I completely agree that "terrorism" is the fashionable word to bludgeon enemies with. One of the more ridiculous examples was from Ron Paige, President Bush's first Secretary of Education, who once referred to the National Education Association as a terrorist organization. It's essentially Godwining public discourse.
The biggest problem with this particular instance is that, unlike the Ron Paige matter, technophobes won't be able to dismiss it as the grossly hyperbolic bullshit it is. It's highly irresponsible for public officials to label non-violent protesters as terrorists in a nation with a frightened, well armed public. This seems by far more of an act of terrorism than anything Anonymous has done.
The threats shouldn't be weighed in a vacuum, they should be compared on the basis of the impact on the environment with other forms of energy production per gigawatt or something similar. On a project like this I'd expect some redundancy in transmission lines and reasonable safety measures. It may be a completely different situation but I'm pretty sure lightening hits the ocean all the time and we're probably able to engineer a cable that would ground safely when cut and notify the transmission system to switch over to a different line.
There may also be significant benefits to the sea life with artificial reefs in the shallow water anchoring structures. I gather that windmills are safer for birds than they were years ago (I have no firm reason to believe it) so these structures could potentially provide some nesting grounds and if not we could work on a way to keep birds away from them.
If the economics of it don't work or the damage outweighs the benefits then I say we shouldn't pursue it but I do't think the nation that put men on the moon 40 years ago should be dissuaded because a project is difficult.
Having a since of humor about it shows that you're confident enough in your masculinity to take the occasional comment about the cuteness of one of your possessions.
This would be my response:
"It's convenient and (stated in a slightly ironic tone) the cuteness offsets what I understand is my sometimes intimidating masculinity."
If they aren't going to be flexible on this then the public needs clear guidelines:
adult takes photos of a nude minor - illegal
nude adult takes photos of a nude minor - more illegal
adult takes photos of nude adult - sexy
minor takes photos of a nude minor - illegal
minor takes photos of nude self - illegal
nude minor takes photos of adult - ?
nude minor takes photos of nude adult - ?
parent takes photos of nude infant - generally legal
infant takes photos of nude parent - probably funny
stranger takes photos of nude infant - OK only if it's Ann Geddes
traffic camera, security camera, sporting event camera crew takes photos of nude minor streaking - ?
adult makes drawing of nude minor - probably from Japan
Following a recognized best practices protocol could provide some legal defense in cases like this while providing better care at a lower cost. In practice it certainly won't be that easy. It does tend to turn the practice of medicine into a game of 21 questions to start identifying the problem and a checklist to treat it but a fill-in-the-blank style of treatment could make their paperwork go faster too.
At 15' most players are going to be hard pressed to see more than part of a Titan's boot on their 17", 19", or even 21" screens so that's likely to handicap them considerably even with homing rockets.
It may make me seem like a bit of a killjoy but there would be no mystery ass-phones in a school I ran. If got wind of an ass-phone situation I'd need a police report on file detailing the origin of the phone, how it came to be in the ass, and if any school staff was involved in placement or extraction of said ass-phone.
As for having the police arrest a teenager with a phone in their ass, I think their options were pretty limited. Rational people don't put phones in their ass outside of hostage situations so talking them down doesn't seem practical. Allowing a student to keep a phone in their ass doesn't seem like a good idea and going after it seems worse.
In response to the "doesn't apply until other states get on board" issues, that would be even harder than a constitutional amendment since there is an increasing incentive to not participate as some states adopt it. You'd effectively need to get almost 50 states to join in instead of the 3/4ths you'd need for a amendment.
It would be just as hard, if not harder, to get it to work the Iowa way.
This plan raises the possibility that the votes of Iowans (more specifically their electoral proxies) could go to someone with almost no support from their voters.
A more serious problem is that if this were to pass the best national campaign strategy for dealing with Iowa voters would be to ignore them in favor of wooing voters from swing states as it would give candidates a sort of Iowa multiplier. There are arguments for and against the electoral college but this is a bad plan for Iowa.
We can't do this one state at a time so we'll need to amend the constitution to switch over. That's not going to happen as long as the western states remain over-represented.
