is why we got what we got. That isn't even a compromise. I don't even agree with you that the reason it is in the current state is a result of any kind of legislative negotiation.
I even question the need for "universal coverage", but that is a separate debate. Throwing money into a corrupt system is not a solution but a way to make that corrupt system even more corrupt.
The Republicans are already called "racists" any time they oppose or criticise Obama (just tune-in ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS,MSNBC etc) so there would be a massive PR hit for even filing charges against the nation's first black president.
Please re-read the post. I know it would be stupid to file impeachment charges against Obama himself, even if things like Benghazi could be shown as iron clad proof that he deliberately ordered the death of a U.S. ambassador (aka actual 1st degree murder charges if any of that is true not to mention flat out treason). I won't repost what else I've said on this subject, but Barack Obama himself is indeed untouchable and can do pretty much anything he wants and Congress will let him. Ignore the guy at the top and the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Other members of the Obama administration don't have the same level of protection though, particularly as their role is to take the bullets (political or otherwise) aimed at the President. It doesn't even matter if they were ordered to perjure themselves, they have to take the fall. They most certainly can be impeached, particularly if their impeachment will make it so Obama is seen as the good guy and these folks making these false statements are shown as rogue individuals not following the law. It will hardly be the first ones to get kicked out either.
If a junior undersecretary or even Forest Service supervisor was to do something stupid, they most certainly can be impeached and removed from office by Congress and such action would likely be done with bipartisan support (depending on how stupid that action might be). Obviously these members of congress don't mind demanding that this particular presidential assistant is fired and thinks that effectively they have a case to show he is incompetent to perform his job duties. I'm just saying to close that circle and make a realistic attempt at doing the job themselves.
If anything, Hillary Clinton got out of the Obama Administration just in time to avoid permanently ruining her potential future career. It will be interesting to see if the Democratic Party will consider her to be damaged goods in 2016 or if she has a real shot at getting the Democratic nomination.
Boldly lying to Congress is usually a good way to get bipartisan support.... to get you slapped in some official manner. There is also the ability to "censure" somebody in the federal government or to offer a "contempt of Congress" resolution as well. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Your statement would be correct if it wasn't for the fact that there were Democrats who signed this letter and that people of both parties are trying to run for cover to get on the popular side of this issue (which also cuts across both parties except for diehard fanatics). Besides, submitting a bill for consideration doesn't require the support of half of the members of any chamber, it only needs a single member of congress to submit the legislation for consideration... and the other co-signers of the letter could simply be co-signers of the legislation instead. If they submitted the legislation and it was held up in committee.... that is something they could similarly use to take back to their constituents and say "I did everything I could to remove this asshat, but the logjam in Washington kept me from getting it done."
I'm saying that the entire notion of begging the President to fire the guy when you have this kind of authority seems stupid and even ignorant on the part of these Congressmen. Sending a letter to the President that you have already submitted such legislation and would like him to preempt such action before it gets to the full House for consideration is IMHO a much stronger message. It is almost as if these guys simply don't want to act at all.
look man,
it's not an AI in the story. its a magical ghost spirit.
why the fuck ask AI specialists about it even? and what the fuck, not that far off? sure it is. it's very far off.
I would have to agree. Those who think a proper artificial intelligence is "just around the corner" have been promising this for the past forty years and longer. I've seen computer clock speeds improve over a million times since that has been said, and memory storage devices improve even more in terms of storage size. Yet in spite of all that, they still don't have a clue as to what intelligence actually is (genuine sentience), much less being able to replicate the concept.
There are some useful tools which mimic intelligence, and perhaps I might even agree that a collection of such tools when combined might be useful as an operating system interface. But getting something that doesn't hit the "uncanny valley" where you know in your gut that something is wrong is going to take millennia of computer scientists to figure out, if it ever will be "solved".
My own bet is that it will never be solved and remain just as elusive a thousand years from now. There will also be in a thousand years more shills who are like these "AI researchers" who will be promising it is "just around the corner" to justify why their research budget needs an extra million dollars.
Congress has the authority to remove people from positions in the federal government on their own. Why don't they use it?
And no, it doesn't need to be an impeachment of the President, it can be any officer or person holding a position of trust in the U.S. government. Dozens of impeachment bills are presented every year in Congress, where they seldom get any sort of attention even when they pass as it is usually for obscure offices or minor judges. if these congressmen were serious, they would just start the process and hold that over the head of President Obama to act before they do.
It just seems that in this case talk is cheap, as if filing a bill is something not in their authority.
Are you talking about a game whose launch was so horrible that the CEO was fired by the board of directors?
The graphics are cool in SC 2013, but as the pinnacle of modern sandbox games it is not. Perhaps the game you were thinking of is Minecraft?
