Re:Organic vs processed (toxic) sugar.
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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HFCS is a mixture - Sucrose is a compound. Let's try another example - Table Salt (NaCl) is a compound. You can safely eat a teaspoon of salt (I wouldn't recommend it, but it very probably won't kill you unless you have a serious case of high blood pressure. ). That's a compound. You could not possibly survive eating a half a teaspoon of pure sodium metal and washing it down with the equivalent weight in Chlorine gas. Compounds are not mixtures, and the difference between the two is often lethal, not "marketing".
I don't remember any TV series that milked the "Russians invented everything" gag. In fact, I've been scratching the row of bumps that mysteriously grew from the top of my spine to my forehead in 1979, and still can't figure out what show you've been describing.
As the parent of a 27 year old Tennessean who may soon make me a grandparent, I second your concern. I also point out that she has chosen to avoid buying a house closer to her workplace because she wants to live in a school district that provides a decent science curriculum for that potential grandchild, and is willing to commute more to do it. Judging by the difference in property taxes and housing costs people will endure to get their kids in a school where they can be confident real science will be taught, a lot of people here are essentially voting against this law with their pocketbooks. However, it's the majority that bothers to vote which rules, not us 'moneyed elites' so the law may well pass.
There's this concept of criminal degrees of negligence (under US or UK law at least). If somebody does a big enough screw-up, something any 'reasonable' person should have known better than to do (as the law defines reasonable), they they have committed criminal acts. In this case, for example, some of the people working for the for the corporation made assurances to their boss that the system was better secured than that, and some of them made assurances to clients or to the government. If I know damned well there's a real chance of a leopard in the next room and I assure the people going through that door that things have been carefully inspected for their comfort, I've taken some of the responsibility for the crime as well as whomever planted the leopard. If I actually know the room inspector has no training in room inspection and was laid off six weeks ago anyway, that level of responsibility could rise to criminal.
The point here is, anyone claiming this rises to the level of legal issue is claiming some employees of the company knew there were real risks, and lied, or lied about their training to detect risks, or they lied to investors, or customers, or inspectors. They lied knowing that their was a real chance somebody would suffer serious financial harm. The law is there so there are circumstances where nobody can just say "I didn't really lie, I'm just a big dumb-ass who didn't think about it at all."
The fact that this is called 'criminal' negligence should explain that the law thinks justice can't be achieved by civil means only in such cases. I'm not sure just what your objecting to here - modifying a n existing law to include provisions for criminal negligence where it specifically relates to this sort of intrusion, or to the existence of criminal negligence as a legal concept in general.
GE has also claimed historic building renovation credits in past years. This credit allows a building's owner to gut and replace or remodel up to 75% of the building's interior and the sides and back of the exterior construction, just so they preserve 75% of the front façade. A building may be historically of note because of some particular interior feature, such as the columns of the Johnson Wax building as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but the law doesn't assess such factors at all in determining whether a company should get the credit.
As somebody pointed out once, if laws affecting poor people worked like this one does for the rich, people in subsidised housing would be allowed to let close relatives stay over for 75% of each month, and non relatives for 1 week in four. Current rules actually allow only grandparents of children in the home to stay overnight for up to 3 days/month with advance permission from the housing authority, and no other cases. We have laws that tell a poor woman on public assistance that she can't have her sister stay over for a couple of weeks right after childbirth to help out, because if we let her do that, she might try to smuggle in some parasitic boyfriend, but the (presumably wealthy) owner of a historically significant building can destroy the very features that make it significant and get a tax credit for it.
You've made some good arguments, but it's not just the unions saying the solution for air traffic control problems is to hire another controller. Trying to stretch resources too thin is a real management problem. Totally non-union entities such as the US military have often had to put two persons on some jobs because the cost of relying on just one not to fail is sometimes simply too great, even with any feasible amount of inspection and supervision. When threats of Leavenworth or a firing squad simply can't ensure safe performance by a lone person in a critical role, what makes you think any civilian company can rely on simple firings and black listings to do the job?
Universities choose to create rape awareness programs. There's even a limited amount of government mandate encouraging universities to create rape awareness programs (Some of them have gotten government grant funding for such programs). But there's no private organisation demanding such programs under penalty of law. N.O.W. isn't demanding that universities not get federal money unless they implement rape awareness programs. No rape victims have filed any class action lawsuits to enjoin any university from receiving federal funds until they have their rape awareness program in place or tried to dictate the exact contents of one.
