Because you know for an absolute fact that no one will ever rape you? Because no one will ever expose you through blood or other fluids? It must be nice to have God's personal assurance nobody that's HIV positive will ever get stabbed near you (or just get nicked on something). Because you are such an infallible judge of character that that person you enter into a long term monagamous realationship with will absolutely never lie to you?
That's going to be a problem. You see, most of these Sears that are closed were the last or near last stores in their malls to close. The little stores went out first, and the big anchor stores held on as the malls got emptier and emptier. So generally, there's little or no place around them for people to shop.
The last bunch of people to try and reform the standard calender were the revolutionary French, under Romme, Ferry and Dupuis. They had the assistance and support of the chemist de Morveau, and the astronomers Lagrange and Lalande, but it still didn't catch on. Strangely, the Metric System started from the same roots, and became widely accepted.
If we're going to get rid of religious calendar references, how about more genral reform? "Venerial" is a word derived from Venus, the goddess of lurve. Elemental quicksilver is 'incorrectly' named after the god Mercury, and a similar problem exists for element number 90 (named after some guy in the Norse pantheon). All Hallows Eve, Walpurgusnacht, and various other holidays, trace to (very religious) calendar of the Celts. Many of our finest automobiles are named after Totemic animals, often of Native American mystical traditions. Considering this too much could drive a man crazy - I'm starting to feel superstitious and even ocultistic for calling the tallest mountain in North America Denali instead of Mount McKinley.
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
Isn't shutting down national parks at extra cost because non-essential government workers are furloughed selling fear?
Isn't ignoring a debt ceiling because of promised financial doom selling fear?
Short answers: No, No, No, and WTF?
Longer Answers: 1. CAGW is a solidly demonstrated model. Some other theories based on it don't have quite that much evidence yet, but still have some pretty strong chance of being right. In just the last decade, we have had two hurricane seasons which started earlier than what was considered the 'safe' season starting date or lasted beyond the 'safe' ending date. We've had a season where they literally had to add names to the lists to cover all the storms and another that came close.
In the US, we've had a tornado season where there were over 500 storms confirmed on radar, when the worst season before it was around 350 (and yes, you can break that data down to look at just the places where doppler radar has been around 20 or 30 years or more, and see the same exceptional spikes in locales where we have a good, long term average for radar data, not just eye witness reports).
We've just had a typhoon this year that is estimated to have been off the top of the measurement scale. Most of the worst storm events, such as The New Orleans and New York hurricanes, weren't even part of those unusually bad overall seasons.
We've had all sorts of records for rainfall or droubt broken in spectacular ways, in places where the weather records go back hundreds of years, or for some parts of Europe, 15 hundred to two thousand or so, and the high and low rainfall regions shifting shows patterns on large scales consistent with AGW related theories. All that's simply facts - if it makes some people afraid, well, they are still facts. People are repeating them because some people are denying they are facts, not just to cause fear. If some people suspect it's all connected to the more basic AGW theories, well, I suspect a lot of it is, although I'm open to alternatives until and unless the data builds up enough to be more certain.
2. Several of the proposed gun control laws you mention included background checks as their first and foremost part - Background checks ARE "mentally Ill control laws". Proposed by the "left" - shot down by the NRA.
3. The sequester was supposed to force the two parties to find better solutions. By definition, it didn't make sensible cuts, for example, it cut the IRS budget, when that meant there were less taxes collected so the problem automatically got worse. Criticising the sequester because it didn't have a bunch of sensible exceptions is criticising it for being exactly what it was supposed to be. What's your alternative, give one side 100% of what it wants and only then start negotiating? Gee, if only the sequester had forced congress to come together and pass a budget without using any of that unpleasant force part...
4. This question makes no sense. The people who want to raise the debt ceiling don't believe the promises of financial doom. They are the ones arguing that we should not be afraid. The people who want to keep the debt ceiling do believe the promises of financial doom, and so rightly or wrongly want us to be afraid of what happens if the others ignore those promises. Are you really claiming with a straight face that the "left" are the people fear mongering about the deficit?
I ran Win ME for about 2 years, about the same time as I started using Linux (on seperate boxes). It did run with better uptimes/stability than Win 98 SE, so I think I'm agreeing with your "more reliable" opinion. I liked Win 98 well enough, especially SE. Storm Linux 2000 didn't seem all that impressive compared to either version of Windows around that time, but Linux gradually pulled ahead, at least in my book. I still support Windows boxes at work and for family, and liked XP (after the first Service Pack came out), and 7's not too bad, but for me, Linux has pulled ahead on several counts.
There were a few real things wrong with Win ME, even for its time. I like fancy desktops and skinnable programs, so I started running and designing skins for various freeware programs that could 'fake' "Alpha channel" transparency in 98, produce non-rectangular windows, and generally enhance Windows visuals - XXCalc, Sonique, Kjofol, early versions of Winamp, Beatnik Internet clock, several translucent notepad variants, little programs such as that. I learned to hack the Windows 98 registry to make the background behind icon text transparent, change the start menu clock fonts, and many other little tricks, mostly for the same reason, When ME came along, It broke a great many things along these lines in the freeware customization scene, even though it supposedly didn't have any significant advances in transparency rendering, by its own admission. Microsoft did so many strange things in the registry (changing an enormous number of variable types from numeric to Boolean, or vice versa, where it just plain wasn't sensible, or, even more often, telling developers that a variable was now of some type, but experimenting with it proved it wasn't.), I swiftly got the feeling they were trying to obfuscate the registry, (and for that matter DLLs and video support) just to make it impossible for third parties to work with them unless they had the financial status to become what Microsoft was starting to call Microsoft Trusted Partners. To me, it came off as petty, as though Microsoft felt insulted anyone was trying to change the desktop appearance that much.
After a few months, there were more serious freeware programs that started running into the same thing, I.e. there were early replacements for Windows Explorer that added some real functionality, such as multi-pane versions, or search tools that let the user do searches with the full range of regular expressions, or adaptations of most of the Berkeley UNIX command line tools, or drive defragmenting programs that ran about 800% faster than the stock Defrag. It seemed like every time Microsoft announced a patch for something, it broke some other functionality, far removed from what they said the patch was supposed to do, and adversely impacted these freeware programs. I don't know if Microsoft did any of that deliberately - but I do know that several of those programmers who stopped updating their freeware creations damned sure thought it was deliberate.
At least one of the articles I've seen on this thing this week mentions a possible Strike role variant. If the whole spectrum of SR-72s to come is based around a single, unmanned design, we're basically looking at the US considering building an unmanned Nuclear Bomber. Just as the SR-71 led to the YF-12 / 12A Interceptor, this design is supposed to transition from a Recon role to a more active combat version, but it's interesting that the powers that be are talking Strategic Bomber rather than a more defensive craft.
