Yes, but being able to blame Windows for your marital problems adds a wonderful degree of consistency to the topic of 'things which cause strife and misery.'
The body consumes 5-6 mL of oxygen at what I assume is close to STP (1), which comes out 7.14 mg of oxygen. The numbers here (2) indicate the dissolved oxygen content can be fairly high, e.g., "the optimal DO for adult brown trout is 9-12 mg/l." In as much as I assume this would be applied toward diving, dissolved oxygen tends to increase with depth. It does not seem that unreasonable to be able to process a liter of water or less per minute, if not by this mechanism, then by some other. Disposing of CO2 is actually a bigger problem, I think, as it is for the liquid breathing you link to, but I think considerable advantages open up in the context of an artificial apparatus vs. trying to interoperate with a human lung.
But the "call to 'shoot the [racist slur]'" was clearly unacceptable and should have been illegal. In the UK this would be incitement to violence and incitement of racial hatred
Clearly it was not clearly unacceptable, or it would not be subject of reversed court decisions and a divided court.
What is at issue is that, yes, it is illegal to promote the killing of the president, but saying 'shoot the president', is not necessarily a call to shoot the president.
"When our law punishes words, we must examine the surrounding circumstances to discern the significance of those words’ utterance, but must not distort or embellish their plain meaning so that the law may reach them," said the 2-1 ruling
If the guy had been up on a pulpit delivering a speech to the Aryan brotherhood or something, the conviction likely would have been upheld. But instead he said it during an inebriated diatribe on an internet chat site. The 9th Circuit decided his statement was more reasonably interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the president than as an actual solicitation for his murder. Frankly, I would agree. It gets murky, to be sure, but ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, when an English speaking person says "I'm gonna kill you" that just means they're upset (or even just playfully pretending to be upset), and this sort of metaphor and off-handedness needs to be accounted for.
In the UK this would be incitement to violence and incitement of racial hatred.
Yes, well, not many countries match the U.S. in their free speech doctrine, and he was not being tried for violating UK law. Also, he obviously *was* brought up on criminal allegations in the U.S., so you aren't comparing our law to your law so much as you're comparing our closely divided court decisions to your vision of how your own magistrates would poll on this.
Even metal and plastic parts are biologically vulnerable. (Look at footage of the Titanic.) I imagine it would be rather more of an issue if these materials had been prevalent in nature, but they may become a more popular food source pretty soon.
You might not want parts to wear out, but what if it is virtually free to grow a new biological part, and costs 10k for the inorganic equivalent? Biological parts are also pretty good about replacing themselves ("healing"), which means they will be fine on their own, vs. a mechanical device which inevitably involves wear on bearings, etc. "Rotting" is a pretty nice feature for resource disposal/recovery as well--at some point it becomes a problem that your fancy inorganic microchips require new resources and/or a lot of energy expenditure to replace.
In any case, I don't think you're going to have to worry about being inconvenienced by the tradeoffs. Obviously, as technology develops, we will use the stuff that is most useful in the places where it makes sense to do so. It's not like there aren't already plenty of inorganic components which are quite heat sensitive, etc. You choose the components based on the needs of your project.
You can photocopy parts of textbooks that you need for a course, if the library has only one copy of a book that hundreds of students need.
My professors have told me that the maximum that's considered "fair use" is about 10%, and that's supposed to be as supplementary material, with the assumption being that there is some other officially assigned textbook for the course. Making photocopies so students can have a course text without buying it is obviously copyright infringement. If you want to promote that, then I don't see why you would suggest people spend hours and lots of money making photocopies when they can usually download the complete textbooks via torrent for free.
What Amazon is providing is a trap, designed to force students to spend their money on something they will be forbidden to look at after a few months, unless they are willing to pay more.
How is amazon going to "force" them to spend money on this? And how is it a "trap"? The options are clearly listed: you can buy the print edition, buy the kindle edition, or rent the kindle edition. As lamentable as our modern education system may be, I think most students will be able to understand what "rent" means, and decide for themselves whether they will be saving money by renting for the semester something they are never going to use again, or if they would rather own it.