I agree with you that there is nothing magical about state & local government.... other than you also have the ability to "vote with your feet" and move to another state or local government if you think they are being too oppressive (like many blacks did in the 1930's-1950's by moving to Chicago & Detroit from the deep south of Mississippi & Alabama) or if you think the tax structure is too out of whack (like many companies are now doing by moving from California to Texas).
I think that counts for something very important, where you can flee tyranny and that governments can be forced into competing for citizens in a way that can cull out the bad governments... bad in the sense that those governments citizens no longer want nor can afford are forced to downsize or reform. The problem with a monolithic federal government that does everything is that you have no place to flee. It is even worse if some sort of world government forms, where the only way to flee is simply death.
Mind you, there is some strength of having a federal government that can act as a curb on abuses of state & local governments, having somebody step in and say "no, you don't do that". Some things like pollution controls (especially when that pollution crosses state lines) and other problems of the tragedy of the commons may be better done on the federal level. The question is how much is too much for the federal government and how do you strip abuses away from a federal authority? The trend at the moment is an aggregation of authority into just a select few, arguably even turning the U.S. Presidency into a dictator... and you think that is a good thing?
That's because the House budgets all included the elimination of the national healthcare mandate: that wasn't a legitimate budget, that was their way of claiming they were just looking for compromise.
Get over the "national healthcare mandate". The Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is hardly what you think it is, but rather a huge corporate welfare program for big insurance companies to be heavily subsidized (all at taxpayer expense) in an attempt to shove additional programs at some targeted voter blocks. It takes the worst aspects of the National Health Service from the UK and combines them with raw kickbacks, costing everybody much more money, and only makes the top managers and board of directors of a few select politically connected insurance companies into billionaires.
Do you really think it is better to concentrate yet more money, especially through legislation, into the hands of political elite as a deliberate act? Yeah, that is real progressive.
You also realize that NZ is protected under the ANZUS treaty. Basically if New Zealand was to be seriously threatened by an invasion from another country, the whole bloody U.S. Marine Corps would be dropping onto whatever offensive was actually taking place (along with the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces).
Yes, I accept your thanks on behalf of my countrymen.
I don't mind the arrangement either, but don't go pretending that 7k people are sufficient for a proper defense by a determined enemy who wants to kick you off of those islands. There are countries who would not hesitate to invade and occupy NZ either if they thought they could get away with it, but realizing that the USA is ready to whoop ass if they try keeps them from getting stupid.
A country which does one better is Costa Rica, who decided to disband their entire military. They have a national police force, but you don't go invading other countries with just cops. Then again that country sort of enjoys the same general protection of America as well, even though it does help their economy substantially to not worry about such things like defense appropriations.
Sure, all it takes is a bunch of warp drive fields that can locally modify the universal gravitational constant, cancel inertia, and redirect those missiles back to their point of origin. Geordi LaForge does it all of the time to help prevent violations of various interstellar treaties or major plot points that are otherwise unsolvable.
Well, that sucks for the American companies. Not so much for non-American companies.
Yes, that is sort of the problem for calling rocket technology a munition. That has been something the ESA (and several European-based manufacturers in addition to the space agency) brag about when they try to land contracts with non-US customers.
Fortunately there is currently enough domestic demand to keep the major American companies (Lockheed-Martin, ATK, Boeing) busy doing at least government contracts that they haven't cared too much. That is also why it was more than a decade from the launch last month of the SES-8 satellite to the previous commercial satellite launched from America. This law ultimately does put American companies at a huge disadvantage and is real pointless as well since the rocket equation isn't exactly a national secret (or for that matter even something invented by an American).
It is about time the provision of this law no longer apply to rocket technology. A certain previous presidential administration gave away the store to the only country that really mattered, which is China.
White Knight can't take off from a ship.
Doesn't stop it taking off from Columbia or Nicaragua etc
One word:
ITAR
It WAS ecconomicaly feasible...as long as they could use hydrogen to give buoyancy. Once they woke up to the fact that hydrogen was a bit too flamable, the much rarer (and more expensive) helium alternative made airships impractical. Oh the humanity!
Hydrogen as a lifting gas is not that dangerous, and the safety of Helium is far too overrated as well. Gasoline in an automobile is far more dangerous than Hydrogen, noting also that one of the problems with the Hindenberg is that its skin was essentially made out of a type of rocket propellant and as much of the cause of the disaster (IMHO more likely) than the hydrogen gas itself. The engineers of the dirigibles knew very well how flammable Hydrogen was, and it should be pointed out that the whole accident with the Hindenberg happened not at 10k feet over the Atlantic but just as it was coming in for a landing and debarkation.