ISPs in the form of cable or phone companies have seen their broadband internet services beginning to compete with their traditional high margin products via VoIP and video on demand internet services. Increasing broadband speed and/or availability not only puts providers into a less profitable position in the market when real competition kicks in but it also means making a lower margin product that competes with their cash cows more valuable without really making them more profitable.
If we want to make telecoms/cable companies play nice with stimulus money we should reimburse them some of their outlay when the work is done because they ripped us off when we dealt with them last time. As for local regulatory issues I say we try to sink cables in interstate medians.
For many in the US ignorance is a virtue and education is the highest form of elitism. It seems that generations of conservatives casting the bulk of the educated youth of America as unamerican, pinkos, or "against us" has poured over in to actual sciences like genetics, medicine, evolutionary biology, and climatology.
The movie rating system is pretty messed up. I prefer the Joe Bob Briggs method of rating movies from when he was on the movie channel. He'd run down the count of kills (with an emphasis on decapitations or anything out of the ordinary) and breasts and other nudity. We could throw in counts of bad language. The rating would be something like:
up to 542 kills/per game - some with chainsaw
8 breasts and 3 asses
"shit" - 12, "piss" - 1, "fuck" - 17, "cunt" - 0, "cocksucker" - 3, "motherfucker" - 6, "tits" - 2
Then a parent can decide if Timmy is ready to saw a zombie in half or if he needs to hold off on being able to hit a button to yell "motherfucker" at a Nazi for another year or so.
We could use national celebrities or historic figures instead of text CAPTCHAs. Say you wanted to make a new gmail account and your IP looks like it comes from the US, Google could make you identify either Coolio, Benjamin Franklin, or Evel Knievel before you proceed.
In modern health care IT systems you have multiple pieces of fairly complicated software generally coming from 1/2 a dozen vendors or so and a user population that is not that technically savvy but is familiar with Windows. Those vendors won't retool their software for market share that currently doesn't exist. It's easy to say that they should use something that isn't as susceptible to malware but that's the only part that's easy.
I'm usually up for most kinds of humane scientific inquiry without question and I'm not squeamish about desecrating graves but this seems sort of pointless.
Did they expect to find something special about his remains?
Where burial rites of astronomers of his time a mystery?
Was he buried with an antique text that could shed light on his discoveries?
Were gold doubloons involved?
Was this part of a wacky bet or some bizarre clause in an eccentric rich person's will?
Could "I found Copernicus' tomb" be a new Polish pickup line?
Did they think it would make a neat geocache?
I just can't quite think of a great reason to go to this much effort for the scientific equivalent of adding a stop on a map of hollywood star's homes that happens to be especially run down and dirty.
There is a strange element of faith that has developed around the free market. It's not enough for the Chicago school people to study the markets, model them, and make predictions or develop policy around those ever improving models. It seems as if they believe that a free market is universally benevolent to the point where they are willing to disregard any evidence to that there could have outcomes many people might not find desirable. The a major problem with this view of economics is that even in its idealized form it really isn't that profitable and no one wants to run a business while fighting cut throat competition when they possibly avoid it. Markets are made of people.
The credit problems and the various bubbles are rooted in a few generic problems:
1. People taking part in the markets are often poorly informed and irrational.
2. Over a short period some people can cheat a market for higher profits and often escape the consequences of doing so.
Markets are based on a notion of value and that is a psychological thing. To ignore the human element in favor of a model based on some vast crowds of these mythical, rational buyers and sellers is a mistake.
Until very recently health care costs were growing at several times the rate of inflation (inflation has increased a lot) and the US is spending much, much more per capita on health care than other western countries while covering a smaller portion of its population. The uninsured still receive care but they get emergency care and that is a very expensive way to treat most conditions. The cost of that is ultimately passed on to the insured and/or taxpayers so we're currently paying for insuring the rest of the country but at an inflated price and getting poor results now.
There are serious problems with care for the insured. Contracts and billing between hospitals and payors are a terrible mess and administrative costs are a big part of hospital bills with private insurance. Medicare and the medicaids cost a lot less to administer so more of the public health care dollar goes to care than the private counterparts.