For that matter, saving students money is a big part of Amazon's business model. Everyone knows it's cheaper to get your books overnighted from Amazon instead of paying for the massive ripoff that is on-campus bookstores. We take our course list, scan in the UPC of the books with our Android phones, and then order them online. There is no conspiracy involved--if Amazon stops being cheap, they will lose that part of their business.
unless the price per sheet is absurdly high.
Well, yeah, of course it is, libraries view the photocopier as a revenue stream.
Libraries are meant to provide a collection of knowledge, not a warehouse of books. Most libraries I've been to have been filled up on every floor with copies of *mostly unique* books. Where are they supposed to store hundreds of identical copies for each of hundreds of different classes? And books used as a reference are different than books used as instructional material: the former can be fifty years old, the latter is assumed to be mostly up to date, and the problem sets need to correspond to the latest edition, i.e., the books must be frequently replaced. It's still going to cost the same (probably more--is the university really going to buy the cheap international paperback?) and I know my school for one would raise the money by hiking tuition.
Many students already share books to the degree that is practical, and pass them on to other friends until the edition is eventually replaced.
In any case, the point is moot because Amazon is providing a solution, and the universities are not, so it's pretty ridiculous to ridicule what Amazon is providing. Good luck convincing the thousands of administrations around the country to implement your solution. (They could have been doing exactly what you suggest for the past hundred years. Maybe some even do, but everywhere I've been we've had to buy the books.) Meanwhile, Amazon is providing a counterpart that can be used anywhere. As long as the price is right, I'm very happy to have the option.
Would the directed investment really have a higher payoff? I'm not so sure. There's the part of technological progress that involves applying what you already know, isolating the optimum test cases, taking a problem and just staring at it for a while. Then there's the part that involves sheer inspiration. It's the reason all the most brilliant minds in the world can putter about unable to make any great progress on a particular problem in physics, until some random guy points out that maybe energy can only exist according to certain quantizations. Yeah, in many cases, that guy is a genius as well; but it's not the lack of brain power that keeps humanity back, it's that everyone keeps attacking the problem the same way.
So it's not a given that the technologies the space program developed, which were co-opted into the private sector, would have been developed in any reasonable time span by engineers working on the problems to which the technologies were eventually applied. It may be that the "intellectual pathway" to the technology did not have a parallel existence outside of the space program. Impossible to prove definitively, of course. But it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a small portion of our R&D should be directed to difficult, multifaceted problems like space exploration, sheerly for their tangential influence, with a larger majority going to the real, concrete problems.
A fire mostly involves collecting together logs and kindling--but to get it going, you also need a spark.
He was responding to the contention that NASA should be patted on the back for bringing that pool of talent together, the point being that they were already working together when NASA got around to contracting the group. Their "ownership" wasn't in dispute.
Arbitrary does not imply 'chance' so much as 'human discretion'. The sense of random described is in line with the larger use of the word. 'Random' is a cognate of 'run' and its use in probabilities refers to the idea of making a rushed choice. (In which cases, using a badly-cobbled together computer program seems oddly appropriate.)
The problem stated was that "The algorithm that was used only looked at submissions of the first 2 days." I am not sure exactly what they think they mean by "scientific randomness"--obviously, many things in science described as random are not equally weighted. As long as the choice from the first 2 days was itself random, it would still be correct to call it a random choice.
But choosing from the first two days is really the sort of thing that will bias your sample in certain ways--you'll find that people who signed up in the first two days were all avid internet users, for example.
Personally, I do not understand why we would want to admit random people for citizenship in the first case. How about admitting the most educated, or the most hard working? Is the goal of the immigration system to give foreigners a fun casino game they can play, or is it to connect people who will improve our society with the opportunity to participate in it?
I know that if you are the sole possessor of, e.g., a discontinued book, you become the copyright holder of that work. Without necessarily knowing the specific laws, it seems it should be similar here. The alleged goal of copyright is to incentivize the creation and/or distribution of works. The fact that this typically involves rewarding the 'artist' is tangential. The pictures do not become accessible to the public unless somebody gives the monkeys an expensive camera and uploads them. That person should have the copyright. (But I also think Techdirt's fair use claim is legitimate.)
Who cares if it did go to the moon? Who cares if it was kissed by King Tut, worn as a hat by Isaac Newton, and served as a swaddling cloth for the young Abe Lincoln?