What makes Hydrogen so dangerous is when you mix it with Oxygen. Doing that is what constitutes a bomb, but that is not what happened with the Hindenberg where all that really happened is that the Hydrogen simply vented into the atmosphere.... and then caught fire after it had already left the ship. Hydrogen inside of a sealed container is inert and non-flammable, and will certainly not self-combust.
Even assuming that the lifting gasses for these airships were completely free, the economics of airship transportation on a widespread basis simply aren't justified.
I think the government space program has had an overall fatality rate of something not quite 10%. It's reasonable considering just what they've been doing, but even if commercial space flight is 10 X more safe than the program NASA developed, that's still going to be some guaranteed casualties for any widely implemented program. It's certainly nothing you would tolerate coming from an air liner. Anyone going up is going to have to be acknowledging the not-utterly-unlikely possibility of their death
The actual number of people who have died as a direct result of being in a spacecraft which malfunctioned or somehow caused the death of the occupant is a fair bit lower than you are suggesting. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Of the total number just more than 500 people who have been in space, 22 people have died. While certainly worse than what you would expect for air transportation, it is not a figure to simply pull out of your behind. It is important to note that these are also pioneers with this form of transportation, where at least for the early travellers they literally had no idea what to expect when they even got into space and the designers of these vehicles really didn't know what to anticipate either.
When compared to the deaths of early aviators and even the deaths of passengers in aviation for the first 50 years of air travel, this is dong pretty damn well and has a surprisingly low casualty rate all things considered.
Ahh, in true AC style, you get pretty much everything wrong...
ESA launches their satellites from Kourou, in French Guiana, South America.
Which is also politically and culturally a part of France itself. People in French Guiana vote in all national elections. Essentially think of it more like the relationship that Hawaii has with America and you get a pretty good idea what the relationship is between French Guiana and the rest of France. It is even considered a part of the European Union.
Yeah, that is some backward 3rd world nation, unless you think France is that backward nation itself.
The loss of the Hindenberg did not stop airship travel. It was the technology itself that basically sucked wind and was far too costly to continue any further investment. While for a time there was some huge concern about the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas, even that I find as a side argument to the much larger problems that come from any lighter than air vehicles.
The U.S. Navy had several air ships as commissioned ships and made some serious attempts to make them useful including an attempt to turn them into aircraft carriers in the sky or to use them for lifting large numbers of bombs over a target. Unfortunately they are extremely slow, hard to handle on the ground when they land, and are just plain costly to operate needing hundreds of people just to load & unload the vehicle. Far more people than are needed even today for a container ship and certainly more than are needed to unload a 747 or A380 today.
It was the large aircraft that was the final nail in the coffin of airships, in terms of widespread usage. They still have a niche role for wealthy tourists who want to do something different, for television aerial shots (especially at sports arenas), and for some advertising applications. Airships definitely can't compete against other forms of transportation for general distribution of bulk goods or even passenger travel that is anything more than an exotic alternative which is the draw all by itself.
AST is "Administrator for Space Transportation".
Part of that is due to its earlier history when it was directly under the Secretary of Transportation, but instead it is now a part of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Google isn't free and does cost high bandwidth users. I think that is where the $10k annual fee mentioned in the GP comes from (for that specific application). Google slows down the serving of images coming from the same website and does other games if you aren't paying for it. Some customers are cheap and expect freebies all of the time, but you should tell prospective customers that there is no free lunch. Serving images costs at least bandwidth even if the images themselves are free. Comparing what it costs a serious data user to some hobby website is not even a valid comparison as Google does serve up images for free to low bandwidth usages, but beware that your website may get cut off if you have a slashdot effect or something similar.
Admittedly the issue is what commercial model can you use in order to freely serve up to date map images for OSM? What you need to sell a customer in this case is a custom rendering solution to the open map data in a way that you currently can't get from Google. There is additional data already above and beyond anything found on Google Maps, and you need to emphasize that anything added to the database won't be captured and resold shutting the customer out either (such as what happened to Grace Note with CDDB that went commercial and "stole" thousands of volunteer hours in a commercial endeavor). This is a hard sell though because Google Maps does have a bunch of nice add on features too.
Or if anyone knows of any good providers of Open Steet map data please mention 'em!
It is the rendering of the maps that is the big deal, not the data provider. There are some open source map providers who take the Open Street Map data and offers it to the world under CC and related licenses, but it may not be sufficient for your needs. If your application is a bandwidth hog you should try to offer to host that data service for your users/clients anyway just in the spirit of paying for what you use instead of living off of the supposed charity of Google (where they instead sell your client's data for purposes like to the NSA for tracking purposes.... and you really want that?) If you take that data and re-render it as maps for your own purposes, you can sell those maps or give it away as a public service as you see fit... breaking the stranglehold from Google.