I don't think the Canadian or British models would fit America very well but the German system with multiple non-profit payors or the Australian system with national health care and an option for a private premium insurance is something I think we should explore as they tend to keep choice in the equation.
Obama's plan seems like it would be expensive but we're already paying for everyone to get health care now in some form so for the most part this is just shifting money around in an effort to provide better care. I think a lot of the savings with this plan from increased efficiency of care and cutting some of the cost of caring for the uninsured that is currently passed on to the insured is going to be eaten up by the hospital and insurance companies. It doesn't fix problems with private insurance but that's too big of a problem to tackle now.
McCain's plan will cause some employers to drop insurance and make modest increases in cash wages for their workers because it will cost more to insure them and they can just let their employees buy insurance with a tax credit paid by other employers who provide insurance to their workers and some of their fake raise. It creates a competitive disadvantage to offer insurance because you'll be paying more to insure your employees and your competitors while they are probably paying a bit less than they were before. The insurance they'll be able to buy probably won't have group risk built into it so you'll see a lot more medical underwriting so healthy people can get good insurance cheaply and sick people will still have problems getting insurance.
If this thing is looking for biological or behavioral clues to detect threats then modifying those flags with drugs could work. Booze would raise their body temperature but this is a system they might be able to defeat with beta blockers or other anti-anxiety medications or opiates or some weed. Plenty of flyers pop some Xanax before boarding so that would be a normal thing in flying public.
Re:Can we please talk about physics now?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
In all fairness most of the public got its information on colliding proton beams from Ghostbusters where we learned that crossing proton steams was extraordinarily dangerous: "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
Granted, it did save the world but it also killed a Sumerian god, which I understand is no small task.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree that "terrorism" is the fashionable word to bludgeon enemies with. One of the more ridiculous examples was from Ron Paige, President Bush's first Secretary of Education, who once referred to the National Education Association as a terrorist organization. It's essentially Godwining public discourse.
The biggest problem with this particular instance is that, unlike the Ron Paige matter, technophobes won't be able to dismiss it as the grossly hyperbolic bullshit it is. It's highly irresponsible for public officials to label non-violent protesters as terrorists in a nation with a frightened, well armed public. This seems by far more of an act of terrorism than anything Anonymous has done.
I don't consider this a bad thing...
What about when it slows down the earth to the point of being tidally locked with the sun, and you're stuck on the day side?
Then we use solar power on the sunny side to turn the windmills into fans.
They could also use some to clean the bird poop off of the platforms.
The threats shouldn't be weighed in a vacuum, they should be compared on the basis of the impact on the environment with other forms of energy production per gigawatt or something similar. On a project like this I'd expect some redundancy in transmission lines and reasonable safety measures. It may be a completely different situation but I'm pretty sure lightening hits the ocean all the time and we're probably able to engineer a cable that would ground safely when cut and notify the transmission system to switch over to a different line.
There may also be significant benefits to the sea life with artificial reefs in the shallow water anchoring structures. I gather that windmills are safer for birds than they were years ago (I have no firm reason to believe it) so these structures could potentially provide some nesting grounds and if not we could work on a way to keep birds away from them.
If the economics of it don't work or the damage outweighs the benefits then I say we shouldn't pursue it but I do't think the nation that put men on the moon 40 years ago should be dissuaded because a project is difficult.
Having a since of humor about it shows that you're confident enough in your masculinity to take the occasional comment about the cuteness of one of your possessions. This would be my response:
"It's convenient and (stated in a slightly ironic tone) the cuteness offsets what I understand is my sometimes intimidating masculinity."
If they aren't going to be flexible on this then the public needs clear guidelines:
adult takes photos of a nude minor - illegal
nude adult takes photos of a nude minor - more illegal
adult takes photos of nude adult - sexy
minor takes photos of a nude minor - illegal
minor takes photos of nude self - illegal
nude minor takes photos of adult - ?
nude minor takes photos of nude adult - ?
parent takes photos of nude infant - generally legal
infant takes photos of nude parent - probably funny
stranger takes photos of nude infant - OK only if it's Ann Geddes
traffic camera, security camera, sporting event camera crew takes photos of nude minor streaking - ?
adult makes drawing of nude minor - probably from Japan
So we have a few spots that need clarification.
