Do you really think Firefox would be the same today (for better or worse), if it had never topped a 2% market share?
What Opportunist said DOES precisely explain FreeBSD and others. If you want to make the extraordinary assertion that people who aren't using FreeBSD deliberately choose to develop apps for it instead of some other OS that they do use, go ahead. What seems to actually happen out here in the real world, is that fewer app developers are attracted to support smaller OSes and the original OS developers pick up some of the slack by also developing the core of fundamental apps, or porting apps to the OS themselves so the developers don't have to. Then there's the Debian solution, slower, stabler development so there's more time for other people to come and play in your sandbox.
If the Universe IS doing calculations, then it is as accurate as possible. You can't possibly get closer to calculating what the laws of physics say should happen than by the calculation actually being what actually does happen.
But that means the universe is either infinite, to hold infinitely long registers, or the real laws of physics don't include any infinite precision expressions. A finite universe can't, for a simple example, be multiplying some number times Pi, an infinite non-repeating decimal. Since non-truncating values are used in a tremendous number of physics formulas, the math we think describes the Universe can't possibly be what a finite Universe is using.
There are ways to keep physics related math from entailing any infinities. Planck's work,setting a minimum size for movement and duration for actions, is an example. Maybe, there will eventually be a Grand Theory of Everything, or Unified Field Theory, with no pesky infinities. But it's interesting that, if the Universe IS in some sense a computer, then a finite Universe simply HAS to have something like Quantum Mechanics, because time and space can't be infinitely divisible.
To a mathematician, the fact that QM seems to work isn't a rigorous proof that the Universe is indeed finite - all we can say for sure is that if the Universe allows infinities, then a QM like theory isn't strictly necessary. To a cosmologist, dimensions such as the Planck length are pretty strong suggestions that the Universe is finite, and that a GTU or UFT or whatever will eventually be found if we are only smart enough.
The media don't get to charge people with crimes. The Media don't get to play judge, jury, and jailor. Shakespeare can say "Glamis hath Murdered Sleep" all he wants, but the courts are who decides what murder is. As long as there exists a Supreme Court decision that copyright violation is not theft (and yes, there is at least one to that effect), the media can call it 'high puppy mutilating pedo-treason' if they want, but guess what it is. That's right, it's Copyright Violation. How many legs does a dog have if the Media calls a tail a leg?
For the publicly traded companies to stop doing this, it has to stop helping boost stock shares. That means stockholders have to learn that a company doesn't become more attractive just because it patented something, but only if that patent will actually make the company a profit.
These are the same stockholders who will sell a very profitable company short because some metric says to always sell whenever employment costs in that industry have risen to over 18% or so of total operating costs, then invest in a non-profitable company that is engaged in a lawsuit and has promised to pay a law firm 33% of the resulting profits, without realizing that same metric says those lawyers are really just more employees.
After we get to the ZZ, we're going to start over at AAA (Amorous Anesthetized Anteater), then Bellicose Bewildered Bonobo. Weirdly Weathered Wallaroo will be 29.04, of course.
(The first three on my list are all actual names among those which have been proposed for Ubuntu development codenames. I don't want to know as much about this subject as I now do. I Googled 'Ubuntu development codenames' and feel curiously the poorer for an answer.)
Rose? Are you really saying you'd take a smoking hot blonde who has never been hardened by working in the sex industry over a... Well, a smoking hot read-head who's only real flaw is a severe centurion fetish? You're missing the real option - "The three companions" (Martha Jones for the trifecta)
But Ghod forbid that this companion business should in any way be sexualised. It's not like all those sixties and seventies and eighties companions included any hot babes.
In Adam Smith's "free market", there is parity of information. Everyone involved in a transaction knows all the pertinent facts. That would mean a government can still prohibit "insider trading", since stopping transactions where some of the involved people know more than others is part of preserving the Smithian 'free market' for those transactions where everyone does have parity of information. At the risk of stressing the obvious, fraud is also a case where some party knows more than the other parties involved, so presumably the same principle apples to fraud. People who argue that the proper role of government is limited to creating the conditions where a free market is possible could include passing and enforcing such laws, although some of those people don't seem to agree.
More esoterically, there were people very soon after Smith who pointed out that it wasn't true that getting close to a perfect free market, but not all the way there, meant we also got close to all the benefits that theoretical perfect free market should bring. Being in a not quite perfect market could easily result in very suboptimal benefits to everyone involved. So, if we could never quite reach a perfect free market, it follows we don't really have any moral mandate, even if we agree totally with Adam Smith, to try and get as close as we can. What a bunch of libertarians might call Stat-ism could even be the best actually realizable alternative to an unrealizable 'perfect free market'.
Metaphorically, the market as a whole can be like the case where the optimal free market price of an airline ticket to Hiwaii is $ 1,000. The potential buyer has only $ 987, so the market offers to get the buyer to a point 12 miles off the shore of the big island, and drop him. There are cases where getting 99% of what you really want is something that is worth absolutely nothing.
Just so we're clear here: Do you think those higher-ups care more now that there are people Occupying Wallstreet? Or are you arguing that they higher-ups will only start caring if the OWS types go to poison, garrotes, and rocket launchers?
No, no, you LIEberals don't see it! Standard & Poor, Moodys, and the rest are arms of the federal government, wholly owned subsidiaries of Freddie Mac. They gave those high ratings to junk bundles cause Obama ordered them to, six years before he got in. They had to do it for all those investment banks who weren't actually subject to any of the rules about lending, since they weren't lending banks. That's how government lending rules caused all this. OOOOPPS! New Big Lie needed! Alert! Alert! Anyone except a socialist knows it was the Albanian Squirrel Mafia, not our friends the bankers!
Thank you for speaking for me, a former armored cav officer, who could have sworn he knew a little bit about what stress was after Desert Shield/Storm. You're part of that same group you are holding yourself oh, so superior to. I can think of at least a dozen other Slashdotters here who could show you and the OP a thing or two about enduring real stress. Cheap sophomore cynicism is just that, and you are contributing absolutely nothing to this conversation. You're a tapeworm, sticking up for another tapeworm.
The real question is, why do the "MSM", ISPs, and others cooperate so easily with the government? Why, as you put it '"trip over themselves to kiss the ring"? You mentioned Occupy Wallstreet, but for the sake of making my point apolitical, let's just assume somebody, maybe an OWS splinter group, maybe a Tea Party splinter group, maybe the Committee to Bronze Nixon's Balls and Hang Them from the St. Louis Arch (CtBNBaHTftStLA), decides to get seriously violent. What happens to a reporter or an editor or a sysadmin, if there is a large, violent revolutionary group blowing up railways and reactor cooling towers, and they see those media employees as really just another arm of the government octopus? Does a small cell of heavily armed terrorists decide to kick in the doors of CIA headquarters and shoot it out with equally armed federal agents, or do they take their complaint to some corporation's boardroom, or easier, to their rank and file personnel?