I'm also confused as to why a 32GB server must cost $800/month. You can easily buy a server for $800 (pay just for electricity), stick it in a closet, and then worry just about bandwidth costs. That isn't much data (at the moment) when TB hard drives are starting to be common. I guess upgrade as necessary for your application, and if you are paying Google $10k-$20k per year it must be a pretty hefty application. If you can't hire an intern or devote one of your developers part-time to this task to undercut the cost to Google, perhaps you need to stick with your current arrangement. I am saying that a hobbyist could certainly get a small scale operation or proof of concept for relatively cheap and certainly wouldn't cost what you are suggesting here.
Running for the presidency is a full time job now, and it really does take at least eight years of running to be successful. If anything, Barack Obama should be congratulated for showing it doesn't need to take that long, but most other successful campaigns easily took that long or longer including a failed bid earlier. To look at two examples, just look at Ronald Reagan (who lost the nomination in 1976 as a sort of warm up to his 1980 campaign) and George W. Bush (who was arguably running for President at the same time he was running as Governor of Texas). Even Bill Clinton took far longer than four years before he became President. Richard Nixon took almost 30 years to become President from when he started his campaign (including eight years serving as VP). Jimmy Carter pretty much started his campaign right when the Watergate scandals were going on.
It doesn't surprise me to see Chris Christie trying to follow that and get his foot in the door, as if his presence at the last Republican National Convention wasn't enough to show that he wanted to be a major contender. If somebody doesn't already have their campaign already well financed and organized right now, there is no way they will become President in 2016. That isn't to say that people like Mr. Christie will be safe, and if anything it is stuff like this bridge that will cause campaigns to implode.
I agree that Ted Cruz should be seen as ineligible for the Presidency.... and just as much as Arnold Schwarzenegger should be seen as ineligible for the same reasons.
I hope it makes people in the so-called Tea Party get angry, and good for them when they have this crammed down their throat.
And, a powerful private sector with highly centralized wealth will always be able to corrupt and control the public sector
Which is where your argument breaks down. Laws can and should be enacted to keep any organization from threatening your liberty, and small organizations in general work best so no single person or group can impose their views upon anybody else. While Adam Smith wrote much about how capitalism is a good thing and how it can help solve a whole bunch of societies problems, he also wrote extensively about the evils of monopolies too.
Monopolies are just as bad for society as incompetent and out of control governments. Both need to be scaled down and made manageable so ordinary people can fight back against them. If that was the point of your rant, I agree.
I agree with you on this sentiment. The Manhattan Project and arguably the Apollo missions were situations where the contractors involved simply didn't even know what was needed in order to get those respective projects completed. But let's be serious on this point: Do we really not understand the scope and task involved needed to get a spacecraft launched into orbit? Why is a cost-plus contract still being used in rocket development for orbital spacecraft like the SLS? Is the scope of knowledge needed to build telescopes really not well defined and understood for something like the James Webb Telescope?
As for your fusion plant example, I do know of some private companies who are doing fusion research on a for profit basis, but in those cases it is a speculative investment that people making such an investment know it very likely won't work out but are hoping it does. Bankruptcy is the way to clear out those approaches which fail to deliver and ensures that those bureaucracies disappear when that happens. There is no similar mechanism if a government bureaucracy fails as the solution is to simply pour more money into that organization hoping that in spite of repeatedly bad results something will change.
You are wrong on so many things with this post that all I can say is that you are just misinformed as to what charter schools really are. Some are certainly for-profit, and others run by non-profit foundations. Some do cherry pick their students, but a great many don't. More over, you simply miss the point of charter schools.
The students who are struggling are the ones who need the best resources/teaching/etc. If charter schools are as great as they are made out to be - they should be VOLUNTEERING to take students who are struggling academically, not shunning them like lepers.
I not only think this should be the case, but I know of charter schools which are set up explicitly to take on struggling students. My kids are attending just such a school even though they aren't attending for that reason. It is also a really good school that has graduated students with college degrees if those students are willing to put in the work.
Don't paint charter schools with a common brush thinking just because you've seen one such school that all of them are alike. There is far more diversity among charter schools than what you even see with public schools.... which even there you can't say all schools are alike with the same policies and standards even in the same state.
The big thing about how your state is implementing the charter school system is to ask this general question: Can you get a group of concerned parents together, hire some teachers as a group, and form a charter school or are the steps to forming that school too restrictive? What kinds of other parental involvement is required by the state chartering laws in terms of the operation of that school? If you can't answer these questions, you don't really understand charter schools in your state and it is entirely possible that your state has a skewed system of charter schools that isn't effective in the first place.