People are complaining that this should not be a matter of law - that's the point you seem to have missed in your straw man attack.
If we can go by any time some politician makes a public suggestion or mutters some trial balloon at a public speaking engagement, the Republicans are making efforts to abolish Social Security, invade North Korea, China, Russia (not the former Soviet Union, modern Russia), every single Arab nation, and Venezuela. There have been Republican candidates publicly calling for lynching the entire staff of National Public radio, putting us back on the Gold standard, repealing the 14th amendment, and killing any woman who gets an abortion. Judged by the same standard you insist is fair, all those are attempts to pass legislation. You've just made a pretty good argument that the Republicans are a bunch of psychopathic lying traitors to the entire USA. Here I thought that was just some isolated remarks and we shouldn't judge a vast political organisation by a few outlying comments mostly coming from junior members on non-politician radio show hosts. Nope, you've convinced me, you all are a bunch of extremely dangerous pathological traitors, liars and murderers and the sane portion of the human race must defend themselves against your plans for triggering nuclear armaggeddon and holy war. I'm sure you've convinced many other people here today with the brilliance of your argument.
Godel's 1st and 2nd theorems apply to all sufficiently powerful formal systems, where formal includes logical systems and not just purely mathematical ones, and "sufficiently powerful" basically means anything capable of proving more than some of the very simplest methods of math. An extremely limited version of The Real Number System, without such flourishes as irrationals, transfinites or imaginary numbers, using just ultimately fundamental operations such as addition and subtraction, is already much more powerful than the simplest systems Godel applies to. The very power of a formal system is what makes it something the hwo theorems apply to. Essentially, for Godel's theorem to not apply, Science would have to have no significant axioms, derive no significant theorems, use no formal methods (including any form of logic, and specifically not committing inductive or deductive reasoning),and not employ even high school level math for rigor To keep Science from being subject to the two theorems, you've just re-defined Science as an irrational belief system based on no principles what-so-ever, lacking fundamental power, and producing nothing provable. Godel rules - deal with it!.
The real subject of quantum physics isn't matter at a scale of less than size N, it's matter at any scale where there's a probabilistic state rather than a discrete one. Several million atoms in a Bose-Einstein conjugate form can be a single quantum event, and a single electron can be a classical one.What's down at the bottom of the scale isn't unlimited smaller, but either limited or unlimited stranger and stranger. Maybe we will be able to store or manipulate data in amounts that extend Moore's law there, maybe not, but it's not about finding, say, 5 sub-quarks and each one being further made of, say, 4 sub-sub quarks, and figuring out a way to compute on those teentsy-tiny thingees...
Would anybody really want a legal ruling where any device that stored data was treatable as though the owner automatically had personal data on it? Should someone who just bought a brand new 1 Tb hard drive be able to claim that whomever stole it also stole personal data, just because the drive obviously had some ones and zeros written to it from low level formatting? Is there personal data on a new Dell in the form of the bundled software? At some point, automobile tires will probably have chips in them that monitor wear and send an e-mail to the owner that reminds them to buy new tires. Do we really want anyone who steals tires to also be charged with data theft? is shoplifting a pair of shoes with an RFID tag data theft? As smart systems become more ubiquitous, every possible material theft also becomes data theft.
In a situation where radiation is a factor, and could be concentrated by the food chain, queueing up sounds better and better. Let's assume you are a decent marksman and the disaster you are dealing with hasn't hit during really cold weather when everything lairs up as much as possible, and you know enough to spot Tularaemia in rabbits and so on. We'll also assume you have some non-meat food sources too and won't get a protein overdose related psychosis.Those assumptions mean you know more than many legendary mountain men, let alone many modern hunters.Do you really know radiation well enough to make the smart decisions there too?
I've got food, basic medical, firewood, and a back up solar and rechargeable battery system to keep flashlights and a small TV or laptop running. I've got a little ammo for the M-16 too, but that's way down on my list. I'm expecting intermittent power failures and an inability to buy some foodstuffs such as Chilean grapes and California oranges at any reasonable price, if the economy gets bad enough. I fill my diabetes related prescriptions 2 months ahead now, for the same reason. Tons of ammo is for the Zombieclypse, not any real threat. If I thought there was a serious threat of, say, Nuclear Winter, I would have worked in wind power instead of solar. If I wasn't already a credit union member I would have switched to improve my 'run on the banks' defense posture', but my expected worse case doesn't even run to needing silver coin to bribe corrupt government thugs, let alone putting all my money in gold and hiding it under the bed.
