Yeah, the no-fly bit didn't take long to go deep into cliche territory. On the other hand, shitty laws don't get enough attention to repeal until they've been throughly used and abused, if only in jest.
It all boils down to too much government spendings, especially on welfare, to raise the kids of those who just stay at home, making babies and taking drugs
Idiot. The vast majority of Federal spending goes to the DoD, Medicare, and Social Security. Frankly, the major constituents for all of these are core Republican voters. The drugs are mostly for blood pressure, gas, and diabetes. So sure, screw 'em.
If the government doesn't have to pay for all these, the tax rate wouldn't be so damn high, and people wouldn't have to renounce their citizenships
They don't have to do anything, kid. 35% percent - before deductions and shelters - is high? Pffft! Anybody in Eduardo's position who's actually paying 35% is using form 1040EZ to do their taxes.
Fixed that for you. What would have been really cool is instead of his dad shipping Eduardo to Miami for safeties sake, the boy got his education old school, getting kidnapped for ransom and/or knifed outside a club in Sao Paulo. But no, he got a respite while raking in some unearned income in Brazil from the safety of FL. Next, he won the lottery when one of his few friends at Harvard needed some start up money for a social networking idea.
Now, he flips the bird to the country that gave him the safety, and an environment to make a major move up the SE ladder, because it's all his HIS! Well, screw 'em, and put 'em on a no-fly list as an ingrate of the First Degree, Order of the Asshole.
Frankly, we're not losing much when the likes of him take off: one of many sociopathic money grubbers constantly looking to game the financial system (privatize the profits, socialize the loses), and whose investments know no border no matter where they've bought a condo. If he participates in fucking the banks in Singapore like his kind did in the US, he'll end up in gaol faster than he can whine "class warfare".
The last science fiction story I'd read with automated driving as a significant story element was the second book from Kim Stanley Robinson's California Trilogy, The Gold Coast, where cars powered inductively via cables buried in the roadways usually ran on autopilot once one was onto major streets or an expressway. But, chaos creeps into all systems, man-made or not, and a couple cruising effortlessly down a freeway in dense - but high speed - traffic could suddenly find themselves awaiting the jaws of life to extract them from the resulting tangle of aluminum, glass, and plastic.
However, I would expect the crash rate to go down significantly, once almost everyone was on the same system. During the transition, the rate would likely go up a bit, as a subset of drivers pitted their increasingly irrelevant subconscious driving psychology against the software in other vehicles.
As others have pointed out, the need for auto insurance wouldn't go away, physical insults against a vehicle's appearance and performance coming from a number of chaotic elements other than getting t-boned at an intersection. I'm sure claims would drop dramatically, but remain far from zero.
Ooow, my first troll rating in like... forever. I've met Stallman, appreciate his contributions to the arts and sciences, and while I believe I hit the nail on the head, I guess the truth still hurts.
Of course Stallman is hypertensive, the brother has been fat and from his appearance pretty sedentary his entire adult life. At 59, his arteries are probably building up as much crap as my water heater. If this isn't a come-to-Jesus moment for a lifestyle change, blowing out his kidneys or a heart attack soon will be.
Thanks to the CC-licensing, this'll probably become a major go-to for wikipedia editors looking for additional source material... particularly images and graphics.
In any case, the Fast Company article referenced by @lanner makes it pretty clear why McAfee cleared out for Belize: he's liable to lose a wrongful death lawsuit in Maricopa County Civil Court (search on case# CV2008-009723) related to the half-assed sky trike tour company he let a 22 y.o. nephew run.
John McAfee’s problems on Molokai had nothing to do with exposing drug use in the Molokai Times (which he financed), and everything to do with making little effort to fit into the small island community. On the one hand, he donated money to community groups. But, his name became mud when he threw food at a market clerk to get his attention.
There are two "supermarkets" on all of Molokai, they're next door to each other, and the whole island shops at 'em. Get impatient and pop one clerk in the head with a snack food, and by noon the next day everyone in your little world knows you're an asshole. Subsequently, while cashing out of Molokai, McAfee tried to pump up the price for an undeveloped property with a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal, and became local public enemy #1. In essence, John was “run off the island” one stink-eye at a time.