Even if the FBI behaves very nicely, and doesn't threaten media elements with dreadful penalties for less than full, enthusiastic cooperation, what about the people the FBI alleges are bad guys? Surely Sprint, Comcast, AT&T and the rest don't trust both sides of the struggle not to give them any problems? It's called blowback. Thinking you are dealing with honest, noble cops may be foolish, but how crazy is thinking you are dealing with honest, noble criminals or terrorists?
So, do government agencies put lots of pressure on the information related businesses to get cooperation? Do they maybe mention IRS audits and such whenever they think a media corp is dragging its feet? Or are they sticking to 'carrots', but with one of the 'carrots' being a promise to give extra protection to the non-state actors that help them?
The claim is that the federal government wont prosecute this possible crime. Of course not. What FEDERAL law has he violated? Even if he murdered his 16 year old daughter, it would be a crime under Texas law, not a federal crime. Hey, I'll bet the governments of Bali, New Zealand, and Monaco don't want to prosecute this judge for beating his kid either. Now there may be a real issue as to why Texas hasn't done anything...
I'm not the original AC, but I'll give you a two part argument for it's being lame. 1. The energy density for this device, while pretty spectacular, is still way, way below the range where current competing theories predict exotic results. This has been a problem for projected particle accelerator of the future designs as well, since at least before the Superconducting Supercollider design that was to be built in Texas was canceled by the US Congress. One of the reasons we have gone ahead with new accelerators even though we (as a species) are still tremendously short of achieving the energy levels needs for more direct tests is a few 'work arounds' have been theorized. These are phenomena that are in the range the machine at CERN or others can reach, but that theoretically may be indirectly influenced by Super-symmetry or other theories we can't test more directly. Without some relatively indirect test like this, the Uber-laser still won't be nearly powerful enough to accomplish anything. So, either there's some sort of indirect prediction from one of the String theory variants, or Super-symmetry, or some more exotic theory, and that indirect prediction is down in the energy range that this thing achieves, or they are basically just gambling on something completely unexpected showing up. Since the article doesn't really explain what that indirect, inferential prediction might be, It's seems more likely than not there isn't a specific one. (Of course, it's possible the interviewer didn't get everything into the article.). 2. The article also states that the energy achieved by this device will be equal to a temperature greater than the center of the sun. That sounds impressive, but we've seen some much more energetic events in astrophysics. Lots of Nova/Supernova variants, neutron star related events, and quasars involve energy densities way beyond both the center of our sun and this laser device. We should at least possibly have seen some evidence for the same kind of effects as this widget is supposed to possibly produce by studying existing astronomical events. While that's not absolutely always a good guideline, I know, in the absence of an indirect prediction based on existing theory, I'd be willing to gamble somewhat if the device aimed to mimic the energy densities of some astrophysical event and could point to theories from there as evidence for this 'hole ripping' or 'cosmic hernia' effect. It's not uncommon for sub-atomic physics to take cues from Astrophysics and Cosmology, and vice-versa, but that too doesn't seem to be happening in this case.
Whoops: To clarify my own post: A corp held by a single person or small group can't do an incentive stock option to that person or to one or more of multiple people who have more than 10% ownership. Such a corporation could offer an ISO to some other person who doesn't have more than 10% share of the corporation and is a bona-fide employee. So if Steve Jobs was on the board of Apple, he could vote to offer himself a regular stock option in a year when he was CEO, but once he held more than 10% of Apple shares, he couldn't offer himself an ISO anymore.
Actually, there is a law. In particular, for S corps, that don't pay corporate taxes of their own, the IRS requires all compensation in total (salary, pensions, stock options, etc, all taken together) to fall in a range that is "reasonable and customary for the position" . If that's not exactly pegged to a market value for executive compensation, that's because there is no standard amount for executive pay. This means the auditing agent has a fairly broad range to decide whether the total package is reasonable or not, but he or she has a table of dozens of cases that set precedent to go by.
For "C" corporations, a CEO taking a $1 salary is doable, because the corporation also pays taxes of its own and the money not paid to a CEO is profit to be taxed. It's not capital gains, its direct profit.
For those posting about stock options:
You can't pay at capital gains rates on a standard non-qualified stock option (which is what most executive options are). You may qualify for the better capital gains rate on the profit from sale of stock, if you hold the stock for at least a year, but that's not exercising an awarded option.
Here's an example: In 2008, CEO Bob gets a 1$ salary, plus the award of a stock option to buy 1000 shares of his company at 50$ each. That option spans a period that is part or all of 2009. In Sept. 2009, Bob exercises that stock option. He has turned the company around as the saying goes, and that stock is normally worth $63.47 a share. When Bob files his 2009 taxes (in 2010), he has to pay on that profit of $13.47 a share, and he pays at his normal rate, not long term capital gains. If Bob holds that stock for a year or more, he can sell it, say in Oct. 2010, and get the better capital gains rate on the sale, so if in Oct 2010 the stock is worth $68.47, Bob makes $5 profit at that time, and when he files his 2010 personal taxes in 2011, he gets the better capital gains rate on that profit.
That 1 year rule means that Bob is never even paying the same year's taxes for exercising the option and for selling the stock. If he sold the stock in the same year he exercised his option to buy it, he'd have to pay the full rate on all the profit in the same tax year.
There are Incentive stock options. There, the time from the granting of the option until it is exercised has to be at least a full year, and then the sale has to happen at least a full year after that.(Making 2 years minimum total). Here capital gains rates can apply to the whole thing as though, in some ways, the exercise and the sale were a single operation. This has some potential for the sort of abuse people are suggesting, but one of the many additional limiting rules about ISOs is that the employee must not, at the time of grant, own stock representing more than 10% of voting power of all stock outstanding (with some additional modifiers). So a corp held by a single person or small group can't do an ISO. Another rule is that the offer has to be made to an actual employee (so you can't offer it to yourself as Chairman of the Board, for example). There are dozens of other restrictions.
I don't understand why you are lumping it into this question. Because when nuclear weapons need serviced, refurbished, or decommissioned, they come under the existing authority of the Dept. of Energy, which controls those jobs. DOE drivers take them from military control and transport them, DOE contractors open them up and work on them. DOE refines the plutonium up to weapons grade. DOE machines the parts. DOE is the people who would build any new bombs if ever needed again. DOE researches better designs and safer designs for the future (Yes, some H-bombs are 'safer' than others).
