Am I the only one? (I should have learned my lesson about asking at/. for video but I haven't.) I don't care *what* the video is made of really. I just really want video with my space stories. When something launches, when something crashes, when something oh, lands on Mars or something... I want video. I don't care if it is computer generated, you (and I) know that the NASA folks made a video to present to someone somewhere.
Already happening, a Deaf couple is trying to have a deaf child by not using embryos that have "hearing", not sure how they make the selection. Their reasoning is that deafness isn't a disability and they want a child that has they can "share their experiences with".
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
I wonder what the reaction would be like to a couple deliberately wanting to have a "disabled" child. For example, if a blind couple also wanted to have a blind child.
I can't believe you just argued that anyone should be allowed to have nukes as long as they're insured.
Dude, chill. I'm not seriously arguing that I want this to happen, I'm just tossing out a (probably implausible) idea I had which I thought was interesting. If something like this were to actually happen, I wouldn't be surprised if the insurance would end up having to be many billions of dollars a year per kiloton, at least, making it in practice impossible to own one.
This actually reminds me of the shortest apologia for the use of nuclear weapons in literature: "He's not my customer!" (from Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned")
Also, while an armed populace that's sufficiently pissed off to rebel may indeed be the final option in the case of governmental tyranny, it's not a solution anyone should hope for. Civil wars are ugly, ugly things, and we should try every possible legal solution before resorting to blood in the streets.
The best deterrents (an armed populace in this case) are the ones which you end up not having to use. Although one should be prepared to shoot a burglar if necessary, it's best if the burglar runs away, and even better if the burglar never breaks into your house in the first place because they think you may have a gun. Similarly, it's better to have the possibility of having to deal with an armed revolt keeps a government's actions in check, rather than have an actual revolt.
One might think that individual rights in the U.S. are encroached upon quite a bit, but just compare it to someplace like the U.K. (where gun rights are essentially non-existent) and you'll notice quite a difference.
But per capita comparisons of homicides seem dubious at best, it's not really a coincidence (in my opinion) that the top 4 on that list are the 4 most populous states in the union. Denser populations lead to more crime. I'd like to see some stats weighted for this fact.
I googled around and Wikipedia seems to have fairly comprehensive stats, and you can sort in order of gun homicides per capita:
What about the fact that it doesn't say "guns", just "arms"? I want my personal nuclear weapons!
I've actually schemed in the past that it might be interesting to have a legal framework for private ownership of arms (up to and including nuclear weapons) modeled after the mandatory car insurance laws in some states. That is, it's legal to own any sort of weapon so long as you have adequate insurance/funds to cover potential damages. Like other forms of insurance, you can lower the insurance rates by having adequate safeguards against accidental misuse (armed guards, remote monitoring, location in remote areas, etc.).
It just isn't really supported by the numbers [statemaster.com].
Thing is, the statistics you linked to are for gun deaths overall, which includes things like suicides (which account for ~50% of all gun deaths) and people shot by the police. The statistics look quite different if you only look at homicides.
If the left consistently acted in that way, they'd never elect another person to office, because the Right isn't going to stop doing what they're doing just because the left is.
Could you elaborate on what dishonorable attacks have been coming from the Right so far in this election? As far as I've seen, the vast majority of the attacks on Obama so far have been from the Clinton camp. McCain on the other hand has (somewhat surprisingly) been trying to take the high ground and has on a number of occasions criticized those who've tried to use spurious claims again Obama.
Also more generally instead of going into genetics and stuff women like guys who are confident and can take charge of situations. It's an attractive quality.
I think the point is that's an attractive quality because of our genetics. Alpha males are sexually in demand in a great many species.
As someone posted above, from the constitution, "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." This means that the legislative branch cannot pass a retroactive law, either to provide immunity or to prosecute people. This bill is unconstitutional, but it will take a hell of a fight and a lot of money to get the supreme court to rule on it as such.
I'm fairly certain that the ex post facto clause only applies to laws which criminalize previously legal behavior. Would it be unconstitutional to pass a law which grants amnesty to illegal immigrants?