However, the Maui County PD never busted down his door for not making the “right” community contributions. Different places, different ways.
>> He doesn't owe anyone a fucking thing, least of all you and your corrupt "society." Our Founding Fathers would shake their head in disgust at your idea.
I guess Ben Franklin was just on a drunk when writing "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
The fusion research give back was a sop to Sen. Brown of MA. Overall, this bill is a step back... did @zrbyte read the article?
I'm fine with funding fusion, but the fact is that we haven't been and aren't anywhere near payoff on fusion research. While this Administration has tried to focus resources on technologies with near-term benefits towards supplementing and eventually substituting our energy supplies with cleaner sources, this Congress is sticking with their usual pork buddies: oil, coal, and uranium. That they threw a bone to Scott Brown was an afterthought, the cost of doing business for when they get to their real priorities: cutting social insurance and 1%er taxes.
The overall DOE budget is cut $365 million below the 2012 budget, $1.76 billion below the Administration request. To pay for this: - Fusion Energy Sciences program: +$72.6 million - Various domestic fusion research programs: +$48.3 million... mostly to keep Alcator C-Mod open. - ITER contribution: +$73 million... a drop in the bucket for the billions ITER will require from the US over 10 years.
They're cutting from this: - DOE's Basic Energy Sciences: -$36.9 million, $142.5 million below Administration request, mostly by canceling or delaying construction projects. - Biological and Environmental Research: -$69.8 million, $83.4 million below request. - Advanced Research Projects Agency: -$75 million, $75 million below request.
Other winners: - Fossil energy research: +$207 million - Fission energy research: +$765 million
There was a short story published in Analog Magazine years back dealing with something much like this situation. The AI available to advise politicians ran models that suggested widespread suicides, or mass conversions to Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. Instead, people began to appreciate their current lives more, and not stress so much, with the realization that their consciousness didn't die. I also recall that abortions also dropped radically... never thought through the idea that the author might have been a subtle right-to-lifer.
The parent comment you're quoting is only half right, for the political will. To have meaningful impact, any of the geoengineering concepts be of massive scale, with costs that guarantee that none will ever move out of the pilot project phase.
The bigger problem with GE (there's a pun there, but I'm too lazy to reach for it) would be the unintended ecological (and as a result, economic) consequences. Meanwhile, the ecological consequences of reducing greenhouse gas output are very well known, because we've already experienced them. The relative unknowns are all economic, and since we're in no danger of going cold turkey, manageable.
So it was 1982 in an intro CS class at Cal State Northridge, and the prof was telling the class that the career window in the field for graduates was going to be limited, and in about ten years, system engineers, scientists, and MBAs would be using automatic code generators to turn their high level business logic into completed projects. There is a very, very small kernel of truth to that claim, when you look at tools like MATLAB, Mathematica, and uh, Access.
And, I employ these tools, too. But, in the larger picture, it's been 30 years I've been listening to people tell me that I'd have to be looking for a new career pretty soon. Yet somehow, I've avoided getting pushed out into retail sales or health services. Mark Zuckerberg has a blinkered view of a programmer/software engineer's career arc, and only by reason of his estimated net worth is Bloomberg giving his opinion the time of day.
IANAL, but based on what we've seen in major news items over the last couple of years, I'm sure.
When a company goes Chapter 13 (reorg), most existing contracts go out the window: labor, suppliers, customers. Privacy policies not affected unless it had a material effect on the reorg.
When a company goes Chapter 7 (liquidation), all contracts, policies, and representations go out the door. The judge and his/her proxies have unlimited leeway to sell off anything, nailed down or not, to satisfy the creditors.
In the good ol' US of A, a company can bend over backwards to in fact do no evil with the personal data they collect. But, if they go Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the full monty), the court is under no obligation to care. They view marketable data as just another asset to be sold off to satisfy creditors... even Scientology.
Given the current Congress, I think the easiest (but by no means best) first step towards better privacy protection would be some tweaks to Title 11 of the United States Code.