I'm thinking you meant to say "Gnome", not "Gone", but I have to admit, as a typo, it makes one hell of a Freudian Slip. I won't say I wish Gnome was Gone, but I do wish the Gnome team would restore some user option control, and even extend it. Gnome has pruned a lot with version 3 and the 3.X's, and I would even think joining in the big bug fix movement should be a lesser priority than for KDE or any of the others to join in. A massively less buggy version of a still heavily restricted Gnome might say that they had no plans to ever expand user control again, for fear of reverting to an overall buggier condition. The Gnome developers jumping on the bug fix bandwagon wouldn't necessarily just be responsible coding in the way it would for, say Enlightenment or Libreoffice, it could also become a way of further burning their bridges - making it even harder for them to restore any customization features they've taken out because overall buggyness would (temporarily) go back up. At this point, Gnome 3.10 (current) seems to have expanded user control over the notifications section a bit, a welcome change in my opinion,
It could be good if lots of window managers, productivity software and even games for Linux all got interested in a coordinated bug-fixing cycle to back the kernel developers themselves, and it just might even lead to good publicity for Linux. It could be good if particular distros really focused on their installers, individual package management and such to make them as rock solid as the new base. I know that some people are going to be more eager to focus on bug fixing themselves if they know the underpinnings won't be glitching up on them as much. I'd certainly welcome the Gnome developers getting on the wagon too, but I can only hope they do it for the sake of creating a more solid but expansible product, not a more tightly locked down one.
It's not that obvious, or I wouldn't see so damned many posts on Slashdot where people insist that you can prove the scientific method itself from within science, and other such fallacies. Empiricism is not really at all the same as Naive Realism, and yet there are plenty of people here who argue as though they were classic Realists, but think they are arguing "Scientifically".
How can the "need to create culture" possibly be a weak argument? The US Constitution gives the goal of promoting progress in the sciences and useful arts as the very reason why copyright is allowed to exist under US law. Functionally, creating new culture certainly sounds like it falls under that clause -so how can the very thing which, constitutionally speaking, justifies copyright, be a weak argument, one way or the other?
Let's look at which way the arguement really goes, as well. Isn't it more likely, in general, that someone is claing the need to create culture is an argument for diluting or eliminating copyright, as is certainly the case for Antigua in this story? You've given us a couple of axioms, the first definitely true, and the second is technically a matter of opinion, but I will even grant you that second axiom freely - the timeless classics are very seldom matched by any new works. Still, your third term in your chain of logic doesn't really follow from those first two. I think you may be able to make a pretty decent rhetorical case, mind you, I just don't think you got there yet.
I find this a little depressing too, when I consider just how much porn there is out there, how easy it is to find. The idea that these individuals somehow need more of it, enough that they will go to the extra trouble of trying to get more in public, on systems that are usually trying to make finding it more difficult, around people who must be indicating some sort of annoyance at least now and then. Often they are at risk of being thrown out of the libraries - that's certainly policy at mine, if they don't decide the viewer has been willfully exposing any children present to it and actually call a cop, but there's a bunch of people trying it anyway. And they will look right at the police and say things like "I didn't think about them looking over my shoulder - that's their parent's job. And besides, they asked me to let them look." Then they will act all surprised when "the man" takes them in. I actually saw and heard one guy explain to the police that his friend wouldn't let him borrow said friend's PC anymore, because the friend caught him looking for "underage" girls. Like saying something like this is going to get somebody out of trouble.
I agree that bul;lying is very real and the old adage about sticks and stones is a lie, but I have to say that the number of kids who have committed or attempted suicide after being bullied to death is exactly zero.
I've noticed another such contradiction in so much of Libertarian doctrine. If Government really always entails the legitimizing of some uses of force by their being in response to others initiating force, and should stay out of all other areas where someone has not initiated force, then what about taxation to pay for those 'legitimate' aims? So long as there's some chance, any chance, not enough people will voluntarily pay to fund courts, police, and military defense, government may have to initiate force against those who don't 'voluntarily' pay for their share. But that means there's at least one purpose that is legitimate to the government, that doesn't involve a response to pre-existing force, and that's raising the money to pay for it.
Now that's the extreme libertarian (small "l") position, and it's easy to call it a straw man, but let's look at a more nuanced and expanded version of libertarianism as a real philosophy. It doesn't help if the typical libertarian model adds fraud, threatening or other such things to crimes of direct force, taxation itself is outside of those categories as well. You can also substitute some plan where the costs of government are so low that "voluntary payments are always going to be enough" and there's no force needed for taxation, but the accounting and tracking funds, auditing where they go, making sure waste stays low, and such is still outside of the group of things libertarians claim are legitimate functions of government. Fund raising and fund management areas are supposed to be 'outside' of the systems they manage - If these functions aren't 'outside', then most of use would say the regulatory department has been "captured" by the police or military departments, and that's not, again to most of us, a good thing. I doubt it's seen as a good thing under libertarian philosophies either.
If it's legitimate for government to implement even just one department - we'll call it a "department of fund-raising and management" so as not to take sides on whether taxation by compulsion must be allowed, but still a department outside of the libertarian law enforcement and military group, why is it necessarily illegitimate for the government to implement any others? Why, for example, can't governments take 'promoting the general wellfare' as their legitimizing mandate for a dept. of transportation, even if that dept. is not about using force in response to force? The dept. of fund raising and management isn''t about that either.
If Libertarianism holds that fund raising has to be by voluntary means so as not to give a department, outside the force-response departments, power it should not have, why can't government implement other departments that also have no power to respond to force? What's fundamentally wrong under a libertarian position with the government doing any program that doesn't involve response to force, on a purely voluntarily funded basis? If military and police functions can be completely funded on a voluntary basis, why can't people choose voluntarily to fund something like an educational system or, for that matter, a space program?
Libertarians seem to take the position that people will always be willing to pay enough to voluntarily fund the police/military budget needed, but won't ever voluntarily pay for other things. That seems spurious. What happens if court fees just happen to raise more money than the libertarian government needs for its police and military departments? Do they have to give those fees back? What philosophical point in libertarian thinking holds that the government can't keep voluntarily donated revenues and put them to some non-forcible use, but must refund them? Isn't the free market about charging what the customer will see as a price they are willing to pay for the service? Why should our hypothetical government be the only entity that must be compelled to charge less than t
There's proprtionality to consider. Deep impact was made at the same time as Armageddon, and while it didn't get all the science right, it came quite a ways closer, Armageddon get's dissed because it went so far out on some very thin limbs, and somebody else at the same time made a better movie on a lower budget.
I'm pretty OK with Gravity though. The movie came out well after the last space shuttle mission, so everyone should know that bird is not still flying. Gravity is therefore set in some alternate universe where more shuttles were built and the program is still ongoing, and also so the Hubble and ISS may have been placed in more similar orbits, the manned maneuvering packs designed differently and retained longer, the Chinese decided to locate their station close to the ISS, etc.
It's like an early Tom Clancy novel. The Japanese never really built a covert nuclear weapons program, but flying an apache 12 feet above a railroad track and having AWACs style radar think it's a bullet train until it pops straight up at them might actually work all the same. Clancy may have been utterly fictitious in attributing the sorts of motives he did to the Japanese, but he made damned sure to check the top speed and operational ceiling of his helecopters, whether they could actually be deployed by sub, and many other things about them.