They don't have the right. The constitution actually forbids it.
Are you sure about that? It seems that this might in a sense be effectively the same as a presidential pardon:
From Article II, section 2, of the US Constitution: "[the President]... shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment"
Back in the late '60s, I did some work on the late, lamented IBM 1620. It had a clock-tick of 20 ms (That's milliseconds, not micro.) and somebody found out that different instructions generated different RF signals. If you put a transistor radio (remember them?) on the console, you could listen to them. There was a program that would take a set of notes and durations and generate a "program" that ran the appropriate instructions to "play" the tune, rather like a rather odd compiler.
More recently, back when I was in high school (in the late 90s) I remember doing similar things with software you could install on the TI-83 and TI-89 calculators. If you put the calculator next to an AM radio it could generate MIDI-like music.
I would have nominated Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri but that one broke many a kernal ago on a glibc update. Too bad Loki is dead or they could have updated it.
On a related note, the other day I was really wishing I had purchased the combo pack (SMAC + SMACX) for Linux which was selling several years back. I was checking on Amazon, and apparently nowadays a used copy of SMACX goes for ~$110, with $150 minimum for a new copy.
If you're curious, here's part of Scalia's rationale:
The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled prece-dent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President's Office of Legal Counsel advised him "that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien de-tained at [Guantanamo Bay]." Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.
In the long term, then, the Court's decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110-90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.
These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As THE CHIEF JUSTICE's dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those proce- dural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be deter-mined by civil courts and (in the Court's contemplation atleast) will be more detainee-friendly than those now ap-plied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If t
From looking at the Request for Proposals, it doesn't seem like they're looking for something that's pre-installed, but rather something they can fire at a plane.
How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?
If they already knew they wouldn't be asking for proposals.
Just to conjecture a bit, one possibility might be some sort of override of the electrical systems, although it'd be tricky to do this in a way which would still allow the plane to land and/or make the effect temporary. For a more outlandish idea, maybe fire some sort of self-attaching flap at the airplane which could adjust itself depending on which way the plane was heading.
I thought the Russians announced that they were no longer doing the space tourism gig, and that space tourism was going to be the realm of private industry from that point forward.
They had previously announced that they would no longer sell individual seats, but it looks like in this case Space Adventures is booking the entire capsule.
I think you're significantly overestimating. Merrill Lynch estimated that there were about 95,000 people in the world with personal fortunes of $30 million or more in 2006. If even 1% of those people wanted to book a trip to the ISS, Space Adventures would have almost 1000 applications piled on their desks. But they don't.
I suspect that for the people who can financially afford it, the concern isn't so much the $30 million fee. It's more the several months of dedicated training in Russia you have to do, isolated from your work and family.
He could be cashing in, he could be a truly repentant whistleblower. Personally, I think his memoirs would have sold very well *without* accusing the administration of criminal acts, so greed isn't enough of a motivation on its own.
Last I checked, Ari Fleischer's memoir hasn't been selling too well.
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Am I the only one? (I should have learned my lesson about asking at /. for video but I haven't.) I don't care *what* the video is made of really. I just really want video with my space stories. When something launches, when something crashes, when something oh, lands on Mars or something... I want video. I don't care if it is computer generated, you (and I) know that the NASA folks made a video to present to someone somewhere.
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PMvS1hQKxM
(Computer-generated video from last year of Ares V concept)
Already happening, a Deaf couple is trying to have a deaf child by not using embryos that have "hearing", not sure how they make the selection. Their reasoning is that deafness isn't a disability and they want a child that has they can "share their experiences with".
Interesting... I actually hadn't heard about that. For those curious, here's a BBC article: "Is it wrong to select a deaf embryo?"
The Polar Bears. No place to go any more.
That actually makes me wonder though... since polar bears have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years or so, what did they during the periods when the planet was warmer than it is today?
My argument against would be that folks that're "disabled" like me wouldn't have a chance to contribute to society as a whole....