I don't know if TFA is correct, but my experience with several defense contractors is that it is not the case in that sector. The Federal government encourages workplace diversity, and the big contractors I'm familiar with make a point of making it happen. It probably doesn't hurt that these firms usually work 8 to 5, and offer benefits and a degree of schedule flexibility. In 30 years, I've yet to work in a lab that didn't include more than a token number of women (and ethnic minorities of either sex).
For your run-of-the-mill box of air, you're right. The city fathers and landowners have no problem with doing whatever it takes to keep the main industry area fresh and profitable. The hangup with Enterprise (serial number whatever) would have been that the engineering to cantilever the structure without unsightly pillars would have made it a bear to tear down.
Assuming it was run as a hotel/casino, another hassle would have been the lack of windows for most rooms. Even today, there aren't video displays high-rez/natural 3D enough to replace a GD pane of glass. Yes, the Trek franchise has had legs, but as a full-size ship on the Strip (or anywhere other than orbit), a niche cultural icon like Enterprise would quickly get old.
Because school administration attracts the kind of person that isn't employable elsewhere.
That would be an easy answer, but I suspect by-and-large incorrect. In fact, primary and secondary schools (public, in particular) get a lot of attention, and given that they're full of almost everyone's children, are a magnet for moaning a bitching. Issues can and do escalate to lawyers, significant costs, and ruined careers very quickly. Thus, administrators are motivated to CTA in ways that at first blush seem responsive to parents' concerns. We may think this was a bone-headed move, but I'll bet that the district parents don't, and they're the customer.
First off, as a general rule, I don't approve of employers asking to log on to your Facebook account to poke around.
That said, this story provides yet another example of the maxim: "if you wouldn't want to see it on the front page of the local newspaper, don't put it on-line." My employer provides this practical advice to the staff every year.
Y'know, looking at our own gas giants, it seems you don't need a whole lot of heavier elements to create a non-fusioning sphere around a star. Granted, Jupiter, Saturn, et al seem to have a lot of goodies further down the periodic table. But, I'd guess that planetary formation will work with whatever is in the buffet, even if it's just H and He with a salting of impurities.
Does it really matter, in the grander scheme of living culture, if Mr. Bay 'reboots' TNT such that it has little in common with the original concept? No. I thought the original Dark Knight Batman movie wasn't bad, for instance. But, after a while, it just gets a little old when film makers can't even be bothered to dish out enough originality to at least do a mash up of previous concepts (eg. Star Wars). It's merely another example of how when it comes to culture, efficiencies of scale aren't. When there aren't even a handful of film studios anymore (speaking of the US), then there are only a (handful * N) opportunities to make a film.
If there were a couple handfuls of studios, there'd be (2 * handful * N) opportunities, and some of them would be forced to find new material, because all of the obvious sources would have been worked over long ago. Would the budgets be as big? Prolly not, and it wouldn't matter, because we're currently seeing a very inefficient use of capital.
But, if I knew anything, I'd be rich, eh? Pffft! Here, Bay, I'll throw you a freebie: Stranger In A Strange Land where instead of Valentine Michael Smith from Mars, we get Osama Bin Liden from Yemen. He still gets shot in the end, but causes a whole lot more trouble in the meantime.
Regarding the parent's quip for a "libertarian trade embargo", the market is stupid, and would sell the rope used to hang it. The root of the writer's complaint is with how foreign and trade policy is handled in democratically organized nation-states, not the issue-of-the-moment.
If war comes, and the writer wishes to root for Iran, that's his prerogative. But, he's liable to get his ass beat and end up on a number of shit lists, depending on the nature of the flag waving. Just keeping it real.
Theocracy in Iran v. Religious Influences in the US: I think we've found another Nader 2000 voter. He's spot on that the GOP presidential contenders are going out of their way to pander to primary voters. But, even if the current GOP had a lock on every elective office in the US, shitty as that would be, it wouldn't begin to measure up to the degree of clerical control Iran "enjoys".
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Yeah, the no-fly bit didn't take long to go deep into cliche territory. On the other hand, shitty laws don't get enough attention to repeal until they've been throughly used and abused, if only in jest.