Unless there are unanswered scientific or historical questions the artifact may shed light on, it doesn't have any real value apart from our own invented sentimentalism. A sheerly practical person may then not care about it. But I don't particularly see why a strip of the flag that went to the moon would be more valuable for having been taken from the flag after it was the moon rather than before. It is still equally unique, and equally connected to the historical incident.
"Getting efficient?" So you want us to throw up a bunch of energy inefficient plants because we think in the future we will eventually have efficient ones? I don't understand why we would want to build the inefficient ones at all. Why not take that money and use it to get the efficient plants more quickly? That's what Bill Gates is suggesting, and it seems sensible to me.
Even if we get the fundamental technology in the next ten years (not guaranteed), plants do not spring up magically and instantaneously. We have to be building infrastructure *right now* based on our anticipation of our near-future energy needs. We can't wait ten years because someone is prophesying an energy miracle, be disappointed and then... what? Spend a few years of rolling blackouts while we try to get back on course?
If we think a certain line of tech is going to have a big payoff, then certainly we should invest in it. But we should not predicate the time-critical solution to our real and tangible needs on uninvented technology.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
You would think that selling and setting off fireworks would also be illegal this year
Banning the use of fireworks would be the worst idea imaginable. The real problem we have is brush fires starting in remote areas. Banning fireworks == people going to remote areas to try to use them without being caught.
If you're a local, you should be well aware that the fireworks laws we do have are popularly ignored anyway.
A better idea would be a public information campaign. A lot of people here who are inclined to shrug at the legal restrictions actually do care about the well-being of their community.
It would be great if we could do away with purchasing things in bulk, i.e., buying a full bottle of a specialty spice even though you're just going to use half of a teaspoon of it, and instead just receive exactly what you need in general purpose containers (saving also the hassle of measuring it yourself). Especially as someone who likes to cook gourmet, I like to buy ingredients as near to when I'm using them as possible.
We could have "one-click recipes" where, instead of spending time locating ingredients, people can share their purchase orders with the associated recipes so anyone can get everything they need to duplicate it with a single mouse click.
Getting things to order, and in exact quantities, could also avoid the energy waste of everyone owning large personal refrigerators and freezers, besides avoiding the cost and environmental impact of fancy packaging, etc.
It becomes increasingly sensible the larger the scale of customers.
the point was that the president had DECIDED to authorize the bill
What was it that he decided to authorize? I suppose he may have a general idea, but I doubt he knows specifically if he's having to sign it remotely. (Is the autopen robot reading the bill for him as well?)
Is he limited to authorizing the signature on specific bills, or can he delegate it so "anything the Democratic leadership is ok with I authorize to be signed," etc.?
Also, if your argument is that it is merely the authorization that is important, I don't see why the autopen would be used in the first place. It would seem that using it is an admission that the bill needs to be physically signed (otherwise, building a device to hold a pen instead of just faxing over a signature is fairly ridiculous). In that case, why do you consider it out-of-bounds to ask whether the signing process itself was legitimate?
The Bush administration Justice Dept reviewed this, and while ultimately Bush decided to manually sign whatever bill they were discussing, the JP had produced a 20+ page justification that it WAS perfectly fine
The fact that Bush did not think the 20+ page justification his Justice department drafted up for him was good enough is probably evidence that it wasn't.
I don't think it's that big of deal to ask a president to physically possess the document he is making every citizen accountable to and put a mark on it. Yes, it is just (constitutionally required) ceremony, but if burying my civil liberties is not even worth a little fanfare anymore, I would have to say the government has gone from being misguided to being downright sadistic.
The National Security Agency's job is not to gather indiscriminate information, as you seem to infer, but rather, to promote national security. Part of the actual day-to-day function of the NSA is to try to provide domestic data security, and inserting backdoors in encryption products used by Americans would be working in blatant opposition to that interest.
America is still at the front of the race--scientifically, technologically, economically, militarily--and consequently is fighting a bit of a one-sided battle regarding espionage--it's really awesome for the Chinese to learn about our secret new stealth fighters and microprocessors. It's not so interesting for us to steal schematics of the 5-10 year old technology they copied from us. Thus, introducing general security holes would be a pretty stupid move on our part.
But maybe *you* are working for the NSA. Developing powerful encryption software and spreading rumors to make other countries too paranoid to use it seems much more effective than export restrictions.
I'm fully opposed to the PATRIOT act (well, that may be a mistake to say--it is a fairly lengthy piece of legislation that doubtless has merit in places, even if just by chance), but I fail to see how someone supporting it "is to a certain measurable degree lowering themselves down the moral scale."
First of all, you've set yourself the privilege of defining the of the moral scale. Is safety greater than liberty, and to what degree? Depending on how you answer those two questions, you may or may not be a supporter of the PATRIOT Act. However, while coming down substantially on the side of liberty, I don't feel that any answer would reflect an impaired sense of morality.
Second, even if someone has the wrong impression, I do not think that implicates them in any sense other than genuine ignorance. It's wrong to support something you know is bad; it's not wrong to support something you think is good, even if you are ultimately incorrect. Otherwise, how can we, as limited finite beings, even know if something is good or bad? (E.g., a man steals a bicycle from a little girl, and if he hadn't she would have been hit by a car on her way home, so an omniscient entity would have the ability to recognize it as a good thing.)
Doubtless, a lot of congress persons are cowardly opportunists who passed the PATRIOT Act in hopes of placating a reactionary public, and for that they deserve our anger. But anyone who voted for it because they honestly felt it was in the best interest of the public, well, if he or she is going to make a lot of that kind of decision then I don't want him or her representing me, but, ceterus paribus, I would not have any complaints against their character.
I've sent about a terabyte of critically important data to a special compression device my computer came with, called "/dev/null", and it still hasn't filled up.
I'm pretty sure the money is often earmarked specifically for infrastruger. E.g., there is fairly ridiculous walkway connecting two buildings on our campus because we apparently had money to build an "addition" but not an independent building.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but being able to blame Windows for your marital problems adds a wonderful degree of consistency to the topic of 'things which cause strife and misery.'
Age of the slashdot millionaires.
Quick calculations:
The body consumes 5-6 mL of oxygen at what I assume is close to STP (1), which comes out 7.14 mg of oxygen. The numbers here (2) indicate the dissolved oxygen content can be fairly high, e.g., "the optimal DO for adult brown trout is 9-12 mg/l." In as much as I assume this would be applied toward diving, dissolved oxygen tends to increase with depth. It does not seem that unreasonable to be able to process a liter of water or less per minute, if not by this mechanism, then by some other. Disposing of CO2 is actually a bigger problem, I think, as it is for the liquid breathing you link to, but I think considerable advantages open up in the context of an artificial apparatus vs. trying to interoperate with a human lung.
(1) "How much oxygen does the human lung consume?" Loer SA, Scheeren TW, Tarnow J., Department of Anesthesiology, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9066318
(2) "General Information on Dissolved Oxygen," Sheila Murphy, City of Boulder/USGS Water Quality Monitoring, http://bcn.boulder.co.us/basin/data/NEW/info/DO.html
Did this really just get modded "informative" for attacking the way the Prime Minister's name is spelled?
But the "call to 'shoot the [racist slur]'" was clearly unacceptable and should have been illegal. In the UK this would be incitement to violence and incitement of racial hatred
Clearly it was not clearly unacceptable, or it would not be subject of reversed court decisions and a divided court.
What is at issue is that, yes, it is illegal to promote the killing of the president, but saying 'shoot the president', is not necessarily a call to shoot the president.
"When our law punishes words, we must examine the surrounding circumstances to discern the significance of those words’ utterance, but must not distort or embellish their plain meaning so that the law may reach them," said the 2-1 ruling
If the guy had been up on a pulpit delivering a speech to the Aryan brotherhood or something, the conviction likely would have been upheld. But instead he said it during an inebriated diatribe on an internet chat site. The 9th Circuit decided his statement was more reasonably interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the president than as an actual solicitation for his murder. Frankly, I would agree. It gets murky, to be sure, but ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, when an English speaking person says "I'm gonna kill you" that just means they're upset (or even just playfully pretending to be upset), and this sort of metaphor and off-handedness needs to be accounted for.
In the UK this would be incitement to violence and incitement of racial hatred.
Yes, well, not many countries match the U.S. in their free speech doctrine, and he was not being tried for violating UK law. Also, he obviously *was* brought up on criminal allegations in the U.S., so you aren't comparing our law to your law so much as you're comparing our closely divided court decisions to your vision of how your own magistrates would poll on this.
43 min for 10 bytes.
I see they've copied the poorly hobbled together config for my SAMBA server.
Actually, doing nothing is the tried and true Slashdot defense against STDs.
Even metal and plastic parts are biologically vulnerable. (Look at footage of the Titanic.) I imagine it would be rather more of an issue if these materials had been prevalent in nature, but they may become a more popular food source pretty soon.
You might not want parts to wear out, but what if it is virtually free to grow a new biological part, and costs 10k for the inorganic equivalent? Biological parts are also pretty good about replacing themselves ("healing"), which means they will be fine on their own, vs. a mechanical device which inevitably involves wear on bearings, etc. "Rotting" is a pretty nice feature for resource disposal/recovery as well--at some point it becomes a problem that your fancy inorganic microchips require new resources and/or a lot of energy expenditure to replace.
In any case, I don't think you're going to have to worry about being inconvenienced by the tradeoffs. Obviously, as technology develops, we will use the stuff that is most useful in the places where it makes sense to do so. It's not like there aren't already plenty of inorganic components which are quite heat sensitive, etc. You choose the components based on the needs of your project.
You can photocopy parts of textbooks that you need for a course, if the library has only one copy of a book that hundreds of students need.
My professors have told me that the maximum that's considered "fair use" is about 10%, and that's supposed to be as supplementary material, with the assumption being that there is some other officially assigned textbook for the course. Making photocopies so students can have a course text without buying it is obviously copyright infringement. If you want to promote that, then I don't see why you would suggest people spend hours and lots of money making photocopies when they can usually download the complete textbooks via torrent for free.
What Amazon is providing is a trap, designed to force students to spend their money on something they will be forbidden to look at after a few months, unless they are willing to pay more.
How is amazon going to "force" them to spend money on this? And how is it a "trap"? The options are clearly listed: you can buy the print edition, buy the kindle edition, or rent the kindle edition. As lamentable as our modern education system may be, I think most students will be able to understand what "rent" means, and decide for themselves whether they will be saving money by renting for the semester something they are never going to use again, or if they would rather own it.
For that matter, saving students money is a big part of Amazon's business model. Everyone knows it's cheaper to get your books overnighted from Amazon instead of paying for the massive ripoff that is on-campus bookstores. We take our course list, scan in the UPC of the books with our Android phones, and then order them online. There is no conspiracy involved--if Amazon stops being cheap, they will lose that part of their business.
unless the price per sheet is absurdly high.
Well, yeah, of course it is, libraries view the photocopier as a revenue stream.
Libraries are meant to provide a collection of knowledge, not a warehouse of books. Most libraries I've been to have been filled up on every floor with copies of *mostly unique* books. Where are they supposed to store hundreds of identical copies for each of hundreds of different classes? And books used as a reference are different than books used as instructional material: the former can be fifty years old, the latter is assumed to be mostly up to date, and the problem sets need to correspond to the latest edition, i.e., the books must be frequently replaced. It's still going to cost the same (probably more--is the university really going to buy the cheap international paperback?) and I know my school for one would raise the money by hiking tuition.
Many students already share books to the degree that is practical, and pass them on to other friends until the edition is eventually replaced.
In any case, the point is moot because Amazon is providing a solution, and the universities are not, so it's pretty ridiculous to ridicule what Amazon is providing. Good luck convincing the thousands of administrations around the country to implement your solution. (They could have been doing exactly what you suggest for the past hundred years. Maybe some even do, but everywhere I've been we've had to buy the books.) Meanwhile, Amazon is providing a counterpart that can be used anywhere. As long as the price is right, I'm very happy to have the option.
Would the directed investment really have a higher payoff? I'm not so sure. There's the part of technological progress that involves applying what you already know, isolating the optimum test cases, taking a problem and just staring at it for a while. Then there's the part that involves sheer inspiration. It's the reason all the most brilliant minds in the world can putter about unable to make any great progress on a particular problem in physics, until some random guy points out that maybe energy can only exist according to certain quantizations. Yeah, in many cases, that guy is a genius as well; but it's not the lack of brain power that keeps humanity back, it's that everyone keeps attacking the problem the same way.
So it's not a given that the technologies the space program developed, which were co-opted into the private sector, would have been developed in any reasonable time span by engineers working on the problems to which the technologies were eventually applied. It may be that the "intellectual pathway" to the technology did not have a parallel existence outside of the space program. Impossible to prove definitively, of course. But it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a small portion of our R&D should be directed to difficult, multifaceted problems like space exploration, sheerly for their tangential influence, with a larger majority going to the real, concrete problems.
A fire mostly involves collecting together logs and kindling--but to get it going, you also need a spark.
He was responding to the contention that NASA should be patted on the back for bringing that pool of talent together, the point being that they were already working together when NASA got around to contracting the group. Their "ownership" wasn't in dispute.
Arbitrary does not imply 'chance' so much as 'human discretion'. The sense of random described is in line with the larger use of the word. 'Random' is a cognate of 'run' and its use in probabilities refers to the idea of making a rushed choice. (In which cases, using a badly-cobbled together computer program seems oddly appropriate.)
The problem stated was that "The algorithm that was used only looked at submissions of the first 2 days." I am not sure exactly what they think they mean by "scientific randomness"--obviously, many things in science described as random are not equally weighted. As long as the choice from the first 2 days was itself random, it would still be correct to call it a random choice.
But choosing from the first two days is really the sort of thing that will bias your sample in certain ways--you'll find that people who signed up in the first two days were all avid internet users, for example.
Personally, I do not understand why we would want to admit random people for citizenship in the first case. How about admitting the most educated, or the most hard working? Is the goal of the immigration system to give foreigners a fun casino game they can play, or is it to connect people who will improve our society with the opportunity to participate in it?
I know that if you are the sole possessor of, e.g., a discontinued book, you become the copyright holder of that work. Without necessarily knowing the specific laws, it seems it should be similar here. The alleged goal of copyright is to incentivize the creation and/or distribution of works. The fact that this typically involves rewarding the 'artist' is tangential. The pictures do not become accessible to the public unless somebody gives the monkeys an expensive camera and uploads them. That person should have the copyright. (But I also think Techdirt's fair use claim is legitimate.)
Who cares if it did go to the moon? Who cares if it was kissed by King Tut, worn as a hat by Isaac Newton, and served as a swaddling cloth for the young Abe Lincoln?
Unless there are unanswered scientific or historical questions the artifact may shed light on, it doesn't have any real value apart from our own invented sentimentalism. A sheerly practical person may then not care about it. But I don't particularly see why a strip of the flag that went to the moon would be more valuable for having been taken from the flag after it was the moon rather than before. It is still equally unique, and equally connected to the historical incident.
"Getting efficient?" So you want us to throw up a bunch of energy inefficient plants because we think in the future we will eventually have efficient ones? I don't understand why we would want to build the inefficient ones at all. Why not take that money and use it to get the efficient plants more quickly? That's what Bill Gates is suggesting, and it seems sensible to me.
Even if we get the fundamental technology in the next ten years (not guaranteed), plants do not spring up magically and instantaneously. We have to be building infrastructure *right now* based on our anticipation of our near-future energy needs. We can't wait ten years because someone is prophesying an energy miracle, be disappointed and then... what? Spend a few years of rolling blackouts while we try to get back on course?
If we think a certain line of tech is going to have a big payoff, then certainly we should invest in it. But we should not predicate the time-critical solution to our real and tangible needs on uninvented technology.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.'"
Why attack a flower box? I had heard the terrorists wanted to take us back to the Dark Ages, but, in this case, the assumption appears to be that they are trying to take us all the way back to the Triassic, before the dawn of angiosperms.
You would think that selling and setting off fireworks would also be illegal this year
Banning the use of fireworks would be the worst idea imaginable. The real problem we have is brush fires starting in remote areas. Banning fireworks == people going to remote areas to try to use them without being caught.
If you're a local, you should be well aware that the fireworks laws we do have are popularly ignored anyway.
A better idea would be a public information campaign. A lot of people here who are inclined to shrug at the legal restrictions actually do care about the well-being of their community.
It would be great if we could do away with purchasing things in bulk, i.e., buying a full bottle of a specialty spice even though you're just going to use half of a teaspoon of it, and instead just receive exactly what you need in general purpose containers (saving also the hassle of measuring it yourself). Especially as someone who likes to cook gourmet, I like to buy ingredients as near to when I'm using them as possible.
We could have "one-click recipes" where, instead of spending time locating ingredients, people can share their purchase orders with the associated recipes so anyone can get everything they need to duplicate it with a single mouse click.
Getting things to order, and in exact quantities, could also avoid the energy waste of everyone owning large personal refrigerators and freezers, besides avoiding the cost and environmental impact of fancy packaging, etc.
It becomes increasingly sensible the larger the scale of customers.
the point was that the president had DECIDED to authorize the bill
What was it that he decided to authorize? I suppose he may have a general idea, but I doubt he knows specifically if he's having to sign it remotely. (Is the autopen robot reading the bill for him as well?)
Is he limited to authorizing the signature on specific bills, or can he delegate it so "anything the Democratic leadership is ok with I authorize to be signed," etc.?
Also, if your argument is that it is merely the authorization that is important, I don't see why the autopen would be used in the first place. It would seem that using it is an admission that the bill needs to be physically signed (otherwise, building a device to hold a pen instead of just faxing over a signature is fairly ridiculous). In that case, why do you consider it out-of-bounds to ask whether the signing process itself was legitimate?
The Bush administration Justice Dept reviewed this, and while ultimately Bush decided to manually sign whatever bill they were discussing, the JP had produced a 20+ page justification that it WAS perfectly fine
The fact that Bush did not think the 20+ page justification his Justice department drafted up for him was good enough is probably evidence that it wasn't.
I don't think it's that big of deal to ask a president to physically possess the document he is making every citizen accountable to and put a mark on it. Yes, it is just (constitutionally required) ceremony, but if burying my civil liberties is not even worth a little fanfare anymore, I would have to say the government has gone from being misguided to being downright sadistic.
The National Security Agency's job is not to gather indiscriminate information, as you seem to infer, but rather, to promote national security. Part of the actual day-to-day function of the NSA is to try to provide domestic data security, and inserting backdoors in encryption products used by Americans would be working in blatant opposition to that interest.
America is still at the front of the race--scientifically, technologically, economically, militarily--and consequently is fighting a bit of a one-sided battle regarding espionage--it's really awesome for the Chinese to learn about our secret new stealth fighters and microprocessors. It's not so interesting for us to steal schematics of the 5-10 year old technology they copied from us. Thus, introducing general security holes would be a pretty stupid move on our part.
But maybe *you* are working for the NSA. Developing powerful encryption software and spreading rumors to make other countries too paranoid to use it seems much more effective than export restrictions.
I'm fully opposed to the PATRIOT act (well, that may be a mistake to say--it is a fairly lengthy piece of legislation that doubtless has merit in places, even if just by chance), but I fail to see how someone supporting it "is to a certain measurable degree lowering themselves down the moral scale."
First of all, you've set yourself the privilege of defining the of the moral scale. Is safety greater than liberty, and to what degree? Depending on how you answer those two questions, you may or may not be a supporter of the PATRIOT Act. However, while coming down substantially on the side of liberty, I don't feel that any answer would reflect an impaired sense of morality.
Second, even if someone has the wrong impression, I do not think that implicates them in any sense other than genuine ignorance. It's wrong to support something you know is bad; it's not wrong to support something you think is good, even if you are ultimately incorrect. Otherwise, how can we, as limited finite beings, even know if something is good or bad? (E.g., a man steals a bicycle from a little girl, and if he hadn't she would have been hit by a car on her way home, so an omniscient entity would have the ability to recognize it as a good thing.)
Doubtless, a lot of congress persons are cowardly opportunists who passed the PATRIOT Act in hopes of placating a reactionary public, and for that they deserve our anger. But anyone who voted for it because they honestly felt it was in the best interest of the public, well, if he or she is going to make a lot of that kind of decision then I don't want him or her representing me, but, ceterus paribus, I would not have any complaints against their character.
I've sent about a terabyte of critically important data to a special compression device my computer came with, called "/dev/null", and it still hasn't filled up.
I'm pretty sure the money is often earmarked specifically for infrastruger. E.g., there is fairly ridiculous walkway connecting two buildings on our campus because we apparently had money to build an "addition" but not an independent building.