Here's some other things I think are reasonable extra costs some people should consider for protection against various disasters and collapses: Have your money divided between two unrelated institutions - If you are married and simply have to use credit, at least have some separate cards from different major providers. Avoid banks that are part of big chains, if you can. If you have stocks, ask yourself it a lot of them would take a hit if some one event happens in some one distant geographic area. I don't think the minor radiation release in Japan is the harbinger of universal armaggeddon, but it's an example of why you don't want to have all your money in a restaurant chain that is just now boasting of using Kobe beef and a semiconductor firm and be thinking you are safely diversified. The most critical vitamin is C, especially during the winter, followed by D for women who might become pregnant. If you think the food supply might be short of either Vitamin D fortified milk or citrus fruits and dark green veggies, keep some of these on the shelf. You can go a decade with not getting enough selenium if you actually live in one of the rare low selenium parts of the world, but Scurvy comes on quickly in winter, and women who have sex should assume they need vitamin D just in case the birth control fails, regardless of the disaster related factors Real survivalists stock MRE's - the rest of us stock canned goods. Chunky soup is nice. Stock things you normally eat, so your diet stays like normal as much as possible in an emergency. Suddenly changing what kind of food you get can make you sick, especially with other stressors.If none of the stuff you normally like keeps, you are not eating right, and have another problem than disaster survival. Serious shortages of pet food are likely to happen even before light or intermittent shortages of people food - stockpile for your pets. Find a place that sells locally grown produce. Chat them up and make friends with the owner and regular workers, and go there at least every couple of weeks so you count as a regular. When fuel hits 6$ a gallon, nothing will come in to the major chain grocery stores that ships by containerized vessel or semi truck. You want some supplier who knows you and will maybe actually hold back a few apples just for your kids, when the national chains are carrying only starchy produce like potatoes, and other really basic items. That scenario is a lot more likely than no stores at all and no food except what you can shoot.
There are certainly circumstances where a non law enforcement person is an active part of serving a warrant, and should be. For example, a chemical or explosives expert going along to identify unknown substances in a drug lab or suspected bomb factory raid. I could see a Microsoft employee going along just to identify what machines were capable of running the bot and what peripherals might be capable of storing a copy, so the law enforcement agents didn't seize any business equipment that couldn't possibly support the bot. Lessening damage to the people whose assets were seized is an appropriate civilian role. (although not necessarily the role Microsoft employees played). The real thing needed here isn't a concrete barrier preventing all civilian involvement but a good way for the general public to verify that the involvement didn't violate anyone's civil rights (or secondarily to rights issues, waste taxpayer money helping enforce something that really should be a civil matter).
With this said, I keep wondering why companies are so willing to cooperate and link themselves with law enforcement. The average citizen can and will argue over whether a company has become merely an arm of the police state, whether there are still limits and safeguards, but just picture what a bunch of real nutcase terrorists would decide. To the extreme radicals, a company that cooperates enough with the FBI or DEA becomes merely another arm of the octopus they want to destroy. And once the fringe group takes that position, they are left with the interesting problem - do they physically attack a bunch of armed federal employees who are well trained in the use of force or do they attack an arm which is much softer and more vulnerable to physical violence? Why would an ISP, for example, cooperate uncritically with the CIA, when anybody wanting 'retribution' can then target them a lot easier than their 'government masters'? For companies especially, if you're going to get involved in armed disputes with nutcases, you might want to think about how the surviving nutcases will react.
Less oil use is good, but using organic sources means encouraging the cultivation of those plants instead of others. Plowing under a diverse ecosystem to plant many acres of nothing but switchgrass or trash paper pine is still a negative consequence. Using corn husks is good, but we already have reductions in corn being used for food so that more can be used as an Ethanol source, and the world needs food as well as less oil dependency. The full array of consequences is always going to be mixed at best. Ultimately, processes like this will have the best impact if they can use a wide variety of organic sources and so a manufacturer can offer to buy up something such as wild Kudzu to reduce or eliminate it from areas where it should never have spread, rather than make people deliberately cultivate the same Kudzu because a major industrial process is now dependent on it. Hopefully Pepsi can use this to target some plants that have been exported way outside of their normal ecosystems, and actually restore some diversity for native plants, rather than promoting more monocultures.
You could embed or suspend these crystals on a vast platter design, and then just mark any that had organic contaminants as bad sectors in your organising system and ignore them.
There are precedents, in the full legal sense of the word. Most states adopted specific laws in the 1920's and 30's for places doing public performance so that they had precedents on their side if they needed, say, to eject some patron for rowdyness. In most states, there is an implied contract law even though the patron doesn't actually sign a contract when they buy a ticket. You're talking about some past situations that can be vaguely analogized, and cases where those analogies fly in the face of the actual precedents under law, as though they were the actual precedents. The game studio, marketing a single player game, really CAN'T claim the real legal precedents apply to them. That would be claiming that a special inclusion under contract law rule existed on at least some state's 20's and 30's additions to Titles, written so as to cover the electronic distribution of a private, single player experience, instead of the public theatre versions that cover such things as smuggling food into a public performance, and such laws simply don't exist.
Now as to whether a little politeness and civility might have kept the problem from arising,, well perhaps it would have (as you said).
It has a certain elegance - the black hole clears both ends of the wormhole so the exit is as usable as the entrance. It's also a very testable model - it predicts we would see some stars being gobbled up by black holes AND some stars being gobbled up by nothing at all.
Well, yes, there's more to it than just a squabble over who gets to produce the drug, but there's many actions on the part of the 'legitimate' side that give just that impression. It isn't the people cooking street meth that claim methamphetamine itself causes ulceration and loss of teeth - it's the DEA, saying that such symptoms are caused by abusing even the purest meth, not by any of the many adulterants or flaws in the street process. If the government is really out to protect people from the risks of cheap kitchen chemistry and drugs cut with rat poison, Then the government needs to tell the truth. Lie to people, tell them the drug itself causes the bad side effects, but not when it has the magical Barr Pharmaceuticals or DuraMed seal on it, and of course people will seize on that lie to prove it's all just a turf war.
Double clicking the bar in KDE can be set to activate windowshade mode, or restore a full window from it, which is a nice feature for some of us. It used to be people actually wrote third party apps just to add this function to early versions of Windows, up to about Me or 2000 at least, which leads me to conclude there was at least a small segment of the user base that finds windowshade effects seriously useful. Of course, my current KDE window configuration has 5 to 6 buttons in the top right corner (depending on whether "help" is included in that program), so there's probably very few people who want the same features I chose set the same way. KDE for the win.
There are a few things along those lines in U.S. law. For one, who has feduciary authority in a corporation has to be clearly spelled out. An individual, real human with feduciary authority can be held responsible for acts and jailed despite the fact they were possibly acting for a corporation, plus where the company has lost track of the dividing line between regular employee and one with authority, the company can lose any remaining right to conduct normal business. Basically, if a bunch of nominally normal employees, including, say, that guy in the mail room who was just hired last Tuesday, are signing legal paperwork, contracts and such, there's nobody left with presumably clean hands who can be appointed by the court to take the place of an arrested individual CEO, CFO, or whatever, so the company owner (or the stockholders for a publicly traded corp) is unable to nominate some person to fuffill existing contracts, sign payrolls and the like, and the arrest of one or a few individuals puts the whole company's activities on hold.
RICO's another area. There, the legal goal for prosecution if a corp is involved is to show that the entity isn't really a corporation at all, because what happened is a group of people first entered into a criminal conspiracy, and as part of that conspiracy they decided to incorporate, not for the stated goal of making money legally, but for their hidden goal.
His point is that the Republicans are talking the big government is Eeeeevillle! line except about the part of big government that is military/security oriented. Unless you know of a bunch of democrats who are saying they want to decrease the size of government by spending even more on homeland security, the comparison is moot. There's a lot of the usual political guff being thrown around, but there's still a particular total insanity which way exceeds normal politics to saying "Big government is bad, now increase the FBI budget again so we'll all be safe.". There are currently 17 Federal civilian agencies who have agents carrying automatic firearms. If big government is dangerous, the worst the National Endowment for the Arts can do to you is still only to deny you a grant for your painting project and reward a competing artist. The worst a BATF agent can do is lob a grenade into your home. Which agencies are the real threat from big government? How is it not a matter of liberals or conservatives, when its ALL conservatives who are telling you the problem is the government agencies that DON'T have police powers. The NEA isn't the people who will be rounding citizens up and putting them into camps - if that happens, it's going to be some agency under homeland security's umbrella.
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HFCS is a mixture - Sucrose is a compound. Let's try another example - Table Salt (NaCl) is a compound. You can safely eat a teaspoon of salt (I wouldn't recommend it, but it very probably won't kill you unless you have a serious case of high blood pressure. ). That's a compound. You could not possibly survive eating a half a teaspoon of pure sodium metal and washing it down with the equivalent weight in Chlorine gas. Compounds are not mixtures, and the difference between the two is often lethal, not "marketing".
I don't remember any TV series that milked the "Russians invented everything" gag. In fact, I've been scratching the row of bumps that mysteriously grew from the top of my spine to my forehead in 1979, and still can't figure out what show you've been describing.
As the parent of a 27 year old Tennessean who may soon make me a grandparent, I second your concern. I also point out that she has chosen to avoid buying a house closer to her workplace because she wants to live in a school district that provides a decent science curriculum for that potential grandchild, and is willing to commute more to do it. Judging by the difference in property taxes and housing costs people will endure to get their kids in a school where they can be confident real science will be taught, a lot of people here are essentially voting against this law with their pocketbooks. However, it's the majority that bothers to vote which rules, not us 'moneyed elites' so the law may well pass.
There's this concept of criminal degrees of negligence (under US or UK law at least). If somebody does a big enough screw-up, something any 'reasonable' person should have known better than to do (as the law defines reasonable), they they have committed criminal acts. In this case, for example, some of the people working for the for the corporation made assurances to their boss that the system was better secured than that, and some of them made assurances to clients or to the government. If I know damned well there's a real chance of a leopard in the next room and I assure the people going through that door that things have been carefully inspected for their comfort, I've taken some of the responsibility for the crime as well as whomever planted the leopard. If I actually know the room inspector has no training in room inspection and was laid off six weeks ago anyway, that level of responsibility could rise to criminal.
The point here is, anyone claiming this rises to the level of legal issue is claiming some employees of the company knew there were real risks, and lied, or lied about their training to detect risks, or they lied to investors, or customers, or inspectors. They lied knowing that their was a real chance somebody would suffer serious financial harm. The law is there so there are circumstances where nobody can just say "I didn't really lie, I'm just a big dumb-ass who didn't think about it at all."
The fact that this is called 'criminal' negligence should explain that the law thinks justice can't be achieved by civil means only in such cases. I'm not sure just what your objecting to here - modifying a n existing law to include provisions for criminal negligence where it specifically relates to this sort of intrusion, or to the existence of criminal negligence as a legal concept in general.
YOU should do the patriotic, public spirited thing, and pay. CORPORATIONS and the WEALTHY should vote their own interests exclusively, not YOU!.
GE has also claimed historic building renovation credits in past years. This credit allows a building's owner to gut and replace or remodel up to 75% of the building's interior and the sides and back of the exterior construction, just so they preserve 75% of the front façade. A building may be historically of note because of some particular interior feature, such as the columns of the Johnson Wax building as designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but the law doesn't assess such factors at all in determining whether a company should get the credit.
As somebody pointed out once, if laws affecting poor people worked like this one does for the rich, people in subsidised housing would be allowed to let close relatives stay over for 75% of each month, and non relatives for 1 week in four. Current rules actually allow only grandparents of children in the home to stay overnight for up to 3 days/month with advance permission from the housing authority, and no other cases. We have laws that tell a poor woman on public assistance that she can't have her sister stay over for a couple of weeks right after childbirth to help out, because if we let her do that, she might try to smuggle in some parasitic boyfriend, but the (presumably wealthy) owner of a historically significant building can destroy the very features that make it significant and get a tax credit for it.
You've made some good arguments, but it's not just the unions saying the solution for air traffic control problems is to hire another controller. Trying to stretch resources too thin is a real management problem. Totally non-union entities such as the US military have often had to put two persons on some jobs because the cost of relying on just one not to fail is sometimes simply too great, even with any feasible amount of inspection and supervision. When threats of Leavenworth or a firing squad simply can't ensure safe performance by a lone person in a critical role, what makes you think any civilian company can rely on simple firings and black listings to do the job?
Universities choose to create rape awareness programs. There's even a limited amount of government mandate encouraging universities to create rape awareness programs (Some of them have gotten government grant funding for such programs). But there's no private organisation demanding such programs under penalty of law. N.O.W. isn't demanding that universities not get federal money unless they implement rape awareness programs. No rape victims have filed any class action lawsuits to enjoin any university from receiving federal funds until they have their rape awareness program in place or tried to dictate the exact contents of one.
People are complaining that this should not be a matter of law - that's the point you seem to have missed in your straw man attack.
If we can go by any time some politician makes a public suggestion or mutters some trial balloon at a public speaking engagement, the Republicans are making efforts to abolish Social Security, invade North Korea, China, Russia (not the former Soviet Union, modern Russia), every single Arab nation, and Venezuela. There have been Republican candidates publicly calling for lynching the entire staff of National Public radio, putting us back on the Gold standard, repealing the 14th amendment, and killing any woman who gets an abortion. Judged by the same standard you insist is fair, all those are attempts to pass legislation. You've just made a pretty good argument that the Republicans are a bunch of psychopathic lying traitors to the entire USA. Here I thought that was just some isolated remarks and we shouldn't judge a vast political organisation by a few outlying comments mostly coming from junior members on non-politician radio show hosts. Nope, you've convinced me, you all are a bunch of extremely dangerous pathological traitors, liars and murderers and the sane portion of the human race must defend themselves against your plans for triggering nuclear armaggeddon and holy war. I'm sure you've convinced many other people here today with the brilliance of your argument.
Godel's 1st and 2nd theorems apply to all sufficiently powerful formal systems, where formal includes logical systems and not just purely mathematical ones, and "sufficiently powerful" basically means anything capable of proving more than some of the very simplest methods of math. An extremely limited version of The Real Number System, without such flourishes as irrationals, transfinites or imaginary numbers, using just ultimately fundamental operations such as addition and subtraction, is already much more powerful than the simplest systems Godel applies to. The very power of a formal system is what makes it something the hwo theorems apply to. Essentially, for Godel's theorem to not apply, Science would have to have no significant axioms, derive no significant theorems, use no formal methods (including any form of logic, and specifically not committing inductive or deductive reasoning),and not employ even high school level math for rigor To keep Science from being subject to the two theorems, you've just re-defined Science as an irrational belief system based on no principles what-so-ever, lacking fundamental power, and producing nothing provable. Godel rules - deal with it!.
The real subject of quantum physics isn't matter at a scale of less than size N, it's matter at any scale where there's a probabilistic state rather than a discrete one. Several million atoms in a Bose-Einstein conjugate form can be a single quantum event, and a single electron can be a classical one.What's down at the bottom of the scale isn't unlimited smaller, but either limited or unlimited stranger and stranger. Maybe we will be able to store or manipulate data in amounts that extend Moore's law there, maybe not, but it's not about finding, say, 5 sub-quarks and each one being further made of, say, 4 sub-sub quarks, and figuring out a way to compute on those teentsy-tiny thingees...
Would anybody really want a legal ruling where any device that stored data was treatable as though the owner automatically had personal data on it? Should someone who just bought a brand new 1 Tb hard drive be able to claim that whomever stole it also stole personal data, just because the drive obviously had some ones and zeros written to it from low level formatting? Is there personal data on a new Dell in the form of the bundled software? At some point, automobile tires will probably have chips in them that monitor wear and send an e-mail to the owner that reminds them to buy new tires. Do we really want anyone who steals tires to also be charged with data theft? is shoplifting a pair of shoes with an RFID tag data theft? As smart systems become more ubiquitous, every possible material theft also becomes data theft.
In a situation where radiation is a factor, and could be concentrated by the food chain, queueing up sounds better and better. Let's assume you are a decent marksman and the disaster you are dealing with hasn't hit during really cold weather when everything lairs up as much as possible, and you know enough to spot Tularaemia in rabbits and so on. We'll also assume you have some non-meat food sources too and won't get a protein overdose related psychosis.Those assumptions mean you know more than many legendary mountain men, let alone many modern hunters.Do you really know radiation well enough to make the smart decisions there too?
I've got food, basic medical, firewood, and a back up solar and rechargeable battery system to keep flashlights and a small TV or laptop running. I've got a little ammo for the M-16 too, but that's way down on my list. I'm expecting intermittent power failures and an inability to buy some foodstuffs such as Chilean grapes and California oranges at any reasonable price, if the economy gets bad enough. I fill my diabetes related prescriptions 2 months ahead now, for the same reason. Tons of ammo is for the Zombieclypse, not any real threat. If I thought there was a serious threat of, say, Nuclear Winter, I would have worked in wind power instead of solar. If I wasn't already a credit union member I would have switched to improve my 'run on the banks' defense posture', but my expected worse case doesn't even run to needing silver coin to bribe corrupt government thugs, let alone putting all my money in gold and hiding it under the bed.
Here's some other things I think are reasonable extra costs some people should consider for protection against various disasters and collapses:
Have your money divided between two unrelated institutions - If you are married and simply have to use credit, at least have some separate cards from different major providers. Avoid banks that are part of big chains, if you can. If you have stocks, ask yourself it a lot of them would take a hit if some one event happens in some one distant geographic area. I don't think the minor radiation release in Japan is the harbinger of universal armaggeddon, but it's an example of why you don't want to have all your money in a restaurant chain that is just now boasting of using Kobe beef and a semiconductor firm and be thinking you are safely diversified.
The most critical vitamin is C, especially during the winter, followed by D for women who might become pregnant. If you think the food supply might be short of either Vitamin D fortified milk or citrus fruits and dark green veggies, keep some of these on the shelf. You can go a decade with not getting enough selenium if you actually live in one of the rare low selenium parts of the world, but Scurvy comes on quickly in winter, and women who have sex should assume they need vitamin D just in case the birth control fails, regardless of the disaster related factors
Real survivalists stock MRE's - the rest of us stock canned goods. Chunky soup is nice. Stock things you normally eat, so your diet stays like normal as much as possible in an emergency. Suddenly changing what kind of food you get can make you sick, especially with other stressors.If none of the stuff you normally like keeps, you are not eating right, and have another problem than disaster survival.
Serious shortages of pet food are likely to happen even before light or intermittent shortages of people food - stockpile for your pets.
Find a place that sells locally grown produce. Chat them up and make friends with the owner and regular workers, and go there at least every couple of weeks so you count as a regular. When fuel hits 6$ a gallon, nothing will come in to the major chain grocery stores that ships by containerized vessel or semi truck. You want some supplier who knows you and will maybe actually hold back a few apples just for your kids, when the national chains are carrying only starchy produce like potatoes, and other really basic items. That scenario is a lot more likely than no stores at all and no food except what you can shoot.
There are certainly circumstances where a non law enforcement person is an active part of serving a warrant, and should be. For example, a chemical or explosives expert going along to identify unknown substances in a drug lab or suspected bomb factory raid. I could see a Microsoft employee going along just to identify what machines were capable of running the bot and what peripherals might be capable of storing a copy, so the law enforcement agents didn't seize any business equipment that couldn't possibly support the bot. Lessening damage to the people whose assets were seized is an appropriate civilian role. (although not necessarily the role Microsoft employees played). The real thing needed here isn't a concrete barrier preventing all civilian involvement but a good way for the general public to verify that the involvement didn't violate anyone's civil rights (or secondarily to rights issues, waste taxpayer money helping enforce something that really should be a civil matter).
With this said, I keep wondering why companies are so willing to cooperate and link themselves with law enforcement. The average citizen can and will argue over whether a company has become merely an arm of the police state, whether there are still limits and safeguards, but just picture what a bunch of real nutcase terrorists would decide. To the extreme radicals, a company that cooperates enough with the FBI or DEA becomes merely another arm of the octopus they want to destroy. And once the fringe group takes that position, they are left with the interesting problem - do they physically attack a bunch of armed federal employees who are well trained in the use of force or do they attack an arm which is much softer and more vulnerable to physical violence? Why would an ISP, for example, cooperate uncritically with the CIA, when anybody wanting 'retribution' can then target them a lot easier than their 'government masters'? For companies especially, if you're going to get involved in armed disputes with nutcases, you might want to think about how the surviving nutcases will react.
Less oil use is good, but using organic sources means encouraging the cultivation of those plants instead of others. Plowing under a diverse ecosystem to plant many acres of nothing but switchgrass or trash paper pine is still a negative consequence. Using corn husks is good, but we already have reductions in corn being used for food so that more can be used as an Ethanol source, and the world needs food as well as less oil dependency. The full array of consequences is always going to be mixed at best. Ultimately, processes like this will have the best impact if they can use a wide variety of organic sources and so a manufacturer can offer to buy up something such as wild Kudzu to reduce or eliminate it from areas where it should never have spread, rather than make people deliberately cultivate the same Kudzu because a major industrial process is now dependent on it. Hopefully Pepsi can use this to target some plants that have been exported way outside of their normal ecosystems, and actually restore some diversity for native plants, rather than promoting more monocultures.
You could embed or suspend these crystals on a vast platter design, and then just mark any that had organic contaminants as bad sectors in your organising system and ignore them.