It all boils down to too much government spendings, especially on welfare, to raise the kids of those who just stay at home, making babies and taking drugs
Idiot. The vast majority of Federal spending goes to the DoD, Medicare, and Social Security. Frankly, the major constituents for all of these are core Republican voters. The drugs are mostly for blood pressure, gas, and diabetes. So sure, screw 'em.
If the government doesn't have to pay for all these, the tax rate wouldn't be so damn high, and people wouldn't have to renounce their citizenships
They don't have to do anything, kid. 35% percent - before deductions and shelters - is high? Pffft! Anybody in Eduardo's position who's actually paying 35% is using form 1040EZ to do their taxes.
Fixed that for you. What would have been really cool is instead of his dad shipping Eduardo to Miami for safeties sake, the boy got his education old school, getting kidnapped for ransom and/or knifed outside a club in Sao Paulo. But no, he got a respite while raking in some unearned income in Brazil from the safety of FL. Next, he won the lottery when one of his few friends at Harvard needed some start up money for a social networking idea.
Now, he flips the bird to the country that gave him the safety, and an environment to make a major move up the SE ladder, because it's all his HIS! Well, screw 'em, and put 'em on a no-fly list as an ingrate of the First Degree, Order of the Asshole.
Frankly, we're not losing much when the likes of him take off: one of many sociopathic money grubbers constantly looking to game the financial system (privatize the profits, socialize the loses), and whose investments know no border no matter where they've bought a condo. If he participates in fucking the banks in Singapore like his kind did in the US, he'll end up in gaol faster than he can whine "class warfare".
The last science fiction story I'd read with automated driving as a significant story element was the second book from Kim Stanley Robinson's California Trilogy, The Gold Coast, where cars powered inductively via cables buried in the roadways usually ran on autopilot once one was onto major streets or an expressway. But, chaos creeps into all systems, man-made or not, and a couple cruising effortlessly down a freeway in dense - but high speed - traffic could suddenly find themselves awaiting the jaws of life to extract them from the resulting tangle of aluminum, glass, and plastic.
However, I would expect the crash rate to go down significantly, once almost everyone was on the same system. During the transition, the rate would likely go up a bit, as a subset of drivers pitted their increasingly irrelevant subconscious driving psychology against the software in other vehicles.
As others have pointed out, the need for auto insurance wouldn't go away, physical insults against a vehicle's appearance and performance coming from a number of chaotic elements other than getting t-boned at an intersection. I'm sure claims would drop dramatically, but remain far from zero.
Hmm, that *is* a PITA. Well, even if the graphic material can't be borrowed, and the text not cut-n-pasted, at least it can be referenced as a source.
Ooow, my first troll rating in like... forever. I've met Stallman, appreciate his contributions to the arts and sciences, and while I believe I hit the nail on the head, I guess the truth still hurts.
Of course Stallman is hypertensive, the brother has been fat and from his appearance pretty sedentary his entire adult life. At 59, his arteries are probably building up as much crap as my water heater. If this isn't a come-to-Jesus moment for a lifestyle change, blowing out his kidneys or a heart attack soon will be.
Thanks to the CC-licensing, this'll probably become a major go-to for wikipedia editors looking for additional source material... particularly images and graphics.
Nope. A poor straw man in any case. "Too corrupt?" Please. McAfee bolted to get away from a run-of-the-mill wrongful death lawsuit.
In any case, the Fast Company article referenced by @lanner makes it pretty clear why McAfee cleared out for Belize: he's liable to lose a wrongful death lawsuit in Maricopa County Civil Court (search on case# CV2008-009723) related to the half-assed sky trike tour company he let a 22 y.o. nephew run.
John McAfee’s problems on Molokai had nothing to do with exposing drug use in the Molokai Times (which he financed), and everything to do with making little effort to fit into the small island community. On the one hand, he donated money to community groups. But, his name became mud when he threw food at a market clerk to get his attention.