I wonder what the reaction would be like to a couple deliberately wanting to have a "disabled" child. For example, if a blind couple also wanted to have a blind child.
I can't believe you just argued that anyone should be allowed to have nukes as long as they're insured.
Dude, chill. I'm not seriously arguing that I want this to happen, I'm just tossing out a (probably implausible) idea I had which I thought was interesting. If something like this were to actually happen, I wouldn't be surprised if the insurance would end up having to be many billions of dollars a year per kiloton, at least, making it in practice impossible to own one.
This actually reminds me of the shortest apologia for the use of nuclear weapons in literature: "He's not my customer!" (from Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned")
Also, while an armed populace that's sufficiently pissed off to rebel may indeed be the final option in the case of governmental tyranny, it's not a solution anyone should hope for. Civil wars are ugly, ugly things, and we should try every possible legal solution before resorting to blood in the streets.
The best deterrents (an armed populace in this case) are the ones which you end up not having to use. Although one should be prepared to shoot a burglar if necessary, it's best if the burglar runs away, and even better if the burglar never breaks into your house in the first place because they think you may have a gun. Similarly, it's better to have the possibility of having to deal with an armed revolt keeps a government's actions in check, rather than have an actual revolt.
One might think that individual rights in the U.S. are encroached upon quite a bit, but just compare it to someplace like the U.K. (where gun rights are essentially non-existent) and you'll notice quite a difference.
But per capita comparisons of homicides seem dubious at best, it's not really a coincidence (in my opinion) that the top 4 on that list are the 4 most populous states in the union. Denser populations lead to more crime. I'd like to see some stats weighted for this fact.
I googled around and Wikipedia seems to have fairly comprehensive stats, and you can sort in order of gun homicides per capita:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state
I'm not very familiar with what the gun control laws are like in the top listed states, but you might have more of an idea on that than I do.
Sorry for venting at you. It just had to come out.
Um, sure thing. Whatever makes you happy, I guess.
What about the fact that it doesn't say "guns", just "arms"? I want my personal nuclear weapons!
I've actually schemed in the past that it might be interesting to have a legal framework for private ownership of arms (up to and including nuclear weapons) modeled after the mandatory car insurance laws in some states. That is, it's legal to own any sort of weapon so long as you have adequate insurance/funds to cover potential damages. Like other forms of insurance, you can lower the insurance rates by having adequate safeguards against accidental misuse (armed guards, remote monitoring, location in remote areas, etc.).
It just isn't really supported by the numbers [statemaster.com].
Thing is, the statistics you linked to are for gun deaths overall, which includes things like suicides (which account for ~50% of all gun deaths) and people shot by the police. The statistics look quite different if you only look at homicides.
My state has no registration regardless.
Out of curiosity, what is the level of gun-related crime like in your state?
If the left consistently acted in that way, they'd never elect another person to office, because the Right isn't going to stop doing what they're doing just because the left is.
Could you elaborate on what dishonorable attacks have been coming from the Right so far in this election? As far as I've seen, the vast majority of the attacks on Obama so far have been from the Clinton camp. McCain on the other hand has (somewhat surprisingly) been trying to take the high ground and has on a number of occasions criticized those who've tried to use spurious claims again Obama.
Also more generally instead of going into genetics and stuff women like guys who are confident and can take charge of situations. It's an attractive quality.
I think the point is that's an attractive quality because of our genetics. Alpha males are sexually in demand in a great many species.
As someone posted above, from the constitution, "No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." This means that the legislative branch cannot pass a retroactive law, either to provide immunity or to prosecute people. This bill is unconstitutional, but it will take a hell of a fight and a lot of money to get the supreme court to rule on it as such.
I'm fairly certain that the ex post facto clause only applies to laws which criminalize previously legal behavior. Would it be unconstitutional to pass a law which grants amnesty to illegal immigrants?
They don't have the right. The constitution actually forbids it.