In Gravity, we had: 1. the death of the mission specialist by having his head punched out, with a pretty realistic injury appearance. 2. The rest of the shuttle crew's deaths by decompression, also realisticly portrayed and with the fact that they would normally not be suited up just because the bay doors were open included. Note that in that scene, most or all of the bridge instrumentation and lighting is down - which may explain one of the supposed inaccuracies - why automatic stabilizing jets didn't fire when the shuttle was first hit, as it looks like the same impact seems to have killed both the bridge crew and the electronics. 3. The use of a fire extinguisher as an improvised propulsion unit, and our heroine's having the sense to grab one rather than push it away. If it's not technically accurate as to how much thrust it would supply, at least it had a real science feel as good as a Clarke or Heinlein story. 4. A realistic fire in space, with a lengthy smouldering period as 0-G kept the smoke from leaving the vicinity of the flame, and eventual flashover as it found sufficient oxidizables to outrace the smothering effect. 5. Realistic air pressure aboard the first Soyuz design capsule (what, you thought spacecraft are pressurized to a full 15 PSI?). Hypoxia in a young healthy adult and its different symptoms from such conditions as Emphasemic Hypoxia with accompanying Peripheral or Organismic Cyanosis treated with medical accuracy. (Periods of recovering from brief unconsiousness to full mental awareness are documented in highly athletic people suffering from suddon onset Hypoxia and not normally in cases where the cause is age or illness, but that's an unusual situation with the ambiguous "religious vision" as part of it, so whether the film got that intentionally right or just hit it by accident is up to the viewer). 6. A Soyuz style capsule stabilizing heat shield down from a tumble in the same manner as a boat tail bullet as it hits denser air, (Something the original Russian designers have long bragged about it being designed to do better than the Apollo, which was in turn supposedly better than the Gemini series). 7. Debris begins to glow with heat at altitudes where the air is still to thin to conduct much sound. Realistic hypersonic decelleration booms, increasing in volume as the air begins to bite,and unshielded debris shredding and vaporizing follow, and it all happens in very accurate realtime with the visuals confirming what the craft's altitude should be as it begins grabbing real air, begins to slow and the last bits pass it by. Time for the shot is textbook standard reentry time if the guidence systems actually get everything right. 8. Just getting the fact right that the Soyuz design is meant to land on solid ground is worth a few brownie points.
The numbers you cite are very unusual, and only found among the youngest applicants and particularly what you would call the working poor, in some select states. Waiting lists to get insurance at $75 a month through state governments can have 18 month delays, or worse. My own native state of Tennessee tried to implement a system called Tenncare, which had prices in that range, but had to force many poorer applicants off the system and throttle it back, and they now have a situation where they announce once or twice a year that there are openings, to be filled on a single date, only to see up to forty times as many people apply as can be added (makes me glad I moved - even though I'm making a lot more than $100 a week and now paying a state income tax, the thought of being uninsurable by the private sector, in Tennessee, should be scary to just about anybody without a trust fund to fall back on.).
But, even if that price was common for white collar or skilled blue collar workers, your ratio would be about 3/16ths of total income. For a married couple, with one of them already unable to work because of illness, that price would approximately double to about 6/16ths, and a single parent with one or two children could similarly expect to see it double or worse. Older people could expect to see numbers double or quadruple that while still being years from retirement, and for older married couples, the risk that one of them would become ill would become a constantly increasing nightmare. In other words, if the numbers you suggest were widely true, it would still be financially extremely foolish for two young, healthy people to marry, even with deliberately, carefullyy postponing having children in hopes of moving up into an income bracket that could afford them, for fear that one might become to sick to work and put all the burden of insuring both on the other one. What's wrong with a system that was made by people who want the poor to do the "responsible" thing, but actually makes the risks for people who do the "responsible" thing so great that the penalties for irrisponsibility are effectively no worse? That sums up many state health care policies quite well.
That's the real point - the ACA was a compromise, where the conservatives wanted to avoid single payer, and to keep a large and ongoing role for the existing businesses in the industry, and the got what they asked for. Now, they keep trying to force re-negotiation after re-negotiation, to get more. If we just use the humorous definition of an "honest" politician - one who once bought, stays bought, there are a large percentage of conservatives who can't live up to even that tongue in cheek definition of honest. That's not normal politics. Some people keep saying both sides are part of the problem, because they see both sides making some of the usual back room deals, and some people aren't yet noticing it's overwhelmingly one side that won't stick to the deals they made and wants to keep re-negotiating until the "compromise" is 100% their way.
To the people who have elected a politician who won't stick to his "final" deals, I don't care how popular that rep is in their home district, they weill never be able to get anyting they promise you for you, once it becomes obvious to the people they have to work with that they don't regard their promises to other politicians as binding. There's a lot of new representitives who are already getting that reputation, and you can keep sending them to Washington, but they won't get on any of the powerful comittees, they certainly won't be able to keep any promises they make to you in the future, and they will have literally hundreds of powerful people looking to sink their careers on any pretext possible.
While we are at it, the Earned income Tax Credit was a conservative idea, to move people from wellfare to "workfare". It's an idea that was once too conservative for Richard M. Nixon. It was supposed to fix every "problem" America was having with "entitlement programs". it was conservative politicians who promised that adopting the EITC would mean continuous surplusses and never having to touch Social Security. Now we have a breed of conservatives who keep referring to the EITC as a liberal creation, blaming it on conveniently dead liberals such as Teddy Kennedy, and saying it's "part of the problem", and pushing to get rid of it. Given that example, can anyone honestly claim that the conservative faction will keep ANY parts of the ACA, such as the no excusion for prior conditions rules, or people being able to keep their college age child on their health insurance? If you're thinking that there are some good ideas in the ACA, but as a whole, the thing is too big, complex, and unweildy, I sympathise, but there have been people fighting against every single tiny part, and for moving back to a pre-New Deal model for Medicare as well,
If you had a real point, you didn't make it. Instead, you're throwing around quasi-legal terms that don't fit the situation, and demanding other people figure out what they mean without giving citations, which looks like you don't really understand your point. Then you're claiming a lot of other people, both Aereo and Slashdot readers, don't really understand it - just maybe, the problem is at your end!
... but I don't think I want a military intelligence specialist who has been ordered to find weapons of mass distruction on satellite photos working them over with this sort of software either...
When you try to define an observer in Physics, you run into a property of Quantum Mechanics. There, an observer is, for example, any outside particle that becomes involved in a state vector. When the state vector begins to impact what the particle is doing, that "collapses the vector", and the quantum state, which is until then is theoretically only a probablity, becomes an actual event, from the 'perspective' of that particle. You can also describe this process in terms of fields instead of particles, which still has much the same implications. Either way, you get an infinte regress, as it is possible to define a new state vector that includes that particle, and collapse that vector as it interacts with another particle, and so on.