If you just leave H-bombs sitting around, a little of the plutonium in them decays, gives off very highly radioactive daughter products, which also decay at various rates, and if these build up enough, the bomb stops working, plus instead of being able to work on them simply using a clean room, robotic arms, and wearing a protective suit to stop a little Alpha, you're talking about sacrificing a million dollar robot every time you open a case, as the radiation will eventually increase to enough to fry shielded electronics in minutes. Some of the unmaintained Russian bombs the DOE dismantled recently were in such states, and it cost lots to fix. If it had gone on a few more years, those weapons might have become literally impossible to dismantle (unless you want to risk a 50 Kt. "fizzle on open" spreading Radio-cobalt and Radio-polonium in amounts that would make Chernobyl look like a cracked smoke alarm case, over a multiple square mile area, by some predictions, every time you risk opening an access hatch).
Go 8 or 10 years over on servicing and we're eventually talking about radiation levels that would kill all insect and even bacterial life in seconds, lasting for weeks before they dropped to levels that would merely kill complex creatures such as us. No one's sure just how bad it can get if people delay long enough past that 8 to 10 year estimate, and no remotely one sane wants to run the tests needed to be sure. The worst of the computer models count in multiples of Hiroshima level damage and seriously predict possible multiple Texas sized areas that would be uninhabitable for centuries. (And by the way, if you retool the government seriously, this sort of risk won't stop accumulating and wait until you have your new solution in place, it will just keep on building up more problems until you get something back on track. American nukes go bad if left on the shelf just like everyone else's. That's why I was asking "What's the plan?" - If there isn't a plan for this part right now, well before Dr. Paul takes office, then he's either going to break some huge campaign promises or endanger a lot of innocent people by the time he gets one.).
YOU have said we need to shut down the agency that manages this process. Dr Paul has talked about saving money by this shut down, so he's not advocating transferring any DOE processes to control by the Dept. of Defense, as that certainly wouldn't reduce costs by the total DOE budget, as he has claimed. Ergo, either Dr. Paul is an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn that this process cannot be simply ignored or unfunded, or you are an idiot who believes a lying candidate that is promising we can save tax money simply by moving something from one compartment of the federal government to another.
You don't understand why I lumped this in with the other things? Your candidate lumped this in, you agreed with him, and I just pointed out the consequences of YOUR position. Go ahead, blame me for pointing out the truth.
I used to agree with you, but there's one huge problem with the Zombie metaphor. As they are being treated, Zombies are sort of semi-supernatural, but not really. Either they are from some sort of virus or weird radiation, or they involve magic. If you knew they were like traditional supernatural zombies, you could rely on salt or crucifixes or whatever to lay them to rest. If you knew they came from a virus, you could find scientific ways to deal with them, and they would have limits in what they could do you could use because a virus can't just let a zombie ignore all the laws of biology. The way a lot of movies treat them, Zombies somehow don't have the vulnerabilities of traditional supernatural creatures (so you can't hide in a church, secure that they can't enter hallowed ground, or bury all new dead swiftly on hollowed ground and stop storing them in morgues and such places). They don't have the vulnerabilities of a natural analog either (like rabid animals). They paradoxically have no minds at all but seem to reason their way into places where they can wait, lurk, and become ambush predators. They find routes through sewers and drains, or across fences or trenches, that would be 100% effective in thwarting a mindless creature. The 'virus' is tough enough to sometimes spread by spatter against unbroken skin or survive laying around in sunlight, yet it can't be isolated by the CDC. Some people on the inside are traitors keeping the zombie plague going.
As disaster prep goes, this is like setting up a radiation spill scenario, and allowing radiation that sometimes doesn't show up on detectors, and sometimes passes through thick layers of stone or metal, but sometimes acts like regular radiation. Or it's like a flood scenario, but you occasionally penalize the first responders for avoiding traveling through low lying areas and seeking alternate routes. Disaster training needs to set reasonable goals that the people being trained can learn from to improve the outcome when a real disaster happens, and I'm coming to think that Zombie scenarios have become negative in that respect.
(And I'm at least a semi-expert here, as I'm a former military officer, have built complex training scenarios at the military company, troop and regimental levels before, been cadre on others, either administered or scored more, have participated in several disaster managment exercises, and have taken over a dozen FEMA courses during my hitch).
How about people take the normal steps to get a leg up in life, and expect that those steps work? Get the education that lets you plant a tree properly, and also demand that no company has the right to just claim your tree may have picked up some of their genetically engineered pollen and plow it under so you can't make a profit, only they can. This isn't about uneducated or lazy people not getting ahead. It's about how the person who does save a little gets 2% interest because the Fed keeps the prime rate at 0%, then Check-into-Cash places are still allowed to charge 36% (and sometimes up). 18 responsible people save and expect their savings to fund economic growth, and 1 guy who has bad judgment finances a big screen TV he can't really afford, and those two things balance out so the economy as a whole shows 0% growth, but some guy at the top still makes his 8%/year on his investment in the rent to own anyway. Like the parent poster said "Change is mostly for the worst...". We can't sustain the current situation with oil and coal and waste forever (or if you prefer, with spending more than we can afford in taxes), so there will have to be change. So all those zombies, and you too, are being told change can't be done without destroying the precarious stability of people's jobs, but change has to happen. You're hearing that threat, and saying "La, la, la, they only mean those zombies that didn't get a good education and build a good foundation, not little ole' me. My comfortable bed is secure." No, they mean you, no matter how hard you work, no matter how skillfully you work, no matter how much a sane society would value what you do. They mean you too. You have to pay some prices, for not being born into the special group that never has to pay any of the prices of change.
The wolf isn't going to eat just those other lazy uneducated zombies, the wolf means to devour the world so it can stand atop a mound of six billion plus corpses and howl in Gods face how it won a world where the special privileged people are all that are left.
Dr. Paul wants to shut down the DOE (as do Bachmann and several other Republican candidates). The DOE does the security for nuclear weapons making and dismantling, and nuclear fuel and waste management. So, if those are not the federal government's job, do they belong to the individual states? Do 50 US governors each have some control over individual nuclear weapons when they are stateside? Or is it just for the states that have facilities to service these weapons (Hey, Tennessee and New Mexico become nuclear powers, but New York doesn't). Or is it a matter of rights of the individual? What's the plan here? Sell the nuclear arsenal to the highest private bidder? Stop servicing the bombs and let them decay? Let any private corporation service the nuclear industry, uncertified and uninspected? Have state standards, but let every state write its own laws for inspection and private industry pick the states that allow them the most 'freedom' in disposing of nukewastes? Every state in the union that has a power reactor needs its own Yucca Flats style facility? (Where's Rhode Island going to put its problem materials?). What's the plan?
And what do all the other claims that the federal government shouldn't be involved in "X" mean, when it's coming in this same context? If the constitution really calls for letting nuclear security on the US arsenal go to lowest private bidders affiliated with 50 different state governments, then we need to stop following the old one and write a new constitution, fast, because the old one really is a suicide pact!.
That's a cute catchphrase at the end of the summary, but it means even less than usual as quantum buzz words go. Most non-physicists have a little, somewhat fuzzy idea about Heisenberg's uncertainty, and conjure up this idea where everything in QM is spooky weird juju, but what does it mean in a case like this?
Photons don't have that sort of situation when it comes to uncertainty. A Photon has a fixed velocity, known to incredible accuracy, and if that part of QM applied simplistically, it would mean we had no idea of where a photon was, ever. Instead, measuring a photon's location by absorbing it simply eliminates the photon, it doesn't mean we are suddenly fuzzy for 'quantum reasons' about how fast it was moving until then. How fast a photon moves in a medium besides vacuum isn't really part of QM spookyness either, and even the particle/wave duality model is pre Quantum theory stuff - classical physics. Yeah, the best explanation for why light works that way comes from QM, but that it works that way is an idea developed way before QM came along. (In fact, the apparent particle/wave duality was what pushed Planck to develop his math around the turn of the 20th century. That got the name of Quantum theory, but it was mostly pretty straightforward to the physicists of the time. The 'spookystuff' got added in over the next 30 years or so with Dirac, Heisenberg, and others applying their touches to build the whole edifice that is QM). The same 'uncertainty about position' math that can make the behavior of a something like a Bose/Einstein condensate seem incredibly freaky in QM terms, here translates out to defining the wavelength or frequency, which can be a very precisely known quantity (for example for a laser), and which doesn't create a lot of verbal paradoxes, or imply anything about spooky action at a distance, half-dead/half-alive cats, or time travel.
Adding more optical aspects to a quantum computer design may well be useful, but it isn't likely to up the 'overall weirdness level'. Certainly, optical links between the computing elements, as some here have speculated, won't. Just because the computational core may be working with quibits doesn't mean the north and south busses are suddenly going to pick up extra quantum goodness if they are optical.
You probably Googled for "War on drugs costs" to get that figure. It's correct - the federal government claims to have spent about 15 Billion in 2010 on it's own website. Maybe you missed the paragraph just below it saying "State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars." As you put it, "assuming constant dollars..." We're up to "at least" 40 Billion per year currently and about 28 years to total a Trillion, and a War On Drugs over nearly twice that time, making Trillions closer to reasonable. Just adding in that state and local component puts us nearly at multiple Trillions.
Beyond that, it's common for parts of the costs of fighting the war on drugs to be hidden elsewhere. Building Prisons often isn't shown as a WOD cost, even though a lot of it has been just that. The US typically, almost invariably, builds prisons because of overcrowding in older facilities rather than because they are wearing out. Then there's the staffing of those prisons - guards, wardens, and related cost money. That 15 Billion you quoted includes some prison costs, but the way the government calculates them assumes that a lot of prisons would be wearing out from age and so considerably understates how much of the prison building and staffing is WOD related.
Then there's foreign aid, a LOT of which is really drug enforcement when you're talking about Central America. (I don't want to suggest a lot of foreign aid in total is WOD related, as when we're talking "foreign aid in total" it's essentially an Israel/Mideast security related issue, but foreign aid to Central and South America and the Caribbean runs way above aid to, say, Africa over the long haul). When we supply, say, Columbia, with assault helicopters to track down Cocaine plantations, that's often carried in the foreign aid budget, and if we have to supply any of Colombia's neighbors, that don't provide so much raw Cocaine, with weapons (to balance the political situation we are destabilizing by giving one regional power all the neat toys), that's always carried in the foreign aid column.
Multiple full squadrons of assault helicopters, training and basing for them, attack helicopters to protect the assault helicopters when the plantations started deploying shoulder mounted rocket launchers, high grade crypto and commo that we don't export elsewhere (because the plantation owners can afford to hack and eavesdrop on older commo), and maintenance for all that - it isn't cheap. Then we have to let someone else in the region have a foreign aid grant to buy, say, destroyer escorts from US approved firms, so that the regional balance of power is maintained. Then our conservative politicians tell their base how foreign aid is all driven by liberals.
You can find funding that's really WOD related in quite a few areas beyond prisons and foreign aid. Part of the Dept of the Interior budget is for keeping people from growing dope in national parks, giving rangers better armament and more practice time. We use Dept. of the Interior personnel to search for tunnels along isolated parts of the US/Canadian border, and even sometimes the Mexican border. There's a line in the overall Homeland Security budget that's about 1/3rd of the FBI total budget. It's for the FBI to run ranges to train all the other security agencies like BATF or Treasury in firearms use. The DEA's weapon's training is thus not carried as a DEA cost any more, since the USA PATRIOT act consolidated that cost. Then the CIA and NSA lend some of their high tech support to the WOD, and it isn't always carried openly in that '15 Billion for 2010" figure either, but its impossible to tell just how much is hidden when you're talking about agencies whose whole budget is basically a black box item. Try adding in such things, and we could make a pretty good case for over 3 Trillion. For all we can be sure of, there's WOD funding shifted to Dept. of Energy, Educ
If you carry the thought a little further: If the first amendment had been written more in parallel with the second, and stressed the right to possess physical tools needed for freedom of speech as much as the right to commit the act of speech, then a lot of things which facilitate speech but can be misused would enjoy the same level of protection gun ownership does in the USA.
The last of the 9 Megaton yield warheads from the US nuclear arsenal was just dismantled last week*, and the largest remaining US weapons have a maximum 'dial-a-yield" of "only" 1.5 Megatons each. Before that, we shut down the W64 model in 2010, and various others under President Bush (43's) administration. If we're going to drag President Obama into this, he just kept another campaign promise AND showed consistency with a position he took ever since his college thesis, and one that most of the public and just about all the experts agree with.
And to get this thread back on topic - Of course judges consider intent. Without intent, murder becomes mere manslaughter. I favor changing some of the laws regarding copyright and downloading issues, but I don't expect judges to not consider whether the intent of a website is to facilitate breaking the law or not. I would much rather see good clean victories for people whose goals include supporting legally protected actions, and judges who have to consider whether there is legitimating intent even if some people misuse the technology, than see a strange distortion of law where judges suddenly can't consider intent at all.
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Do you really think Firefox would be the same today (for better or worse), if it had never topped a 2% market share?
What Opportunist said DOES precisely explain FreeBSD and others. If you want to make the extraordinary assertion that people who aren't using FreeBSD deliberately choose to develop apps for it instead of some other OS that they do use, go ahead. What seems to actually happen out here in the real world, is that fewer app developers are attracted to support smaller OSes and the original OS developers pick up some of the slack by also developing the core of fundamental apps, or porting apps to the OS themselves so the developers don't have to. Then there's the Debian solution, slower, stabler development so there's more time for other people to come and play in your sandbox.
If the Universe IS doing calculations, then it is as accurate as possible. You can't possibly get closer to calculating what the laws of physics say should happen than by the calculation actually being what actually does happen.
But that means the universe is either infinite, to hold infinitely long registers, or the real laws of physics don't include any infinite precision expressions. A finite universe can't, for a simple example, be multiplying some number times Pi, an infinite non-repeating decimal. Since non-truncating values are used in a tremendous number of physics formulas, the math we think describes the Universe can't possibly be what a finite Universe is using.
There are ways to keep physics related math from entailing any infinities. Planck's work,setting a minimum size for movement and duration for actions, is an example. Maybe, there will eventually be a Grand Theory of Everything, or Unified Field Theory, with no pesky infinities. But it's interesting that, if the Universe IS in some sense a computer, then a finite Universe simply HAS to have something like Quantum Mechanics, because time and space can't be infinitely divisible.
To a mathematician, the fact that QM seems to work isn't a rigorous proof that the Universe is indeed finite - all we can say for sure is that if the Universe allows infinities, then a QM like theory isn't strictly necessary. To a cosmologist, dimensions such as the Planck length are pretty strong suggestions that the Universe is finite, and that a GTU or UFT or whatever will eventually be found if we are only smart enough.
The media don't get to charge people with crimes. The Media don't get to play judge, jury, and jailor. Shakespeare can say "Glamis hath Murdered Sleep" all he wants, but the courts are who decides what murder is. As long as there exists a Supreme Court decision that copyright violation is not theft (and yes, there is at least one to that effect), the media can call it 'high puppy mutilating pedo-treason' if they want, but guess what it is. That's right, it's Copyright Violation. How many legs does a dog have if the Media calls a tail a leg?
For the publicly traded companies to stop doing this, it has to stop helping boost stock shares. That means stockholders have to learn that a company doesn't become more attractive just because it patented something, but only if that patent will actually make the company a profit.
These are the same stockholders who will sell a very profitable company short because some metric says to always sell whenever employment costs in that industry have risen to over 18% or so of total operating costs, then invest in a non-profitable company that is engaged in a lawsuit and has promised to pay a law firm 33% of the resulting profits, without realizing that same metric says those lawyers are really just more employees.
15.04 Virtuoso Velociraptor...
15.10 Wiggly Wallaby...
16.04 Xintillating Xenomorph...
After we get to the ZZ, we're going to start over at AAA (Amorous Anesthetized Anteater), then Bellicose Bewildered Bonobo. Weirdly Weathered Wallaroo will be 29.04, of course.
(The first three on my list are all actual names among those which have been proposed for Ubuntu development codenames. I don't want to know as much about this subject as I now do. I Googled 'Ubuntu development codenames' and feel curiously the poorer for an answer.)
Rose? Are you really saying you'd take a smoking hot blonde who has never been hardened by working in the sex industry over a ... Well, a smoking hot read-head who's only real flaw is a severe centurion fetish? You're missing the real option - "The three companions" (Martha Jones for the trifecta)
But Ghod forbid that this companion business should in any way be sexualised. It's not like all those sixties and seventies and eighties companions included any hot babes.
Worse, they'll have mass drivers that fling Sean Connerys!
In Adam Smith's "free market", there is parity of information. Everyone involved in a transaction knows all the pertinent facts. That would mean a government can still prohibit "insider trading", since stopping transactions where some of the involved people know more than others is part of preserving the Smithian 'free market' for those transactions where everyone does have parity of information. At the risk of stressing the obvious, fraud is also a case where some party knows more than the other parties involved, so presumably the same principle apples to fraud. People who argue that the proper role of government is limited to creating the conditions where a free market is possible could include passing and enforcing such laws, although some of those people don't seem to agree.
More esoterically, there were people very soon after Smith who pointed out that it wasn't true that getting close to a perfect free market, but not all the way there, meant we also got close to all the benefits that theoretical perfect free market should bring. Being in a not quite perfect market could easily result in very suboptimal benefits to everyone involved. So, if we could never quite reach a perfect free market, it follows we don't really have any moral mandate, even if we agree totally with Adam Smith, to try and get as close as we can. What a bunch of libertarians might call Stat-ism could even be the best actually realizable alternative to an unrealizable 'perfect free market'.
Metaphorically, the market as a whole can be like the case where the optimal free market price of an airline ticket to Hiwaii is $ 1,000. The potential buyer has only $ 987, so the market offers to get the buyer to a point 12 miles off the shore of the big island, and drop him. There are cases where getting 99% of what you really want is something that is worth absolutely nothing.
Just so we're clear here: Do you think those higher-ups care more now that there are people Occupying Wallstreet? Or are you arguing that they higher-ups will only start caring if the OWS types go to poison, garrotes, and rocket launchers?
No, no, you LIEberals don't see it! Standard & Poor, Moodys, and the rest are arms of the federal government, wholly owned subsidiaries of Freddie Mac. They gave those high ratings to junk bundles cause Obama ordered them to, six years before he got in. They had to do it for all those investment banks who weren't actually subject to any of the rules about lending, since they weren't lending banks. That's how government lending rules caused all this. OOOOPPS! New Big Lie needed! Alert! Alert! Anyone except a socialist knows it was the Albanian Squirrel Mafia, not our friends the bankers!
Thank you for speaking for me, a former armored cav officer, who could have sworn he knew a little bit about what stress was after Desert Shield/Storm. You're part of that same group you are holding yourself oh, so superior to. I can think of at least a dozen other Slashdotters here who could show you and the OP a thing or two about enduring real stress. Cheap sophomore cynicism is just that, and you are contributing absolutely nothing to this conversation. You're a tapeworm, sticking up for another tapeworm.
"An insanity defense is nearly impregnable, but you have to prepare it pretty early" - Dave Sim.
The real question is, why do the "MSM", ISPs, and others cooperate so easily with the government? Why, as you put it '"trip over themselves to kiss the ring"? You mentioned Occupy Wallstreet, but for the sake of making my point apolitical, let's just assume somebody, maybe an OWS splinter group, maybe a Tea Party splinter group, maybe the Committee to Bronze Nixon's Balls and Hang Them from the St. Louis Arch (CtBNBaHTftStLA), decides to get seriously violent. What happens to a reporter or an editor or a sysadmin, if there is a large, violent revolutionary group blowing up railways and reactor cooling towers, and they see those media employees as really just another arm of the government octopus? Does a small cell of heavily armed terrorists decide to kick in the doors of CIA headquarters and shoot it out with equally armed federal agents, or do they take their complaint to some corporation's boardroom, or easier, to their rank and file personnel?
Even if the FBI behaves very nicely, and doesn't threaten media elements with dreadful penalties for less than full, enthusiastic cooperation, what about the people the FBI alleges are bad guys? Surely Sprint, Comcast, AT&T and the rest don't trust both sides of the struggle not to give them any problems? It's called blowback. Thinking you are dealing with honest, noble cops may be foolish, but how crazy is thinking you are dealing with honest, noble criminals or terrorists?
So, do government agencies put lots of pressure on the information related businesses to get cooperation? Do they maybe mention IRS audits and such whenever they think a media corp is dragging its feet? Or are they sticking to 'carrots', but with one of the 'carrots' being a promise to give extra protection to the non-state actors that help them?
The claim is that the federal government wont prosecute this possible crime. Of course not. What FEDERAL law has he violated? Even if he murdered his 16 year old daughter, it would be a crime under Texas law, not a federal crime. Hey, I'll bet the governments of Bali, New Zealand, and Monaco don't want to prosecute this judge for beating his kid either. Now there may be a real issue as to why Texas hasn't done anything...
I'm not the original AC, but I'll give you a two part argument for it's being lame.
1. The energy density for this device, while pretty spectacular, is still way, way below the range where current competing theories predict exotic results. This has been a problem for projected particle accelerator of the future designs as well, since at least before the Superconducting Supercollider design that was to be built in Texas was canceled by the US Congress. One of the reasons we have gone ahead with new accelerators even though we (as a species) are still tremendously short of achieving the energy levels needs for more direct tests is a few 'work arounds' have been theorized. These are phenomena that are in the range the machine at CERN or others can reach, but that theoretically may be indirectly influenced by Super-symmetry or other theories we can't test more directly. Without some relatively indirect test like this, the Uber-laser still won't be nearly powerful enough to accomplish anything. So, either there's some sort of indirect prediction from one of the String theory variants, or Super-symmetry, or some more exotic theory, and that indirect prediction is down in the energy range that this thing achieves, or they are basically just gambling on something completely unexpected showing up. Since the article doesn't really explain what that indirect, inferential prediction might be, It's seems more likely than not there isn't a specific one. (Of course, it's possible the interviewer didn't get everything into the article.).
2. The article also states that the energy achieved by this device will be equal to a temperature greater than the center of the sun. That sounds impressive, but we've seen some much more energetic events in astrophysics. Lots of Nova/Supernova variants, neutron star related events, and quasars involve energy densities way beyond both the center of our sun and this laser device. We should at least possibly have seen some evidence for the same kind of effects as this widget is supposed to possibly produce by studying existing astronomical events. While that's not absolutely always a good guideline, I know, in the absence of an indirect prediction based on existing theory, I'd be willing to gamble somewhat if the device aimed to mimic the energy densities of some astrophysical event and could point to theories from there as evidence for this 'hole ripping' or 'cosmic hernia' effect. It's not uncommon for sub-atomic physics to take cues from Astrophysics and Cosmology, and vice-versa, but that too doesn't seem to be happening in this case.
Whoops: To clarify my own post: A corp held by a single person or small group can't do an incentive stock option to that person or to one or more of multiple people who have more than 10% ownership. Such a corporation could offer an ISO to some other person who doesn't have more than 10% share of the corporation and is a bona-fide employee. So if Steve Jobs was on the board of Apple, he could vote to offer himself a regular stock option in a year when he was CEO, but once he held more than 10% of Apple shares, he couldn't offer himself an ISO anymore.
Actually, there is a law. In particular, for S corps, that don't pay corporate taxes of their own, the IRS requires all compensation in total (salary, pensions, stock options, etc, all taken together) to fall in a range that is "reasonable and customary for the position" . If that's not exactly pegged to a market value for executive compensation, that's because there is no standard amount for executive pay. This means the auditing agent has a fairly broad range to decide whether the total package is reasonable or not, but he or she has a table of dozens of cases that set precedent to go by.
For "C" corporations, a CEO taking a $1 salary is doable, because the corporation also pays taxes of its own and the money not paid to a CEO is profit to be taxed. It's not capital gains, its direct profit.
For those posting about stock options:
You can't pay at capital gains rates on a standard non-qualified stock option (which is what most executive options are). You may qualify for the better capital gains rate on the profit from sale of stock, if you hold the stock for at least a year, but that's not exercising an awarded option.
Here's an example: In 2008, CEO Bob gets a 1$ salary, plus the award of a stock option to buy 1000 shares of his company at 50$ each. That option spans a period that is part or all of 2009. In Sept. 2009, Bob exercises that stock option. He has turned the company around as the saying goes, and that stock is normally worth $63.47 a share. When Bob files his 2009 taxes (in 2010), he has to pay on that profit of $13.47 a share, and he pays at his normal rate, not long term capital gains. If Bob holds that stock for a year or more, he can sell it, say in Oct. 2010, and get the better capital gains rate on the sale, so if in Oct 2010 the stock is worth $68.47, Bob makes $5 profit at that time, and when he files his 2010 personal taxes in 2011, he gets the better capital gains rate on that profit.
That 1 year rule means that Bob is never even paying the same year's taxes for exercising the option and for selling the stock. If he sold the stock in the same year he exercised his option to buy it, he'd have to pay the full rate on all the profit in the same tax year.
There are Incentive stock options. There, the time from the granting of the option until it is exercised has to be at least a full year, and then the sale has to happen at least a full year after that.(Making 2 years minimum total). Here capital gains rates can apply to the whole thing as though, in some ways, the exercise and the sale were a single operation. This has some potential for the sort of abuse people are suggesting, but one of the many additional limiting rules about ISOs is that the employee must not, at the time of grant, own stock representing more than 10% of voting power of all stock outstanding (with some additional modifiers). So a corp held by a single person or small group can't do an ISO. Another rule is that the offer has to be made to an actual employee (so you can't offer it to yourself as Chairman of the Board, for example). There are dozens of other restrictions.
I don't understand why you are lumping it into this question.
Because when nuclear weapons need serviced, refurbished, or decommissioned, they come under the existing authority of the Dept. of Energy, which controls those jobs. DOE drivers take them from military control and transport them, DOE contractors open them up and work on them. DOE refines the plutonium up to weapons grade. DOE machines the parts. DOE is the people who would build any new bombs if ever needed again. DOE researches better designs and safer designs for the future (Yes, some H-bombs are 'safer' than others).
If you just leave H-bombs sitting around, a little of the plutonium in them decays, gives off very highly radioactive daughter products, which also decay at various rates, and if these build up enough, the bomb stops working, plus instead of being able to work on them simply using a clean room, robotic arms, and wearing a protective suit to stop a little Alpha, you're talking about sacrificing a million dollar robot every time you open a case, as the radiation will eventually increase to enough to fry shielded electronics in minutes. Some of the unmaintained Russian bombs the DOE dismantled recently were in such states, and it cost lots to fix. If it had gone on a few more years, those weapons might have become literally impossible to dismantle (unless you want to risk a 50 Kt. "fizzle on open" spreading Radio-cobalt and Radio-polonium in amounts that would make Chernobyl look like a cracked smoke alarm case, over a multiple square mile area, by some predictions, every time you risk opening an access hatch).
Go 8 or 10 years over on servicing and we're eventually talking about radiation levels that would kill all insect and even bacterial life in seconds, lasting for weeks before they dropped to levels that would merely kill complex creatures such as us. No one's sure just how bad it can get if people delay long enough past that 8 to 10 year estimate, and no remotely one sane wants to run the tests needed to be sure. The worst of the computer models count in multiples of Hiroshima level damage and seriously predict possible multiple Texas sized areas that would be uninhabitable for centuries. (And by the way, if you retool the government seriously, this sort of risk won't stop accumulating and wait until you have your new solution in place, it will just keep on building up more problems until you get something back on track. American nukes go bad if left on the shelf just like everyone else's. That's why I was asking "What's the plan?" - If there isn't a plan for this part right now, well before Dr. Paul takes office, then he's either going to break some huge campaign promises or endanger a lot of innocent people by the time he gets one.).
YOU have said we need to shut down the agency that manages this process. Dr Paul has talked about saving money by this shut down, so he's not advocating transferring any DOE processes to control by the Dept. of Defense, as that certainly wouldn't reduce costs by the total DOE budget, as he has claimed. Ergo, either Dr. Paul is an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn that this process cannot be simply ignored or unfunded, or you are an idiot who believes a lying candidate that is promising we can save tax money simply by moving something from one compartment of the federal government to another.
You don't understand why I lumped this in with the other things? Your candidate lumped this in, you agreed with him, and I just pointed out the consequences of YOUR position. Go ahead, blame me for pointing out the truth.
I used to agree with you, but there's one huge problem with the Zombie metaphor. As they are being treated, Zombies are sort of semi-supernatural, but not really. Either they are from some sort of virus or weird radiation, or they involve magic. If you knew they were like traditional supernatural zombies, you could rely on salt or crucifixes or whatever to lay them to rest. If you knew they came from a virus, you could find scientific ways to deal with them, and they would have limits in what they could do you could use because a virus can't just let a zombie ignore all the laws of biology. The way a lot of movies treat them, Zombies somehow don't have the vulnerabilities of traditional supernatural creatures (so you can't hide in a church, secure that they can't enter hallowed ground, or bury all new dead swiftly on hollowed ground and stop storing them in morgues and such places). They don't have the vulnerabilities of a natural analog either (like rabid animals). They paradoxically have no minds at all but seem to reason their way into places where they can wait, lurk, and become ambush predators. They find routes through sewers and drains, or across fences or trenches, that would be 100% effective in thwarting a mindless creature. The 'virus' is tough enough to sometimes spread by spatter against unbroken skin or survive laying around in sunlight, yet it can't be isolated by the CDC. Some people on the inside are traitors keeping the zombie plague going.
As disaster prep goes, this is like setting up a radiation spill scenario, and allowing radiation that sometimes doesn't show up on detectors, and sometimes passes through thick layers of stone or metal, but sometimes acts like regular radiation. Or it's like a flood scenario, but you occasionally penalize the first responders for avoiding traveling through low lying areas and seeking alternate routes. Disaster training needs to set reasonable goals that the people being trained can learn from to improve the outcome when a real disaster happens, and I'm coming to think that Zombie scenarios have become negative in that respect.
(And I'm at least a semi-expert here, as I'm a former military officer, have built complex training scenarios at the military company, troop and regimental levels before, been cadre on others, either administered or scored more, have participated in several disaster managment exercises, and have taken over a dozen FEMA courses during my hitch).
How about people take the normal steps to get a leg up in life, and expect that those steps work? Get the education that lets you plant a tree properly, and also demand that no company has the right to just claim your tree may have picked up some of their genetically engineered pollen and plow it under so you can't make a profit, only they can.
This isn't about uneducated or lazy people not getting ahead. It's about how the person who does save a little gets 2% interest because the Fed keeps the prime rate at 0%, then Check-into-Cash places are still allowed to charge 36% (and sometimes up). 18 responsible people save and expect their savings to fund economic growth, and 1 guy who has bad judgment finances a big screen TV he can't really afford, and those two things balance out so the economy as a whole shows 0% growth, but some guy at the top still makes his 8%/year on his investment in the rent to own anyway.
Like the parent poster said "Change is mostly for the worst...". We can't sustain the current situation with oil and coal and waste forever (or if you prefer, with spending more than we can afford in taxes), so there will have to be change. So all those zombies, and you too, are being told change can't be done without destroying the precarious stability of people's jobs, but change has to happen. You're hearing that threat, and saying "La, la, la, they only mean those zombies that didn't get a good education and build a good foundation, not little ole' me. My comfortable bed is secure." No, they mean you, no matter how hard you work, no matter how skillfully you work, no matter how much a sane society would value what you do. They mean you too. You have to pay some prices, for not being born into the special group that never has to pay any of the prices of change.
The wolf isn't going to eat just those other lazy uneducated zombies, the wolf means to devour the world so it can stand atop a mound of six billion plus corpses and howl in Gods face how it won a world where the special privileged people are all that are left.
Dr. Paul wants to shut down the DOE (as do Bachmann and several other Republican candidates). The DOE does the security for nuclear weapons making and dismantling, and nuclear fuel and waste management.
So, if those are not the federal government's job, do they belong to the individual states? Do 50 US governors each have some control over individual nuclear weapons when they are stateside? Or is it just for the states that have facilities to service these weapons (Hey, Tennessee and New Mexico become nuclear powers, but New York doesn't). Or is it a matter of rights of the individual?
What's the plan here? Sell the nuclear arsenal to the highest private bidder? Stop servicing the bombs and let them decay? Let any private corporation service the nuclear industry, uncertified and uninspected? Have state standards, but let every state write its own laws for inspection and private industry pick the states that allow them the most 'freedom' in disposing of nukewastes? Every state in the union that has a power reactor needs its own Yucca Flats style facility? (Where's Rhode Island going to put its problem materials?). What's the plan?
And what do all the other claims that the federal government shouldn't be involved in "X" mean, when it's coming in this same context? If the constitution really calls for letting nuclear security on the US arsenal go to lowest private bidders affiliated with 50 different state governments, then we need to stop following the old one and write a new constitution, fast, because the old one really is a suicide pact!.
That's a cute catchphrase at the end of the summary, but it means even less than usual as quantum buzz words go. Most non-physicists have a little, somewhat fuzzy idea about Heisenberg's uncertainty, and conjure up this idea where everything in QM is spooky weird juju, but what does it mean in a case like this?
Photons don't have that sort of situation when it comes to uncertainty. A Photon has a fixed velocity, known to incredible accuracy, and if that part of QM applied simplistically, it would mean we had no idea of where a photon was, ever. Instead, measuring a photon's location by absorbing it simply eliminates the photon, it doesn't mean we are suddenly fuzzy for 'quantum reasons' about how fast it was moving until then. How fast a photon moves in a medium besides vacuum isn't really part of QM spookyness either, and even the particle/wave duality model is pre Quantum theory stuff - classical physics. Yeah, the best explanation for why light works that way comes from QM, but that it works that way is an idea developed way before QM came along. (In fact, the apparent particle/wave duality was what pushed Planck to develop his math around the turn of the 20th century. That got the name of Quantum theory, but it was mostly pretty straightforward to the physicists of the time. The 'spookystuff' got added in over the next 30 years or so with Dirac, Heisenberg, and others applying their touches to build the whole edifice that is QM). The same 'uncertainty about position' math that can make the behavior of a something like a Bose/Einstein condensate seem incredibly freaky in QM terms, here translates out to defining the wavelength or frequency, which can be a very precisely known quantity (for example for a laser), and which doesn't create a lot of verbal paradoxes, or imply anything about spooky action at a distance, half-dead/half-alive cats, or time travel.
Adding more optical aspects to a quantum computer design may well be useful, but it isn't likely to up the 'overall weirdness level'. Certainly, optical links between the computing elements, as some here have speculated, won't. Just because the computational core may be working with quibits doesn't mean the north and south busses are suddenly going to pick up extra quantum goodness if they are optical.
You probably Googled for "War on drugs costs" to get that figure. It's correct - the federal government claims to have spent about 15 Billion in 2010 on it's own website.
Maybe you missed the paragraph just below it saying "State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars." As you put it, "assuming constant dollars..." We're up to "at least" 40 Billion per year currently and about 28 years to total a Trillion, and a War On Drugs over nearly twice that time, making Trillions closer to reasonable. Just adding in that state and local component puts us nearly at multiple Trillions.
Beyond that, it's common for parts of the costs of fighting the war on drugs to be hidden elsewhere. Building Prisons often isn't shown as a WOD cost, even though a lot of it has been just that. The US typically, almost invariably, builds prisons because of overcrowding in older facilities rather than because they are wearing out. Then there's the staffing of those prisons - guards, wardens, and related cost money. That 15 Billion you quoted includes some prison costs, but the way the government calculates them assumes that a lot of prisons would be wearing out from age and so considerably understates how much of the prison building and staffing is WOD related.
Then there's foreign aid, a LOT of which is really drug enforcement when you're talking about Central America. (I don't want to suggest a lot of foreign aid in total is WOD related, as when we're talking "foreign aid in total" it's essentially an Israel/Mideast security related issue, but foreign aid to Central and South America and the Caribbean runs way above aid to, say, Africa over the long haul). When we supply, say, Columbia, with assault helicopters to track down Cocaine plantations, that's often carried in the foreign aid budget, and if we have to supply any of Colombia's neighbors, that don't provide so much raw Cocaine, with weapons (to balance the political situation we are destabilizing by giving one regional power all the neat toys), that's always carried in the foreign aid column.
Multiple full squadrons of assault helicopters, training and basing for them, attack helicopters to protect the assault helicopters when the plantations started deploying shoulder mounted rocket launchers, high grade crypto and commo that we don't export elsewhere (because the plantation owners can afford to hack and eavesdrop on older commo), and maintenance for all that - it isn't cheap. Then we have to let someone else in the region have a foreign aid grant to buy, say, destroyer escorts from US approved firms, so that the regional balance of power is maintained. Then our conservative politicians tell their base how foreign aid is all driven by liberals.
You can find funding that's really WOD related in quite a few areas beyond prisons and foreign aid. Part of the Dept of the Interior budget is for keeping people from growing dope in national parks, giving rangers better armament and more practice time. We use Dept. of the Interior personnel to search for tunnels along isolated parts of the US/Canadian border, and even sometimes the Mexican border. There's a line in the overall Homeland Security budget that's about 1/3rd of the FBI total budget. It's for the FBI to run ranges to train all the other security agencies like BATF or Treasury in firearms use. The DEA's weapon's training is thus not carried as a DEA cost any more, since the USA PATRIOT act consolidated that cost. Then the CIA and NSA lend some of their high tech support to the WOD, and it isn't always carried openly in that '15 Billion for 2010" figure either, but its impossible to tell just how much is hidden when you're talking about agencies whose whole budget is basically a black box item. Try adding in such things, and we could make a pretty good case for over 3 Trillion. For all we can be sure of, there's WOD funding shifted to Dept. of Energy, Educ
If you carry the thought a little further: If the first amendment had been written more in parallel with the second, and stressed the right to possess physical tools needed for freedom of speech as much as the right to commit the act of speech, then a lot of things which facilitate speech but can be misused would enjoy the same level of protection gun ownership does in the USA.
The last of the 9 Megaton yield warheads from the US nuclear arsenal was just dismantled last week*, and the largest remaining US weapons have a maximum 'dial-a-yield" of "only" 1.5 Megatons each. Before that, we shut down the W64 model in 2010, and various others under President Bush (43's) administration. If we're going to drag President Obama into this, he just kept another campaign promise AND showed consistency with a position he took ever since his college thesis, and one that most of the public and just about all the experts agree with.
And to get this thread back on topic - Of course judges consider intent. Without intent, murder becomes mere manslaughter. I favor changing some of the laws regarding copyright and downloading issues, but I don't expect judges to not consider whether the intent of a website is to facilitate breaking the law or not. I would much rather see good clean victories for people whose goals include supporting legally protected actions, and judges who have to consider whether there is legitimating intent even if some people misuse the technology, than see a strange distortion of law where judges suddenly can't consider intent at all.
*at a Pantex plant in Texas:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-25/nuke-bomb-disassembly/50901152/1