Are you sure about that? It seems that this might in a sense be effectively the same as a presidential pardon:
From Article II, section 2, of the US Constitution: "[the President]... shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment"
Back in the late '60s, I did some work on the late, lamented IBM 1620. It had a clock-tick of 20 ms (That's milliseconds, not micro.) and somebody found out that different instructions generated different RF signals. If you put a transistor radio (remember them?) on the console, you could listen to them. There was a program that would take a set of notes and durations and generate a "program" that ran the appropriate instructions to "play" the tune, rather like a rather odd compiler.
More recently, back when I was in high school (in the late 90s) I remember doing similar things with software you could install on the TI-83 and TI-89 calculators. If you put the calculator next to an AM radio it could generate MIDI-like music.
I would have nominated Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri but that one broke many a kernal ago on a glibc update. Too bad Loki is dead or they could have updated it.
On a related note, the other day I was really wishing I had purchased the combo pack (SMAC + SMACX) for Linux which was selling several years back. I was checking on Amazon, and apparently nowadays a used copy of SMACX goes for ~$110, with $150 minimum for a new copy.
http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/06-1195.pdf
If you're curious, here's part of Scalia's rationale:
The game of bait-and-switch that today's opinion plays upon the Nation's Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court's blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled prece-dent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950), when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President's Office of Legal Counsel advised him "that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien de-tained at [Guantanamo Bay]." Memorandum from Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorneys General, Office of Legal Counsel, to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel, Dept. of Defense (Dec. 28, 2001). Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.
In the long term, then, the Court's decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. See S. Rep. No. 110-90, pt. 7, p. 13 (2007) (Minority Views of Sens. Kyl, Sessions, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn) (hereinafter Minority Report). Some have been captured or killed. See ibid.; see also Mintz, Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight, Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2004, pp. A1, A12. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.
These, mind you, were detainees whom the military had concluded were not enemy combatants. Their return to the kill illustrates the incredible difficulty of assessing who is and who is not an enemy combatant in a foreign theater of operations where the environment does not lend itself to rigorous evidence collection. Astoundingly, the Court today raises the bar, requiring military officials to appear before civilian courts and defend their decisions under procedural and evidentiary rules that go beyond what Congress has specified. As THE CHIEF JUSTICE's dissent makes clear, we have no idea what those proce- dural and evidentiary rules are, but they will be deter-mined by civil courts and (in the Court's contemplation atleast) will be more detainee-friendly than those now ap-plied, since otherwise there would no reason to hold the congressionally prescribed procedures unconstitutional. If t
A "kill switch" as of now means an F-18A intercepting it and shooting it down.
The term "kill switch" was a journalistic flair added by Wired, and doesn't actually occur anywhere in the Request for Proposals.
From looking at the Request for Proposals, it doesn't seem like they're looking for something that's pre-installed, but rather something they can fire at a plane.
How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?
If they already knew they wouldn't be asking for proposals.
Just to conjecture a bit, one possibility might be some sort of override of the electrical systems, although it'd be tricky to do this in a way which would still allow the plane to land and/or make the effect temporary. For a more outlandish idea, maybe fire some sort of self-attaching flap at the airplane which could adjust itself depending on which way the plane was heading.
I thought the Russians announced that they were no longer doing the space tourism gig, and that space tourism was going to be the realm of private industry from that point forward.
They had previously announced that they would no longer sell individual seats, but it looks like in this case Space Adventures is booking the entire capsule.
I think you're significantly overestimating. Merrill Lynch estimated that there were about 95,000 people in the world with personal fortunes of $30 million or more in 2006. If even 1% of those people wanted to book a trip to the ISS, Space Adventures would have almost 1000 applications piled on their desks. But they don't.
I suspect that for the people who can financially afford it, the concern isn't so much the $30 million fee. It's more the several months of dedicated training in Russia you have to do, isolated from your work and family.
He could be cashing in, he could be a truly repentant whistleblower. Personally, I think his memoirs would have sold very well *without* accusing the administration of criminal acts, so greed isn't enough of a motivation on its own.
Last I checked, Ari Fleischer's memoir hasn't been selling too well.
Sure, that's the spin Rockefeller wants to put on it, but what about the actual report from the committee?