If you try to define an observer only as being capable of making some sort of interpretation, i.e., (from your own examples), by doing a prediction or applying a convention, you get an interesting problem. Schrodenger described this in the famous Cat Paradox, but let's scale it up a bit. If an observer has to be able to think, even very simplistically, then we can't logically ask what Jupiter is. I can, for example, say that, about an hour ago, Jupiter was a planet. because I looked up and saw it, and was capable of thinking about the difference between a planet and other things that look like one. But Jupiter, right now, isn't any actual thing, it's an uncollapsed state vector involving umpteen bajillion fundamental particles and a relativistic light cone about an hour long, and all of that becomes just a probability and not an actuality. If there's limitations like you have suggested, then any time it's cloudy everywhere a moderately educated person can see Jupiter and identify it, the state vector lengthens until the rain goes away, potentially becoming many hours long. That's one damned big 'cat', in an even bigger 'box'. Schrodinger figured a macroscopic object like a cat was big enough to show how some arguments were absurd.
By this interpretation, every tree that falls in a forest with no observer around not only doesn't make a sound, it's an uncollapsed state vector until something which knows the difference between a tree and a shrub comes along. Does an insect tasting the fallen tree need to know that its a dead tree and not some other cellulose object before the state vector collapses? If we are the only astronomical civilization in the universe, did all those objects in the Hubble deep field photo just become objects when Hubble took the shot, or even when some human first looked at the picture? All the universe that lies outside 'the' observable radius could be one gigantic uncollapsed quantum probability function, not yet a thing, and since it is moveing away to fast for light to ever reach us, never to be an actual thing.
All that's implied if encoding and decoding were fundamental, which Is probably why you don't like that interpretation much. If encoding and decoding are fundamental, that pretty much implies a "Big G" god to take the whole universe from probabilistic function to actuality, by observing from every point, or else a vast epistemological limbo surrounds our tiny bubble of observations. We can justify claiming that mathematical calculation based models describe a lot of events in a way that makes them easier to address, and such, as you've suggested, but if we claim to know for a fact that these reflect a fundamental truth, we'e claiming to know that something omnescient exists, and that's probably not a place a lot of the 'universe as computation' theorists want to go.
It's not just about morality. Copyright violation (In the US, at least, I'm not sure if it ever was under the older European system) was all originally a tort. To sue for civil damages, yes, you normally have to show there actually are damages. Copyright law only started using statutory damages in the 2000's, and the US got by with considering actual damages only for over 200 years, before anyone thought it needed changed. Copyright law still covers cases where the matter ends up in a civil suit rather than criminal courts.
Profits are therefore still relevant, so long as getting a conviction, or just threatening to seek one, also supports winning civil suits. What we have now allows the possibility of people paying statutory damages to other people who have not in fact been damaged, and criminal law being used to support that civil litigation trick. That's not good law, and there's plenty of practical reasons not to do laws like that.
This also points up that people who don't know the law covers torts as well as crimes should learn before they use a word such as "illegal" in a blanket way and think they are shining light on the subject. Recognizing that copyright torts still exist means that a claim that "profits are irrelevant" becomes self-evidently false. Knowing that criminal prosecution is often threatened in this area to force capitulation on civil claims makes it generally relevant to all current copyright cases and laws. But that's not particularly a moral point - torts are not about moral action - responsible is not the same thing as guilty, and charge abuse is not just happening in copyright cases, even if it's very common there.
Now taking the thread back to support your moral point - declaring that the profits don't matter means pointing out the immorality of getting paid for NOT having been harmed can't enter the discussion. To run with the rape analogy, someone is trying to declare that the court in a rape case should not consider whether the rapist is actually HIV+ or not before they choose to seek a charge of aggravated rape. (yes, that's only roughly analogous, maybe I could get closer with a car anaolgy).
Knowing somebody shows a proclivity to commit murder doesn't require immediate arrest to stop them from just maybe attempting another mirder later. Even if the people interpreting the law re. "reckless indifference", "depraved indifference", et. al. were correct that the FBI was absolutely required to act on the information, then consider, building a good, solid case where the criminal may face 40 years or so sentence is a responsible choice of action, not an inaction. It's not ignoring indications the person may kill other people, It's recognizing that you don't have a particular target that looks likely to be in imminent danger. It's taking steps that mean the criminal will eventually be out of action for a longer time than if law enforcement acts precipitately. Particularly if the FBI agents think the person is unlikely to ever reform, they arguably may also think the total chance of more murders will be less if the criminal gets a lengthy sentence in a higher security facility. If the FBI knows the motive for the criminal to seek a hit man in the first place, then they can also judge whether the criminal actually has plans to kill some specific body else, rather than merely having shown potential to maybe, someday, be in another situation where they might try it again, and can make a judgement call about the relative risks. Doing that is what's supposed to happen, not "reckless indiference".
Under US law, there's a very specific definition of Treason, and Snowden, at least, hasn't come anywhere close to it. (I don't see any real case for the others either, and a military court evidently agrees with my assessment about how far Manning's actions fell short of Treason, but for Snowden in particular, there just isn't anything to support even impaneling a grand jury to look at a claim of Treason - hell there isn't anything that would justify putting a detective on the job of investigating further.).
It's like Murder. It really doesn't matter if fifty million Americans think a person has comitted murder by leaving the cap off their toothpaste, those fifty million are just plain wrong. What's scary is the big chunk of those fifty million who say things like, "I don't give a damn what the Constitution says - Screw what the Constitution says, he's still really a traitor.". How did we end up with so many people who who seem to hate everything America stands for, yet want to punish somebody else with death for not loving America enough?
Plus, Helium is a waste product of Hydrogen fusion. Getting it out of there should make the sun stay on the main sequence longer before converting to higher order fusion and becoming a Red Giant. Sounds like we could use all the Helium the sun's got, and save the solar system from the menace of bloated communist stellar conversion..
Federal grants to buy machines such as MRI mean getting one can be dirt cheap for a rural or poverty zone hospital. However, by act of congress, these grants are for the equipment only, not for training or paying for operators or maintainers, which still has to be funded locally, and is an ongoing cost that can eventually eclipse all the original costs. Having the item offline for lack of trained personnel by definition means actual working supply may or may not exceed demand, but if you include the stuff that is installed and just awaiting actual workers, (or in many cases, still sitting in crates), you get a much bigger number for supply. A real economic analysis would also have to include situations where scarce technician support means a hospital or clinic gets to run a machine for, say, 4 hours every second wednesday, and that one area tech gets paid (inefficiently) to drive to multiple locations each day..
How this affects helium use is a different issue. I'd figure if it's not hooked up yet, it's not being kept supercooled while just sitting around, but if it's being run on a very part time basis, it probably entails a seriously less efficient use of Helium..
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Because you know for an absolute fact that no one will ever rape you?
Because no one will ever expose you through blood or other fluids? It must be nice to have God's personal assurance nobody that's HIV positive will ever get stabbed near you (or just get nicked on something).