Following a recognized best practices protocol could provide some legal defense in cases like this while providing better care at a lower cost. In practice it certainly won't be that easy. It does tend to turn the practice of medicine into a game of 21 questions to start identifying the problem and a checklist to treat it but a fill-in-the-blank style of treatment could make their paperwork go faster too.
At 15' most players are going to be hard pressed to see more than part of a Titan's boot on their 17", 19", or even 21" screens so that's likely to handicap them considerably even with homing rockets.
It may make me seem like a bit of a killjoy but there would be no mystery ass-phones in a school I ran. If got wind of an ass-phone situation I'd need a police report on file detailing the origin of the phone, how it came to be in the ass, and if any school staff was involved in placement or extraction of said ass-phone.
As for having the police arrest a teenager with a phone in their ass, I think their options were pretty limited. Rational people don't put phones in their ass outside of hostage situations so talking them down doesn't seem practical. Allowing a student to keep a phone in their ass doesn't seem like a good idea and going after it seems worse.
In response to the "doesn't apply until other states get on board" issues, that would be even harder than a constitutional amendment since there is an increasing incentive to not participate as some states adopt it. You'd effectively need to get almost 50 states to join in instead of the 3/4ths you'd need for a amendment.
It would be just as hard, if not harder, to get it to work the Iowa way.
This plan raises the possibility that the votes of Iowans (more specifically their electoral proxies) could go to someone with almost no support from their voters.
A more serious problem is that if this were to pass the best national campaign strategy for dealing with Iowa voters would be to ignore them in favor of wooing voters from swing states as it would give candidates a sort of Iowa multiplier. There are arguments for and against the electoral college but this is a bad plan for Iowa.
We can't do this one state at a time so we'll need to amend the constitution to switch over. That's not going to happen as long as the western states remain over-represented.
ISPs in the form of cable or phone companies have seen their broadband internet services beginning to compete with their traditional high margin products via VoIP and video on demand internet services. Increasing broadband speed and/or availability not only puts providers into a less profitable position in the market when real competition kicks in but it also means making a lower margin product that competes with their cash cows more valuable without really making them more profitable.
If we want to make telecoms/cable companies play nice with stimulus money we should reimburse them some of their outlay when the work is done because they ripped us off when we dealt with them last time. As for local regulatory issues I say we try to sink cables in interstate medians.
For many in the US ignorance is a virtue and education is the highest form of elitism. It seems that generations of conservatives casting the bulk of the educated youth of America as unamerican, pinkos, or "against us" has poured over in to actual sciences like genetics, medicine, evolutionary biology, and climatology.
The movie rating system is pretty messed up. I prefer the Joe Bob Briggs method of rating movies from when he was on the movie channel. He'd run down the count of kills (with an emphasis on decapitations or anything out of the ordinary) and breasts and other nudity. We could throw in counts of bad language. The rating would be something like:
up to 542 kills/per game - some with chainsaw
8 breasts and 3 asses
"shit" - 12, "piss" - 1, "fuck" - 17, "cunt" - 0, "cocksucker" - 3, "motherfucker" - 6, "tits" - 2
Then a parent can decide if Timmy is ready to saw a zombie in half or if he needs to hold off on being able to hit a button to yell "motherfucker" at a Nazi for another year or so.
We could use national celebrities or historic figures instead of text CAPTCHAs. Say you wanted to make a new gmail account and your IP looks like it comes from the US, Google could make you identify either Coolio, Benjamin Franklin, or Evel Knievel before you proceed.
In modern health care IT systems you have multiple pieces of fairly complicated software generally coming from 1/2 a dozen vendors or so and a user population that is not that technically savvy but is familiar with Windows. Those vendors won't retool their software for market share that currently doesn't exist. It's easy to say that they should use something that isn't as susceptible to malware but that's the only part that's easy.