There are two "supermarkets" on all of Molokai, they're next door to each other, and the whole island shops at 'em. Get impatient and pop one clerk in the head with a snack food, and by noon the next day everyone in your little world knows you're an asshole. Subsequently, while cashing out of Molokai, McAfee tried to pump up the price for an undeveloped property with a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal, and became local public enemy #1. In essence, John was “run off the island” one stink-eye at a time.
However, the Maui County PD never busted down his door for not making the “right” community contributions. Different places, different ways.
>> He doesn't owe anyone a fucking thing, least of all you and your corrupt "society." Our Founding Fathers would shake their head in disgust at your idea.
I guess Ben Franklin was just on a drunk when writing "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
The fusion research give back was a sop to Sen. Brown of MA. Overall, this bill is a step back... did @zrbyte read the article?
I'm fine with funding fusion, but the fact is that we haven't been and aren't anywhere near payoff on fusion research. While this Administration has tried to focus resources on technologies with near-term benefits towards supplementing and eventually substituting our energy supplies with cleaner sources, this Congress is sticking with their usual pork buddies: oil, coal, and uranium. That they threw a bone to Scott Brown was an afterthought, the cost of doing business for when they get to their real priorities: cutting social insurance and 1%er taxes.
The overall DOE budget is cut $365 million below the 2012 budget, $1.76 billion below the Administration request. ... mostly to keep Alcator C-Mod open. ... a drop in the bucket for the billions ITER will require from the US over 10 years.
To pay for this:
- Fusion Energy Sciences program: +$72.6 million
- Various domestic fusion research programs: +$48.3 million
- ITER contribution: +$73 million
They're cutting from this:
- DOE's Basic Energy Sciences: -$36.9 million, $142.5 million below Administration request, mostly by canceling or delaying construction projects.
- Biological and Environmental Research: -$69.8 million, $83.4 million below request.
- Advanced Research Projects Agency: -$75 million, $75 million below request.
Other winners:
- Fossil energy research: +$207 million
- Fission energy research: +$765 million
There was a short story published in Analog Magazine years back dealing with something much like this situation. The AI available to advise politicians ran models that suggested widespread suicides, or mass conversions to Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. Instead, people began to appreciate their current lives more, and not stress so much, with the realization that their consciousness didn't die. I also recall that abortions also dropped radically... never thought through the idea that the author might have been a subtle right-to-lifer.
The parent comment you're quoting is only half right, for the political will. To have meaningful impact, any of the geoengineering concepts be of massive scale, with costs that guarantee that none will ever move out of the pilot project phase.
The bigger problem with GE (there's a pun there, but I'm too lazy to reach for it) would be the unintended ecological (and as a result, economic) consequences. Meanwhile, the ecological consequences of reducing greenhouse gas output are very well known, because we've already experienced them. The relative unknowns are all economic, and since we're in no danger of going cold turkey, manageable.
So it was 1982 in an intro CS class at Cal State Northridge, and the prof was telling the class that the career window in the field for graduates was going to be limited, and in about ten years, system engineers, scientists, and MBAs would be using automatic code generators to turn their high level business logic into completed projects. There is a very, very small kernel of truth to that claim, when you look at tools like MATLAB, Mathematica, and uh, Access.
And, I employ these tools, too. But, in the larger picture, it's been 30 years I've been listening to people tell me that I'd have to be looking for a new career pretty soon. Yet somehow, I've avoided getting pushed out into retail sales or health services. Mark Zuckerberg has a blinkered view of a programmer/software engineer's career arc, and only by reason of his estimated net worth is Bloomberg giving his opinion the time of day.
IANAL, but based on what we've seen in major news items over the last couple of years, I'm sure.
When a company goes Chapter 13 (reorg), most existing contracts go out the window: labor, suppliers, customers. Privacy policies not affected unless it had a material effect on the reorg.
When a company goes Chapter 7 (liquidation), all contracts, policies, and representations go out the door. The judge and his/her proxies have unlimited leeway to sell off anything, nailed down or not, to satisfy the creditors.
In the good ol' US of A, a company can bend over backwards to in fact do no evil with the personal data they collect. But, if they go Chapter 7 bankruptcy (the full monty), the court is under no obligation to care. They view marketable data as just another asset to be sold off to satisfy creditors... even Scientology.
Given the current Congress, I think the easiest (but by no means best) first step towards better privacy protection would be some tweaks to Title 11 of the United States Code.
I don't know if TFA is correct, but my experience with several defense contractors is that it is not the case in that sector. The Federal government encourages workplace diversity, and the big contractors I'm familiar with make a point of making it happen. It probably doesn't hurt that these firms usually work 8 to 5, and offer benefits and a degree of schedule flexibility. In 30 years, I've yet to work in a lab that didn't include more than a token number of women (and ethnic minorities of either sex).
For your run-of-the-mill box of air, you're right. The city fathers and landowners have no problem with doing whatever it takes to keep the main industry area fresh and profitable. The hangup with Enterprise (serial number whatever) would have been that the engineering to cantilever the structure without unsightly pillars would have made it a bear to tear down.
Assuming it was run as a hotel/casino, another hassle would have been the lack of windows for most rooms. Even today, there aren't video displays high-rez/natural 3D enough to replace a GD pane of glass. Yes, the Trek franchise has had legs, but as a full-size ship on the Strip (or anywhere other than orbit), a niche cultural icon like Enterprise would quickly get old.
Because school administration attracts the kind of person that isn't employable elsewhere.
That would be an easy answer, but I suspect by-and-large incorrect. In fact, primary and secondary schools (public, in particular) get a lot of attention, and given that they're full of almost everyone's children, are a magnet for moaning a bitching. Issues can and do escalate to lawyers, significant costs, and ruined careers very quickly. Thus, administrators are motivated to CTA in ways that at first blush seem responsive to parents' concerns. We may think this was a bone-headed move, but I'll bet that the district parents don't, and they're the customer.
First off, as a general rule, I don't approve of employers asking to log on to your Facebook account to poke around.
That said, this story provides yet another example of the maxim: "if you wouldn't want to see it on the front page of the local newspaper, don't put it on-line." My employer provides this practical advice to the staff every year.
Y'know, looking at our own gas giants, it seems you don't need a whole lot of heavier elements to create a non-fusioning sphere around a star. Granted, Jupiter, Saturn, et al seem to have a lot of goodies further down the periodic table. But, I'd guess that planetary formation will work with whatever is in the buffet, even if it's just H and He with a salting of impurities.
Does it really matter, in the grander scheme of living culture, if Mr. Bay 'reboots' TNT such that it has little in common with the original concept? No. I thought the original Dark Knight Batman movie wasn't bad, for instance. But, after a while, it just gets a little old when film makers can't even be bothered to dish out enough originality to at least do a mash up of previous concepts (eg. Star Wars). It's merely another example of how when it comes to culture, efficiencies of scale aren't. When there aren't even a handful of film studios anymore (speaking of the US), then there are only a (handful * N) opportunities to make a film.
If there were a couple handfuls of studios, there'd be (2 * handful * N) opportunities, and some of them would be forced to find new material, because all of the obvious sources would have been worked over long ago. Would the budgets be as big? Prolly not, and it wouldn't matter, because we're currently seeing a very inefficient use of capital.
But, if I knew anything, I'd be rich, eh? Pffft! Here, Bay, I'll throw you a freebie: Stranger In A Strange Land where instead of Valentine Michael Smith from Mars, we get Osama Bin Liden from Yemen. He still gets shot in the end, but causes a whole lot more trouble in the meantime.
Regarding the parent's quip for a "libertarian trade embargo", the market is stupid, and would sell the rope used to hang it. The root of the writer's complaint is with how foreign and trade policy is handled in democratically organized nation-states, not the issue-of-the-moment.
If war comes, and the writer wishes to root for Iran, that's his prerogative. But, he's liable to get his ass beat and end up on a number of shit lists, depending on the nature of the flag waving. Just keeping it real.
Theocracy in Iran v. Religious Influences in the US: I think we've found another Nader 2000 voter. He's spot on that the GOP presidential contenders are going out of their way to pander to primary voters. But, even if the current GOP had a lock on every elective office in the US, shitty as that would be, it wouldn't begin to measure up to the degree of clerical control Iran "enjoys".