There are precedents, in the full legal sense of the word. Most states adopted specific laws in the 1920's and 30's for places doing public performance so that they had precedents on their side if they needed, say, to eject some patron for rowdyness. In most states, there is an implied contract law even though the patron doesn't actually sign a contract when they buy a ticket. You're talking about some past situations that can be vaguely analogized, and cases where those analogies fly in the face of the actual precedents under law, as though they were the actual precedents. The game studio, marketing a single player game, really CAN'T claim the real legal precedents apply to them. That would be claiming that a special inclusion under contract law rule existed on at least some state's 20's and 30's additions to Titles, written so as to cover the electronic distribution of a private, single player experience, instead of the public theatre versions that cover such things as smuggling food into a public performance, and such laws simply don't exist.
Now as to whether a little politeness and civility might have kept the problem from arising,, well perhaps it would have (as you said).
I didn't understand any of this, until I asked Alice and Bob about it.
It has a certain elegance - the black hole clears both ends of the wormhole so the exit is as usable as the entrance. It's also a very testable model - it predicts we would see some stars being gobbled up by black holes AND some stars being gobbled up by nothing at all.
Well, yes, there's more to it than just a squabble over who gets to produce the drug, but there's many actions on the part of the 'legitimate' side that give just that impression. It isn't the people cooking street meth that claim methamphetamine itself causes ulceration and loss of teeth - it's the DEA, saying that such symptoms are caused by abusing even the purest meth, not by any of the many adulterants or flaws in the street process. If the government is really out to protect people from the risks of cheap kitchen chemistry and drugs cut with rat poison, Then the government needs to tell the truth. Lie to people, tell them the drug itself causes the bad side effects, but not when it has the magical Barr Pharmaceuticals or DuraMed seal on it, and of course people will seize on that lie to prove it's all just a turf war.
Double clicking the bar in KDE can be set to activate windowshade mode, or restore a full window from it, which is a nice feature for some of us. It used to be people actually wrote third party apps just to add this function to early versions of Windows, up to about Me or 2000 at least, which leads me to conclude there was at least a small segment of the user base that finds windowshade effects seriously useful. Of course, my current KDE window configuration has 5 to 6 buttons in the top right corner (depending on whether "help" is included in that program), so there's probably very few people who want the same features I chose set the same way. KDE for the win.
You can't put a company to jail, or do you?
There are a few things along those lines in U.S. law. For one, who has feduciary authority in a corporation has to be clearly spelled out. An individual, real human with feduciary authority can be held responsible for acts and jailed despite the fact they were possibly acting for a corporation, plus where the company has lost track of the dividing line between regular employee and one with authority, the company can lose any remaining right to conduct normal business. Basically, if a bunch of nominally normal employees, including, say, that guy in the mail room who was just hired last Tuesday, are signing legal paperwork, contracts and such, there's nobody left with presumably clean hands who can be appointed by the court to take the place of an arrested individual CEO, CFO, or whatever, so the company owner (or the stockholders for a publicly traded corp) is unable to nominate some person to fuffill existing contracts, sign payrolls and the like, and the arrest of one or a few individuals puts the whole company's activities on hold.
RICO's another area. There, the legal goal for prosecution if a corp is involved is to show that the entity isn't really a corporation at all, because what happened is a group of people first entered into a criminal conspiracy, and as part of that conspiracy they decided to incorporate, not for the stated goal of making money legally, but for their hidden goal.
The Mach 25 Orbitally Based Dip-bomber lives again!
His point is that the Republicans are talking the big government is Eeeeevillle! line except about the part of big government that is military/security oriented. Unless you know of a bunch of democrats who are saying they want to decrease the size of government by spending even more on homeland security, the comparison is moot. There's a lot of the usual political guff being thrown around, but there's still a particular total insanity which way exceeds normal politics to saying "Big government is bad, now increase the FBI budget again so we'll all be safe.". There are currently 17 Federal civilian agencies who have agents carrying automatic firearms. If big government is dangerous, the worst the National Endowment for the Arts can do to you is still only to deny you a grant for your painting project and reward a competing artist. The worst a BATF agent can do is lob a grenade into your home. Which agencies are the real threat from big government? How is it not a matter of liberals or conservatives, when its ALL conservatives who are telling you the problem is the government agencies that DON'T have police powers. The NEA isn't the people who will be rounding citizens up and putting them into camps - if that happens, it's going to be some agency under homeland security's umbrella.