Because you are such an infallible judge of character that that person you enter into a long term monagamous realationship with will absolutely never lie to you?
Get away from work to go to the Dr. and go shop!
That's going to be a problem. You see, most of these Sears that are closed were the last or near last stores in their malls to close. The little stores went out first, and the big anchor stores held on as the malls got emptier and emptier. So generally, there's little or no place around them for people to shop.
The last bunch of people to try and reform the standard calender were the revolutionary French, under Romme, Ferry and Dupuis. They had the assistance and support of the chemist de Morveau, and the astronomers Lagrange and Lalande, but it still didn't catch on. Strangely, the Metric System started from the same roots, and became widely accepted.
If we're going to get rid of religious calendar references, how about more genral reform? "Venerial" is a word derived from Venus, the goddess of lurve. Elemental quicksilver is 'incorrectly' named after the god Mercury, and a similar problem exists for element number 90 (named after some guy in the Norse pantheon). All Hallows Eve, Walpurgusnacht, and various other holidays, trace to (very religious) calendar of the Celts. Many of our finest automobiles are named after Totemic animals, often of Native American mystical traditions. Considering this too much could drive a man crazy - I'm starting to feel superstitious and even ocultistic for calling the tallest mountain in North America Denali instead of Mount McKinley.
Isn't CAGW government selling fear?
Isn't trying to pass gun control laws instead of mentally ill control laws selling fear?
Isn't shutting down national parks at extra cost because non-essential government workers are furloughed selling fear?
Isn't ignoring a debt ceiling because of promised financial doom selling fear?
Short answers: No, No, No, and WTF?
Longer Answers:
1. CAGW is a solidly demonstrated model. Some other theories based on it don't have quite that much evidence yet, but still have some pretty strong chance of being right. In just the last decade, we have had two hurricane seasons which started earlier than what was considered the 'safe' season starting date or lasted beyond the 'safe' ending date. We've had a season where they literally had to add names to the lists to cover all the storms and another that came close.
In the US, we've had a tornado season where there were over 500 storms confirmed on radar, when the worst season before it was around 350 (and yes, you can break that data down to look at just the places where doppler radar has been around 20 or 30 years or more, and see the same exceptional spikes in locales where we have a good, long term average for radar data, not just eye witness reports).
We've just had a typhoon this year that is estimated to have been off the top of the measurement scale. Most of the worst storm events, such as The New Orleans and New York hurricanes, weren't even part of those unusually bad overall seasons.
We've had all sorts of records for rainfall or droubt broken in spectacular ways, in places where the weather records go back hundreds of years, or for some parts of Europe, 15 hundred to two thousand or so, and the high and low rainfall regions shifting shows patterns on large scales consistent with AGW related theories. All that's simply facts - if it makes some people afraid, well, they are still facts. People are repeating them because some people are denying they are facts, not just to cause fear. If some people suspect it's all connected to the more basic AGW theories, well, I suspect a lot of it is, although I'm open to alternatives until and unless the data builds up enough to be more certain.
2. Several of the proposed gun control laws you mention included background checks as their first and foremost part - Background checks ARE "mentally Ill control laws". Proposed by the "left" - shot down by the NRA.
3. The sequester was supposed to force the two parties to find better solutions. By definition, it didn't make sensible cuts, for example, it cut the IRS budget, when that meant there were less taxes collected so the problem automatically got worse. Criticising the sequester because it didn't have a bunch of sensible exceptions is criticising it for being exactly what it was supposed to be. What's your alternative, give one side 100% of what it wants and only then start negotiating? Gee, if only the sequester had forced congress to come together and pass a budget without using any of that unpleasant force part...
4. This question makes no sense. The people who want to raise the debt ceiling don't believe the promises of financial doom. They are the ones arguing that we should not be afraid. The people who want to keep the debt ceiling do believe the promises of financial doom, and so rightly or wrongly want us to be afraid of what happens if the others ignore those promises. Are you really claiming with a straight face that the "left" are the people fear mongering about the deficit?
I ran Win ME for about 2 years, about the same time as I started using Linux (on seperate boxes). It did run with better uptimes/stability than Win 98 SE, so I think I'm agreeing with your "more reliable" opinion. I liked Win 98 well enough, especially SE. Storm Linux 2000 didn't seem all that impressive compared to either version of Windows around that time, but Linux gradually pulled ahead, at least in my book. I still support Windows boxes at work and for family, and liked XP (after the first Service Pack came out), and 7's not too bad, but for me, Linux has pulled ahead on several counts.
There were a few real things wrong with Win ME, even for its time. I like fancy desktops and skinnable programs, so I started running and designing skins for various freeware programs that could 'fake' "Alpha channel" transparency in 98, produce non-rectangular windows, and generally enhance Windows visuals - XXCalc, Sonique, Kjofol, early versions of Winamp, Beatnik Internet clock, several translucent notepad variants, little programs such as that. I learned to hack the Windows 98 registry to make the background behind icon text transparent, change the start menu clock fonts, and many other little tricks, mostly for the same reason, When ME came along, It broke a great many things along these lines in the freeware customization scene, even though it supposedly didn't have any significant advances in transparency rendering, by its own admission. Microsoft did so many strange things in the registry (changing an enormous number of variable types from numeric to Boolean, or vice versa, where it just plain wasn't sensible, or, even more often, telling developers that a variable was now of some type, but experimenting with it proved it wasn't.), I swiftly got the feeling they were trying to obfuscate the registry, (and for that matter DLLs and video support) just to make it impossible for third parties to work with them unless they had the financial status to become what Microsoft was starting to call Microsoft Trusted Partners. To me, it came off as petty, as though Microsoft felt insulted anyone was trying to change the desktop appearance that much.
After a few months, there were more serious freeware programs that started running into the same thing, I.e. there were early replacements for Windows Explorer that added some real functionality, such as multi-pane versions, or search tools that let the user do searches with the full range of regular expressions, or adaptations of most of the Berkeley UNIX command line tools, or drive defragmenting programs that ran about 800% faster than the stock Defrag. It seemed like every time Microsoft announced a patch for something, it broke some other functionality, far removed from what they said the patch was supposed to do, and adversely impacted these freeware programs. I don't know if Microsoft did any of that deliberately - but I do know that several of those programmers who stopped updating their freeware creations damned sure thought it was deliberate.
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
- Damon Runyan
At least one of the articles I've seen on this thing this week mentions a possible Strike role variant. If the whole spectrum of SR-72s to come is based around a single, unmanned design, we're basically looking at the US considering building an unmanned Nuclear Bomber. Just as the SR-71 led to the YF-12 / 12A Interceptor, this design is supposed to transition from a Recon role to a more active combat version, but it's interesting that the powers that be are talking Strategic Bomber rather than a more defensive craft.
I'm thinking you meant to say "Gnome", not "Gone", but I have to admit, as a typo, it makes one hell of a Freudian Slip. I won't say I wish Gnome was Gone, but I do wish the Gnome team would restore some user option control, and even extend it. Gnome has pruned a lot with version 3 and the 3.X's, and I would even think joining in the big bug fix movement should be a lesser priority than for KDE or any of the others to join in. A massively less buggy version of a still heavily restricted Gnome might say that they had no plans to ever expand user control again, for fear of reverting to an overall buggier condition. The Gnome developers jumping on the bug fix bandwagon wouldn't necessarily just be responsible coding in the way it would for, say Enlightenment or Libreoffice, it could also become a way of further burning their bridges - making it even harder for them to restore any customization features they've taken out because overall buggyness would (temporarily) go back up. At this point, Gnome 3.10 (current) seems to have expanded user control over the notifications section a bit, a welcome change in my opinion,
It could be good if lots of window managers, productivity software and even games for Linux all got interested in a coordinated bug-fixing cycle to back the kernel developers themselves, and it just might even lead to good publicity for Linux. It could be good if particular distros really focused on their installers, individual package management and such to make them as rock solid as the new base. I know that some people are going to be more eager to focus on bug fixing themselves if they know the underpinnings won't be glitching up on them as much. I'd certainly welcome the Gnome developers getting on the wagon too, but I can only hope they do it for the sake of creating a more solid but expansible product, not a more tightly locked down one.
It's not that obvious, or I wouldn't see so damned many posts on Slashdot where people insist that you can prove the scientific method itself from within science, and other such fallacies. Empiricism is not really at all the same as Naive Realism, and yet there are plenty of people here who argue as though they were classic Realists, but think they are arguing "Scientifically".
How can the "need to create culture" possibly be a weak argument? The US Constitution gives the goal of promoting progress in the sciences and useful arts as the very reason why copyright is allowed to exist under US law. Functionally, creating new culture certainly sounds like it falls under that clause -so how can the very thing which, constitutionally speaking, justifies copyright, be a weak argument, one way or the other?
Let's look at which way the arguement really goes, as well. Isn't it more likely, in general, that someone is claing the need to create culture is an argument for diluting or eliminating copyright, as is certainly the case for Antigua in this story? You've given us a couple of axioms, the first definitely true, and the second is technically a matter of opinion, but I will even grant you that second axiom freely - the timeless classics are very seldom matched by any new works. Still, your third term in your chain of logic doesn't really follow from those first two. I think you may be able to make a pretty decent rhetorical case, mind you, I just don't think you got there yet.
I find this a little depressing too, when I consider just how much porn there is out there, how easy it is to find. The idea that these individuals somehow need more of it, enough that they will go to the extra trouble of trying to get more in public, on systems that are usually trying to make finding it more difficult, around people who must be indicating some sort of annoyance at least now and then. Often they are at risk of being thrown out of the libraries - that's certainly policy at mine, if they don't decide the viewer has been willfully exposing any children present to it and actually call a cop, but there's a bunch of people trying it anyway. And they will look right at the police and say things like "I didn't think about them looking over my shoulder - that's their parent's job. And besides, they asked me to let them look." Then they will act all surprised when "the man" takes them in. I actually saw and heard one guy explain to the police that his friend wouldn't let him borrow said friend's PC anymore, because the friend caught him looking for "underage" girls. Like saying something like this is going to get somebody out of trouble.
I agree that bul;lying is very real and the old adage about sticks and stones is a lie, but I have to say that the number of kids who have committed or attempted suicide after being bullied to death is exactly zero.
I've noticed another such contradiction in so much of Libertarian doctrine. If Government really always entails the legitimizing of some uses of force by their being in response to others initiating force, and should stay out of all other areas where someone has not initiated force, then what about taxation to pay for those 'legitimate' aims? So long as there's some chance, any chance, not enough people will voluntarily pay to fund courts, police, and military defense, government may have to initiate force against those who don't 'voluntarily' pay for their share. But that means there's at least one purpose that is legitimate to the government, that doesn't involve a response to pre-existing force, and that's raising the money to pay for it.
Now that's the extreme libertarian (small "l") position, and it's easy to call it a straw man, but let's look at a more nuanced and expanded version of libertarianism as a real philosophy. It doesn't help if the typical libertarian model adds fraud, threatening or other such things to crimes of direct force, taxation itself is outside of those categories as well. You can also substitute some plan where the costs of government are so low that "voluntary payments are always going to be enough" and there's no force needed for taxation, but the accounting and tracking funds, auditing where they go, making sure waste stays low, and such is still outside of the group of things libertarians claim are legitimate functions of government. Fund raising and fund management areas are supposed to be 'outside' of the systems they manage - If these functions aren't 'outside', then most of use would say the regulatory department has been "captured" by the police or military departments, and that's not, again to most of us, a good thing. I doubt it's seen as a good thing under libertarian philosophies either.
If it's legitimate for government to implement even just one department - we'll call it a "department of fund-raising and management" so as not to take sides on whether taxation by compulsion must be allowed, but still a department outside of the libertarian law enforcement and military group, why is it necessarily illegitimate for the government to implement any others? Why, for example, can't governments take 'promoting the general wellfare' as their legitimizing mandate for a dept. of transportation, even if that dept. is not about using force in response to force? The dept. of fund raising and management isn''t about that either.
If Libertarianism holds that fund raising has to be by voluntary means so as not to give a department, outside the force-response departments, power it should not have, why can't government implement other departments that also have no power to respond to force? What's fundamentally wrong under a libertarian position with the government doing any program that doesn't involve response to force, on a purely voluntarily funded basis? If military and police functions can be completely funded on a voluntary basis, why can't people choose voluntarily to fund something like an educational system or, for that matter, a space program?
Libertarians seem to take the position that people will always be willing to pay enough to voluntarily fund the police/military budget needed, but won't ever voluntarily pay for other things. That seems spurious. What happens if court fees just happen to raise more money than the libertarian government needs for its police and military departments? Do they have to give those fees back? What philosophical point in libertarian thinking holds that the government can't keep voluntarily donated revenues and put them to some non-forcible use, but must refund them? Isn't the free market about charging what the customer will see as a price they are willing to pay for the service? Why should our hypothetical government be the only entity that must be compelled to charge less than t
There's proprtionality to consider. Deep impact was made at the same time as Armageddon, and while it didn't get all the science right, it came quite a ways closer, Armageddon get's dissed because it went so far out on some very thin limbs, and somebody else at the same time made a better movie on a lower budget.
I'm pretty OK with Gravity though. The movie came out well after the last space shuttle mission, so everyone should know that bird is not still flying. Gravity is therefore set in some alternate universe where more shuttles were built and the program is still ongoing, and also so the Hubble and ISS may have been placed in more similar orbits, the manned maneuvering packs designed differently and retained longer, the Chinese decided to locate their station close to the ISS, etc.
It's like an early Tom Clancy novel. The Japanese never really built a covert nuclear weapons program, but flying an apache 12 feet above a railroad track and having AWACs style radar think it's a bullet train until it pops straight up at them might actually work all the same. Clancy may have been utterly fictitious in attributing the sorts of motives he did to the Japanese, but he made damned sure to check the top speed and operational ceiling of his helecopters, whether they could actually be deployed by sub, and many other things about them.
In Gravity, we had:
1. the death of the mission specialist by having his head punched out, with a pretty realistic injury appearance.
2. The rest of the shuttle crew's deaths by decompression, also realisticly portrayed and with the fact that they would normally not be suited up just because the bay doors were open included. Note that in that scene, most or all of the bridge instrumentation and lighting is down - which may explain one of the supposed inaccuracies - why automatic stabilizing jets didn't fire when the shuttle was first hit, as it looks like the same impact seems to have killed both the bridge crew and the electronics.
3. The use of a fire extinguisher as an improvised propulsion unit, and our heroine's having the sense to grab one rather than push it away. If it's not technically accurate as to how much thrust it would supply, at least it had a real science feel as good as a Clarke or Heinlein story.
4. A realistic fire in space, with a lengthy smouldering period as 0-G kept the smoke from leaving the vicinity of the flame, and eventual flashover as it found sufficient oxidizables to outrace the smothering effect.
5. Realistic air pressure aboard the first Soyuz design capsule (what, you thought spacecraft are pressurized to a full 15 PSI?). Hypoxia in a young healthy adult and its different symptoms from such conditions as Emphasemic Hypoxia with accompanying Peripheral or Organismic Cyanosis treated with medical accuracy. (Periods of recovering from brief unconsiousness to full mental awareness are documented in highly athletic people suffering from suddon onset Hypoxia and not normally in cases where the cause is age or illness, but that's an unusual situation with the ambiguous "religious vision" as part of it, so whether the film got that intentionally right or just hit it by accident is up to the viewer).
6. A Soyuz style capsule stabilizing heat shield down from a tumble in the same manner as a boat tail bullet as it hits denser air, (Something the original Russian designers have long bragged about it being designed to do better than the Apollo, which was in turn supposedly better than the Gemini series).
7. Debris begins to glow with heat at altitudes where the air is still to thin to conduct much sound. Realistic hypersonic decelleration booms, increasing in volume as the air begins to bite,and unshielded debris shredding and vaporizing follow, and it all happens in very accurate realtime with the visuals confirming what the craft's altitude should be as it begins grabbing real air, begins to slow and the last bits pass it by. Time for the shot is textbook standard reentry time if the guidence systems actually get everything right.
8. Just getting the fact right that the Soyuz design is meant to land on solid ground is worth a few brownie points.
The numbers you cite are very unusual, and only found among the youngest applicants and particularly what you would call the working poor, in some select states. Waiting lists to get insurance at $75 a month through state governments can have 18 month delays, or worse. My own native state of Tennessee tried to implement a system called Tenncare, which had prices in that range, but had to force many poorer applicants off the system and throttle it back, and they now have a situation where they announce once or twice a year that there are openings, to be filled on a single date, only to see up to forty times as many people apply as can be added (makes me glad I moved - even though I'm making a lot more than $100 a week and now paying a state income tax, the thought of being uninsurable by the private sector, in Tennessee, should be scary to just about anybody without a trust fund to fall back on.).
But, even if that price was common for white collar or skilled blue collar workers, your ratio would be about 3/16ths of total income. For a married couple, with one of them already unable to work because of illness, that price would approximately double to about 6/16ths, and a single parent with one or two children could similarly expect to see it double or worse. Older people could expect to see numbers double or quadruple that while still being years from retirement, and for older married couples, the risk that one of them would become ill would become a constantly increasing nightmare. In other words, if the numbers you suggest were widely true, it would still be financially extremely foolish for two young, healthy people to marry, even with deliberately, carefullyy postponing having children in hopes of moving up into an income bracket that could afford them, for fear that one might become to sick to work and put all the burden of insuring both on the other one. What's wrong with a system that was made by people who want the poor to do the "responsible" thing, but actually makes the risks for people who do the "responsible" thing so great that the penalties for irrisponsibility are effectively no worse? That sums up many state health care policies quite well.
That's the real point - the ACA was a compromise, where the conservatives wanted to avoid single payer, and to keep a large and ongoing role for the existing businesses in the industry, and the got what they asked for. Now, they keep trying to force re-negotiation after re-negotiation, to get more. If we just use the humorous definition of an "honest" politician - one who once bought, stays bought, there are a large percentage of conservatives who can't live up to even that tongue in cheek definition of honest. That's not normal politics. Some people keep saying both sides are part of the problem, because they see both sides making some of the usual back room deals, and some people aren't yet noticing it's overwhelmingly one side that won't stick to the deals they made and wants to keep re-negotiating until the "compromise" is 100% their way.
To the people who have elected a politician who won't stick to his "final" deals, I don't care how popular that rep is in their home district, they weill never be able to get anyting they promise you for you, once it becomes obvious to the people they have to work with that they don't regard their promises to other politicians as binding. There's a lot of new representitives who are already getting that reputation, and you can keep sending them to Washington, but they won't get on any of the powerful comittees, they certainly won't be able to keep any promises they make to you in the future, and they will have literally hundreds of powerful people looking to sink their careers on any pretext possible.
While we are at it, the Earned income Tax Credit was a conservative idea, to move people from wellfare to "workfare". It's an idea that was once too conservative for Richard M. Nixon. It was supposed to fix every "problem" America was having with "entitlement programs". it was conservative politicians who promised that adopting the EITC would mean continuous surplusses and never having to touch Social Security. Now we have a breed of conservatives who keep referring to the EITC as a liberal creation, blaming it on conveniently dead liberals such as Teddy Kennedy, and saying it's "part of the problem", and pushing to get rid of it. Given that example, can anyone honestly claim that the conservative faction will keep ANY parts of the ACA, such as the no excusion for prior conditions rules, or people being able to keep their college age child on their health insurance? If you're thinking that there are some good ideas in the ACA, but as a whole, the thing is too big, complex, and unweildy, I sympathise, but there have been people fighting against every single tiny part, and for moving back to a pre-New Deal model for Medicare as well,
The "Lemon test" relates to the constitutional clause governing the establishment of religion, and has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_v._Kurtzman
http://www.usconstitution.net/lemon.html
If you had a real point, you didn't make it. Instead, you're throwing around quasi-legal terms that don't fit the situation, and demanding other people figure out what they mean without giving citations, which looks like you don't really understand your point. Then you're claiming a lot of other people, both Aereo and Slashdot readers, don't really understand it - just maybe, the problem is at your end!
... but I don't think I want a military intelligence specialist who has been ordered to find weapons of mass distruction on satellite photos working them over with this sort of software either ...
I have absolutely no interest in learning if I exist inside a simulation or not, unless it's programed with accessable cheat codes.
When you try to define an observer in Physics, you run into a property of Quantum Mechanics. There, an observer is, for example, any outside particle that becomes involved in a state vector. When the state vector begins to impact what the particle is doing, that "collapses the vector", and the quantum state, which is until then is theoretically only a probablity, becomes an actual event, from the 'perspective' of that particle. You can also describe this process in terms of fields instead of particles, which still has much the same implications. Either way, you get an infinte regress, as it is possible to define a new state vector that includes that particle, and collapse that vector as it interacts with another particle, and so on.
If you try to define an observer only as being capable of making some sort of interpretation, i.e., (from your own examples), by doing a prediction or applying a convention, you get an interesting problem. Schrodenger described this in the famous Cat Paradox, but let's scale it up a bit. If an observer has to be able to think, even very simplistically, then we can't logically ask what Jupiter is. I can, for example, say that, about an hour ago, Jupiter was a planet. because I looked up and saw it, and was capable of thinking about the difference between a planet and other things that look like one. But Jupiter, right now, isn't any actual thing, it's an uncollapsed state vector involving umpteen bajillion fundamental particles and a relativistic light cone about an hour long, and all of that becomes just a probability and not an actuality. If there's limitations like you have suggested, then any time it's cloudy everywhere a moderately educated person can see Jupiter and identify it, the state vector lengthens until the rain goes away, potentially becoming many hours long. That's one damned big 'cat', in an even bigger 'box'. Schrodinger figured a macroscopic object like a cat was big enough to show how some arguments were absurd.
By this interpretation, every tree that falls in a forest with no observer around not only doesn't make a sound, it's an uncollapsed state vector until something which knows the difference between a tree and a shrub comes along. Does an insect tasting the fallen tree need to know that its a dead tree and not some other cellulose object before the state vector collapses? If we are the only astronomical civilization in the universe, did all those objects in the Hubble deep field photo just become objects when Hubble took the shot, or even when some human first looked at the picture? All the universe that lies outside 'the' observable radius could be one gigantic uncollapsed quantum probability function, not yet a thing, and since it is moveing away to fast for light to ever reach us, never to be an actual thing.
All that's implied if encoding and decoding were fundamental, which Is probably why you don't like that interpretation much. If encoding and decoding are fundamental, that pretty much implies a "Big G" god to take the whole universe from probabilistic function to actuality, by observing from every point, or else a vast epistemological limbo surrounds our tiny bubble of observations. We can justify claiming that mathematical calculation based models describe a lot of events in a way that makes them easier to address, and such, as you've suggested, but if we claim to know for a fact that these reflect a fundamental truth, we'e claiming to know that something omnescient exists, and that's probably not a place a lot of the 'universe as computation' theorists want to go.
It's not just about morality. Copyright violation (In the US, at least, I'm not sure if it ever was under the older European system) was all originally a tort. To sue for civil damages, yes, you normally have to show there actually are damages. Copyright law only started using statutory damages in the 2000's, and the US got by with considering actual damages only for over 200 years, before anyone thought it needed changed. Copyright law still covers cases where the matter ends up in a civil suit rather than criminal courts.
Profits are therefore still relevant, so long as getting a conviction, or just threatening to seek one, also supports winning civil suits. What we have now allows the possibility of people paying statutory damages to other people who have not in fact been damaged, and criminal law being used to support that civil litigation trick. That's not good law, and there's plenty of practical reasons not to do laws like that.
This also points up that people who don't know the law covers torts as well as crimes should learn before they use a word such as "illegal" in a blanket way and think they are shining light on the subject. Recognizing that copyright torts still exist means that a claim that "profits are irrelevant" becomes self-evidently false. Knowing that criminal prosecution is often threatened in this area to force capitulation on civil claims makes it generally relevant to all current copyright cases and laws. But that's not particularly a moral point - torts are not about moral action - responsible is not the same thing as guilty, and charge abuse is not just happening in copyright cases, even if it's very common there.
Now taking the thread back to support your moral point - declaring that the profits don't matter means pointing out the immorality of getting paid for NOT having been harmed can't enter the discussion. To run with the rape analogy, someone is trying to declare that the court in a rape case should not consider whether the rapist is actually HIV+ or not before they choose to seek a charge of aggravated rape. (yes, that's only roughly analogous, maybe I could get closer with a car anaolgy).
Knowing somebody shows a proclivity to commit murder doesn't require immediate arrest to stop them from just maybe attempting another mirder later. Even if the people interpreting the law re. "reckless indifference", "depraved indifference", et. al. were correct that the FBI was absolutely required to act on the information, then consider, building a good, solid case where the criminal may face 40 years or so sentence is a responsible choice of action, not an inaction. It's not ignoring indications the person may kill other people, It's recognizing that you don't have a particular target that looks likely to be in imminent danger. It's taking steps that mean the criminal will eventually be out of action for a longer time than if law enforcement acts precipitately. Particularly if the FBI agents think the person is unlikely to ever reform, they arguably may also think the total chance of more murders will be less if the criminal gets a lengthy sentence in a higher security facility. If the FBI knows the motive for the criminal to seek a hit man in the first place, then they can also judge whether the criminal actually has plans to kill some specific body else, rather than merely having shown potential to maybe, someday, be in another situation where they might try it again, and can make a judgement call about the relative risks. Doing that is what's supposed to happen, not "reckless indiference".
Under US law, there's a very specific definition of Treason, and Snowden, at least, hasn't come anywhere close to it. (I don't see any real case for the others either, and a military court evidently agrees with my assessment about how far Manning's actions fell short of Treason, but for Snowden in particular, there just isn't anything to support even impaneling a grand jury to look at a claim of Treason - hell there isn't anything that would justify putting a detective on the job of investigating further.).
It's like Murder. It really doesn't matter if fifty million Americans think a person has comitted murder by leaving the cap off their toothpaste, those fifty million are just plain wrong. What's scary is the big chunk of those fifty million who say things like, "I don't give a damn what the Constitution says - Screw what the Constitution says, he's still really a traitor.". How did we end up with so many people who who seem to hate everything America stands for, yet want to punish somebody else with death for not loving America enough?
Plus, Helium is a waste product of Hydrogen fusion. Getting it out of there should make the sun stay on the main sequence longer before converting to higher order fusion and becoming a Red Giant. Sounds like we could use all the Helium the sun's got, and save the solar system from the menace of bloated communist stellar conversion..
Federal grants to buy machines such as MRI mean getting one can be dirt cheap for a rural or poverty zone hospital. However, by act of congress, these grants are for the equipment only, not for training or paying for operators or maintainers, which still has to be funded locally, and is an ongoing cost that can eventually eclipse all the original costs. Having the item offline for lack of trained personnel by definition means actual working supply may or may not exceed demand, but if you include the stuff that is installed and just awaiting actual workers, (or in many cases, still sitting in crates), you get a much bigger number for supply. A real economic analysis would also have to include situations where scarce technician support means a hospital or clinic gets to run a machine for, say, 4 hours every second wednesday, and that one area tech gets paid (inefficiently) to drive to multiple locations each day..
How this affects helium use is a different issue. I'd figure if it's not hooked up yet, it's not being kept supercooled while just sitting around, but if it's being run on a very part time basis, it probably entails a seriously less efficient use of Helium..