I'm pretty sure this is the plot for nearly every movie involving hackers. I'd say that it's overly thinkable.
So, you're saying that this was . . . murder? YEEEOW . . . who are you? DO DO, DO DO.
I'm usually up for most kinds of humane scientific inquiry without question and I'm not squeamish about desecrating graves but this seems sort of pointless.
Did they expect to find something special about his remains?
Where burial rites of astronomers of his time a mystery?
Was he buried with an antique text that could shed light on his discoveries?
Were gold doubloons involved?
Was this part of a wacky bet or some bizarre clause in an eccentric rich person's will?
Could "I found Copernicus' tomb" be a new Polish pickup line?
Did they think it would make a neat geocache?
I just can't quite think of a great reason to go to this much effort for the scientific equivalent of adding a stop on a map of hollywood star's homes that happens to be especially run down and dirty.
There is a strange element of faith that has developed around the free market. It's not enough for the Chicago school people to study the markets, model them, and make predictions or develop policy around those ever improving models. It seems as if they believe that a free market is universally benevolent to the point where they are willing to disregard any evidence to that there could have outcomes many people might not find desirable. The a major problem with this view of economics is that even in its idealized form it really isn't that profitable and no one wants to run a business while fighting cut throat competition when they possibly avoid it. Markets are made of people.
The credit problems and the various bubbles are rooted in a few generic problems: 1. People taking part in the markets are often poorly informed and irrational. 2. Over a short period some people can cheat a market for higher profits and often escape the consequences of doing so.
Markets are based on a notion of value and that is a psychological thing. To ignore the human element in favor of a model based on some vast crowds of these mythical, rational buyers and sellers is a mistake.
A space purse would look lame and according to my wife it would need to match their boots.
Until very recently health care costs were growing at several times the rate of inflation (inflation has increased a lot) and the US is spending much, much more per capita on health care than other western countries while covering a smaller portion of its population. The uninsured still receive care but they get emergency care and that is a very expensive way to treat most conditions. The cost of that is ultimately passed on to the insured and/or taxpayers so we're currently paying for insuring the rest of the country but at an inflated price and getting poor results now.
There are serious problems with care for the insured. Contracts and billing between hospitals and payors are a terrible mess and administrative costs are a big part of hospital bills with private insurance. Medicare and the medicaids cost a lot less to administer so more of the public health care dollar goes to care than the private counterparts.
I don't think the Canadian or British models would fit America very well but the German system with multiple non-profit payors or the Australian system with national health care and an option for a private premium insurance is something I think we should explore as they tend to keep choice in the equation.
Obama's plan seems like it would be expensive but we're already paying for everyone to get health care now in some form so for the most part this is just shifting money around in an effort to provide better care. I think a lot of the savings with this plan from increased efficiency of care and cutting some of the cost of caring for the uninsured that is currently passed on to the insured is going to be eaten up by the hospital and insurance companies. It doesn't fix problems with private insurance but that's too big of a problem to tackle now.
McCain's plan will cause some employers to drop insurance and make modest increases in cash wages for their workers because it will cost more to insure them and they can just let their employees buy insurance with a tax credit paid by other employers who provide insurance to their workers and some of their fake raise. It creates a competitive disadvantage to offer insurance because you'll be paying more to insure your employees and your competitors while they are probably paying a bit less than they were before. The insurance they'll be able to buy probably won't have group risk built into it so you'll see a lot more medical underwriting so healthy people can get good insurance cheaply and sick people will still have problems getting insurance.
If this thing is looking for biological or behavioral clues to detect threats then modifying those flags with drugs could work. Booze would raise their body temperature but this is a system they might be able to defeat with beta blockers or other anti-anxiety medications or opiates or some weed. Plenty of flyers pop some Xanax before boarding so that would be a normal thing in flying public.
In all fairness most of the public got its information on colliding proton beams from Ghostbusters where we learned that crossing proton steams was extraordinarily dangerous: "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
Granted, it did save the world but it also killed a Sumerian god, which I understand is no small task.
Some guy at Scientific American seems to think it is a bad idea. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling