Go ahead, people, cheer for the corporations. None of them are doing anything for you. Your government supplies your drinking water, builds your roads, responds in the event of disaster, and much, much more.
I believe as far as entities go governments are also the leading executors of genocide, war, religious oppression, institutionalized discrimination, etc., etc. At least corporations aren't ever going to be interested in the wholesale extermination of large segments of their customer base.
Not that I am particularly interested in having corporations exist with comparable powers. The short and simple rule is that the more power something or someone has the more despicable it becomes. But there is no getting around the fact that there is a lot of power to be wielded one way or the other. You can't simply declare it to be void. So the best you can do is to try to keep it divided against itself.
Thus, a divided government (legislative vs. judicial vs. executive; independent states; competing political parties; et al.) is better positioned to be free than an absolutely monarchy. And functioning capitalism promotes more freedom than monopolies or communism.
Where monopolies have cropped up I am all for seeing them removed. Especially when their existence is the result of direct government sponsorship.
However, I persist in the (so far historically correct) observation that government is the most dangerous entity, and I am very happy to have a great deal of its power divested to private entities, companies or otherwise. It worries me to see such extreme views as your own... with such an attitude you can justify anything. We should check the power of corporations without making it into a holy crusade. I realize they are a nice soft target for ideological grandstanding, and in the end they are certainly an imperfect instrument, but probably having them around is the less terrible than many of the alternatives.
You are forgetting about all the accidents and injuries caused by people with colorblindness being less aware of warnings and other color-coded safety information. Society has to pick up the tab, and as such is within its rights to require every citizen to obtain full vision correction whether they like it or not!
(Don't worry about the cost of the procedure; it will be covered by your government-mandated insurance purchase.)
You cut deals simply in order expand your ability to prosecute. In a criminal hierarchy you're often interested in "cutting off the head," who is probably the guy guilty of the most charges anyway, but in this case that was Bernie Madoff (whom they've already got) and it isn't exactly clear that his "top aide" was more instrumental to the deceit than the programmers. In any case, if they weren't willing to cut a deal themselves, well, I guess their "prisoner's dilemma" playing strategy was not optimal.
Looking at my school's course catalog, I'm not sure where people in any of the hard science programs would be getting this kind of knowledge. Even the probability course--which students grumble about if they have to take instead of the "easier" statistics class--is not that in depth. There are too many areas to cover in a single semester to focus on ironing out all the "gotchas" rather than simply introducing the core material. And no statistics related courses are required beyond that one class.
In other courses professors are rather more intent on teaching their own material. They'll teach t-tests, etc., if they have to, but not at the depth which would address the problems described in the article. In my experience the physics department has been the only place where they don't play fast-and-loose with mathematics in general.
I think you probably have less problems in the published research of the hard sciences in that that is often interested in applying an actual theoretical model. Misapprehending the finer points of the statistics involved is not as relevant as it is when you are just datamining the genome for any correlation you can grab at.
I would definitely be interested in buying a car that can be triggered to shutdown or start blaring its horn remotely! Is there anyway to buy one with a built-in bomb?
Will a healthy "non-donator" be put far behind, for example, other persons likely to die/reject the transplant? If the free-loaders are a small minority one would think it would be better to keep the emphasis on getting organs to the people who stand the best chances of being able to use them, rather than necessarily who has put in an equitable stake.
For that matter, although these people may not have volunteered their organs, if they pay taxes they are still contributing to Israel's socialized health care program. How much does that count for sharing the burden of these expensive procedures?
And will these people still have a reasonable chance of coming up on the waiting list, or are their prospects pretty much nullified? Seems to me that death is a bit harsh of a penalty for not signing up. You may as well just void the opt-out bit entirely. Surely you would rather they be annoying whiners about it than potentially dead.
Disclaimer: I'm 100% for letting people bear the natural consequences of their choices, even when that's death, and would never want to be forced to sign up for anything. The above simply represents some objections I feel a less libertarian individual might raise.
no punishment that state can inflict will come close to what he's done to himself.
You say that based on (let's generously say) 99% of all cases. But what about that 1% of cases where Daddy, or Mommy, or both are psychopaths?
Do we leave open that get-out-of-jail-free card where all they have to do is say, "Timmy, point this at yourself and pull the trigger, will you?" and have a happy consequence free murder?
Basically what you are arguing is that there should never be any punishment for manslaughter, as the vast majority of healthy-thinking individuals would be pretty torn up about having killed someone.
But societal punishment has more nuanced aims than simply to provide a minimum assurance that people with functioning consciences will not want to repeat their mistakes.
Also,
I wouldn't be surprised if he winds up comitting suicide intentionally, with the same gun. I can't imagine how much this guy's hurting right now.
If that's the way he feels, maybe having an imposed punishment would free him of the need to punish himself, and ultimately give him some peace.
Ah, yes, 1 baby per month is what you would expect for the classical case, but if we model the baby as a particle in a time box we actually expect 2/9*sin^2(n*pi*t/9) babies.
Some people just don't stop to think about the realism of their model!
I have found that I can either go to sleep at the same time every night, or go to sleep when I feel tired. The latter results in something like you describe. My sensation is that there are cycles of alertness and tiredness (which I guess is a good adaptation--your body should encourage you to get rest without constantly sabotaging your functionality) and you have to hit on the right point of the cycle in order to fall asleep peaceably.
I generally "reset" by going a day entirely without sleep or with only a small nap in the morning.
Bias is affecting the experiment even before it begins--hypotheses are made based on human intuition, and experiments are selected based on judgments of value. Historically, look how long science lagged in the same state simply because people didn't think outside of what they had come to expect. Even post-Newton, if it wasn't for chance discoveries--for example, Hertz' observation of the photoelectic effect--one wonders if the human mind would ever have ever dared to venture speculations beyond the 'sensible' mechanisms of classical mechanics. It's not a simple thing to divorce your expectations from the form the science has previously taken.
In any case, I was more specifically interested in the environmental aspect, as it was a central consideration of the article. Climate science (certainly at this stage of its development) does not quite lend to your criterion of "experiment, rinse, repeat." There's not really any experiments that can be run to analyze the sum nature of the system. At best you can confirm small elements of what is going on and try to incorporate them into an approximate model, which is speculative and requires many assumptions. There's also the matter of when certain results contradict other results, and you say "the sum of the evidence says this." But it is a weighted sum, obviously--there's no guarantee a slight discrepancy in one place doesn't represent a fundamental flaw in the model. Beyond that, there is the issue of understanding what the science you're testing states--how much is the methodology based on expectations?
If we accept the study's conclusion that people, when presented with actual facts, tend to select, discard, and reason around them based on their cultural identities, one would imagine a bias in cultural identity could infuse a bias into their net understanding of these statistical considerations. In which case, we may need to examine those biases before coming to such conclusions as "between the 90% and the 10% positions in field X, the 90% position is most probably correct by reason of being a greater proportion." What if that simply represents a proportion of personalties?
Not commenting on the debate, but I think it's interesting that in an article about cognitive biases (particularly group cognitive biases) that they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus," they only view it from the perspective of how such biases affect the freshly germinated views of the uninitated. You would think scientists, being human beings as well, would be in some way subject the same effects, and as long as questions are being raised about the human proclivity for certain viewpoints, someone might stop to wonder "in what ratio do people who go into the environmental sciences tend to be individualist or communitarian, and how is this likely to affect their judgment of related information?"
If they want to check his presence, logging him in and out, there are other methods to do that. They don't need his fingerprints. It worked perfectly well with badges and/or company ID cards.
How exactly does an ID card verify his presence, rather than simply that someone possessing the card happened to run it through the machine?
And, yes, his fingerprints are all over the doorprint. Together with a gazillion of other fingerprints. And withoug registration that makes him one of the anonymous crowd.
As long as no one goes to the extraordinary effort of pre-emptively wiping the handle clean.
It's easy to ridicule people as paranoid. Instead, however, you should be thinking "why the heck are they requiring my fingerprints".
What I am comparing this to is, for example, using a social security number for identification, which seems to generate a large current of opposition here on slashdot precisely because it such a non-physical, easily reproducible security feature. I want anonymity as much as the next guy, but the one place I don't want it is in verifying my identity. (I would think most people could see the inherent contradiction in wanting both at the same time.) Ideally only one person will be able to gain access to things under my identity, that being me.
Fyi, pretty much any job working for the government or with children is much more invasive--you will actually have your prints submitted to a database for a background check, rather than simply having checksummed on the given machine. The latter doesn't seem that controversial to me.
(1) "Mayor Tommy Battle" and his "task force to include 25 community leaders" does not equate to Alabama congresscritters, Alabama citizens in general, or the tea party movement.
(2) Nor do I really think if we took a poll of Alabama's citizens that we would find a majority who thought Obama was "fascist" or "communist".
(3) So far I haven't found anything definitive about Mr. Battle's political affiliation... maybe someone else can make a more skilled research. But the best lead I have is that he spoke at a conference for Democrat women. It may be the case your assumption he represents conservative groups is incorrect. Was it substantiated by anything other than seeing the word Alabama?
(4) Promoting small government does not preclude people from supporting the existence of certain government programs. I mean, theoretically you are talking about conservatives (or some crude caricature thereof), not anarcho-capitalists. As "the Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook," I think it there are probably some decent balancing arguments for maintaining the program.
I'm not saying that securing pork isn't likely to be among the motivations, or that there mightn't be some hypocrisy; but as far as establishing either of those points goes, all you did was rant off some wild generalizations.
Unmanned spaceflight isn't exactly justified by the costs, either, assuming we're only considering the utilitarian value. If things like learning Martian geology etc. are useful at all, it's certainly not in the short term. It would make much more sense to ignore space altogether until computer and materials science is much more advanced, and in the meantime limit ourselves strictly to earth-centric projects (mostly in the form of satellites).
However, I don't particularly care about simply optimizing every ounce of resource over the course of humanity's multi-million year future, or whatever it may chance to be. I'm looking at, say, 70 more years of life, and if it all at possible I want to see the Mars landing and semi-viable space colonies. Probably not going to happen, but as one of the people who is taxed to fund this program, I'm just putting in my vote.
Anyway, while it would be inordinately pleasant to convince ourselves that Obama just wants to see NASA's resources used more effectively, let's not kid. It's not like this idea is coming attached with any extra funds (such as would say, "I think this is a valuable effort"), and congress's unfailing habit has been to slash NASA's budget. If, as you say, the manned program is "pure pork and nationalism," well, what do you think is going to happen to our space program without those incentives for funding it? Is congress suddenly going to realize the value of pure research? Nah, they're just going to view it as an even more tempting piggy bank for when they want to bail out banks but also want to pretend they have some vague notions about balancing the budget.
Fortunately for you, I don't think anyone is ever going to ask to go for the ride. And if cheap commercial space flight gets shoved in the attic, I don't think any of your children will get the chance to say no either.
But if we're going to let people try to climb Everest, go cave diving, and test experimental aircraft, I don't see why we need to go nuts with space safety, assuming there are plenty of people eager to take the risk. I mean, trying to be super careful hasn't even worked--to this day we still learn about our mistakes when the whole thing goes kablooey. Trying to overengineer it doesn't make it safe, what we really need is just to get through this first phase of space flight where we are still heavily experimenting, and the only way to do that is to just go for it.
It seems entirely another thing to have the political leanings off my boss amplified through corporate profits which I help earn, whether I like it or not.
(1) It's not whether you like it or not--you can work where you please. But that is besides the point because the company *reimburses you* for what you contribute. I don't see why you think you have earned some additional right to dictate their actions by virtue of fulfilling the contract they paid you for.
(2) The real "pool of interests" is the shareholders, and if we were going to ok all political spending except by corporations, theoretically the shareholders can give themselves dividends and contribute that directly to a PAC created to represent the corporation, having the same result. Basically, a corporation *is* an interest organization (with itself as its interest) and you just happen to be a secular contractor.
(3) If the government can restrict speech at all, it can restrict speech disproportionately. It could say "big oil and medical organizations can spend on political ads but labor unions and movie companies cannot" fixing it so that Republicans tend to reap the benefits, or vice versa. The question is not whether corporations wielding influence is a good or bad thing--it's whether you want the government to have any jurisdiction over private speech in the first place. There are lots of instances where you could probably do a lot of "good" by shutting some people up. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the SC's idea that, if you really want to add a provision to America's free speech clause, it will have to be done by a constitutional amendment, not by the whim of the legislature.
You underestimate the amount of pressure that submerged objects are subject to. For roughly every 10 meters of depth, the pressure increases by a factor. At 90 meters depth, the pressure is about 1000% of Earth's atmosphere at sea level.
It has to be designed to accommodate massive pressure anyway--this is a gun, creating massive internal pressure is how it works. In fact, if the explosion pressure is more than the water pressure then the increased water pressure actually decreases the maximum net pressure the barrel needs to be capable of withstanding. Also, it's depicted as being at a ~45 degree angle, which means that the water pressure factor is reduced by the square root of two relative to the length of the chamber.
There you go you have all of your premium pixels back.
Speaking as someone who has an "extra wide" laptop screen I much prefer having the top/bottom taskbars as they provide faster access--on my touchpad it takes 2 strokes to traverse the screen top-to-bottom vs. 4.5 strokes to traverse the screen left-to-right.
Yes, well, do you need to need to perform a neurological and skeletal exam to re-fill someone's acne medication?
Obviously there are some things this works well for and others that it doesn't. I don't see why you automatically assume this will be used for the latter. Presumably a doctor is conscious of the holes in the information obtained this way and thus if able to state if he requires a personal visit.
On that note, you are also assuming you have the given patient at your mercy. The truth is a lot of people simply do not visit the doctor unless they can no longer help doing so. For all its possible deficiencies, a cheap, fast, unobtrusive examination process that people will actually use is a million times better than no examination at all.
What if the military has arranged a backdoor in this particular software package? That could result in an awful lot of valuable intelligence for them. Handing out a few unencrypted drone feeds to bait the trap might not be such a terrible tradeoff.
Not saying that's how it is, of course, but it's a possibility.
Personal cheques are a purely a cost to the average bank, shuffling paper and checking signatures does not make them scads of cash.
Au contraire, they make plenty of money off of bounced checks.
People who use checks often do so to take advantage of the time it takes to be mailed/cashed/processed, i.e., they are living on the edge of their account's holdings.
It is also easier to lose track of how much you actually have if you keep track on paper.
There's not really any kind of transactions banks don't make plenty of money off us. (why would they continue to honor any other kind?)
How about I was pointing out the fact that they are experts in economics, not climatology or any related field?
Well, they certainly could themselves be operating from a perspective that would itself introduce in-built prejudices into their conclusion. That is fair to bring up and discuss.
But as for whether they are qualified to analyze the data, I would say that if they are capable in their field that they are extremely well qualified to do so. Applied economics is all-about statistical analysis of datasets and the identification of trends. You may need a degree in climatology to build a climate model from the ground up, but as for actually applying the model or simply looking at raw data, anyone who is capable of doing that in any other field is certainly capable of branching out, no problem at all. (actually I wouldn't be at all surprised if your average economist was more skilled in that respect than your average climatologist)
You're certainly right that there is a difference of scale.
On the one hand you (hypothetically) have the possibility of lots of money from the oil company. Call it ~$300k annual as I believe that is what geophysicists (i.e. finding oil) make.
On the other hand you have the possibility of working at an academic institution (say ~$100k plus setting your own hours, etc.), actually being published, and advancing your career and reputation in the field.
What do you think someone who spends 10 years earning a Ph.D. is more interested in? Gaining prestige or padding an already decently padded lifestyle? It's gonna be the first option, which coincidentally is the option chosen by the people who will be training that person in their field in the first place, judging their thesis, etc., and it's not as though you can *plan* when you're writing your original research on eventually be picked up and paid off by the oil companies.
Given the common personality traits in academia (arrogance, career-obsession, the stuff exhibited in the CRU emails) and the nature of advancing and securing grants in a cut-throat field, it is really not surprising that certain systemic biases enter the system. The way to eliminate those is to have transparency, so that people in the field have to worry about being massively embarrassed when people outside the field deconstruct their methods. Then they actually have to be rigorous in how they approach the problem--not just expect that if they make assumptions in line with existing biases that they will safely go unchallenged.
If you have some nutty system where price curves aren't really defined beyond an individual level, prices aren't widely available, etc., all the usual pricing signals, resource allocation by the "invisible hand", etc., get a lot more muddled, and probably begin to break down.
Companies already have all sorts of way to optimize price models besides looking at a supply demand curve so as to pick one point of intersect. Coupons and discounts allow you to charge more for wealthier individuals, who are less conscerned with spending their Sunday afternoons clipping newspapers. Charging less for over-the-weekend flights means you are effectively able to set higher prices for business trips. Those Pepsi-codes that give people prizes effectively makes Pepsi cheaper to the consumer based on his/her willingness to invest some extra time in winning contests.
And overall this is no different than paying Michael Phelps $x-million to appear on a box of cereal, except now the $x-million is being distributed to somewhat more ordinary people who act as local rather than national advertisers.
Slashdot Mirror
Go ahead, people, cheer for the corporations. None of them are doing anything for you. Your government supplies your drinking water, builds your roads, responds in the event of disaster, and much, much more.
I believe as far as entities go governments are also the leading executors of genocide, war, religious oppression, institutionalized discrimination, etc., etc. At least corporations aren't ever going to be interested in the wholesale extermination of large segments of their customer base.
Not that I am particularly interested in having corporations exist with comparable powers. The short and simple rule is that the more power something or someone has the more despicable it becomes. But there is no getting around the fact that there is a lot of power to be wielded one way or the other. You can't simply declare it to be void. So the best you can do is to try to keep it divided against itself.
Thus, a divided government (legislative vs. judicial vs. executive; independent states; competing political parties; et al.) is better positioned to be free than an absolutely monarchy. And functioning capitalism promotes more freedom than monopolies or communism.
Where monopolies have cropped up I am all for seeing them removed. Especially when their existence is the result of direct government sponsorship.
However, I persist in the (so far historically correct) observation that government is the most dangerous entity, and I am very happy to have a great deal of its power divested to private entities, companies or otherwise. It worries me to see such extreme views as your own... with such an attitude you can justify anything. We should check the power of corporations without making it into a holy crusade. I realize they are a nice soft target for ideological grandstanding, and in the end they are certainly an imperfect instrument, but probably having them around is the less terrible than many of the alternatives.
You are forgetting about all the accidents and injuries caused by people with colorblindness being less aware of warnings and other color-coded safety information. Society has to pick up the tab, and as such is within its rights to require every citizen to obtain full vision correction whether they like it or not!
(Don't worry about the cost of the procedure; it will be covered by your government-mandated insurance purchase.)
Britain is putting their citizen observation stations EVERYWHERE, even in the middle of words.
You cut deals simply in order expand your ability to prosecute. In a criminal hierarchy you're often interested in "cutting off the head," who is probably the guy guilty of the most charges anyway, but in this case that was Bernie Madoff (whom they've already got) and it isn't exactly clear that his "top aide" was more instrumental to the deceit than the programmers. In any case, if they weren't willing to cut a deal themselves, well, I guess their "prisoner's dilemma" playing strategy was not optimal.
Looking at my school's course catalog, I'm not sure where people in any of the hard science programs would be getting this kind of knowledge. Even the probability course--which students grumble about if they have to take instead of the "easier" statistics class--is not that in depth. There are too many areas to cover in a single semester to focus on ironing out all the "gotchas" rather than simply introducing the core material. And no statistics related courses are required beyond that one class.
In other courses professors are rather more intent on teaching their own material. They'll teach t-tests, etc., if they have to, but not at the depth which would address the problems described in the article. In my experience the physics department has been the only place where they don't play fast-and-loose with mathematics in general.
I think you probably have less problems in the published research of the hard sciences in that that is often interested in applying an actual theoretical model. Misapprehending the finer points of the statistics involved is not as relevant as it is when you are just datamining the genome for any correlation you can grab at.
I would definitely be interested in buying a car that can be triggered to shutdown or start blaring its horn remotely! Is there anyway to buy one with a built-in bomb?
Will a healthy "non-donator" be put far behind, for example, other persons likely to die/reject the transplant? If the free-loaders are a small minority one would think it would be better to keep the emphasis on getting organs to the people who stand the best chances of being able to use them, rather than necessarily who has put in an equitable stake.
For that matter, although these people may not have volunteered their organs, if they pay taxes they are still contributing to Israel's socialized health care program. How much does that count for sharing the burden of these expensive procedures?
And will these people still have a reasonable chance of coming up on the waiting list, or are their prospects pretty much nullified? Seems to me that death is a bit harsh of a penalty for not signing up. You may as well just void the opt-out bit entirely. Surely you would rather they be annoying whiners about it than potentially dead.
Disclaimer: I'm 100% for letting people bear the natural consequences of their choices, even when that's death, and would never want to be forced to sign up for anything. The above simply represents some objections I feel a less libertarian individual might raise.
no punishment that state can inflict will come close to what he's done to himself.
You say that based on (let's generously say) 99% of all cases. But what about that 1% of cases where Daddy, or Mommy, or both are psychopaths?
Do we leave open that get-out-of-jail-free card where all they have to do is say, "Timmy, point this at yourself and pull the trigger, will you?" and have a happy consequence free murder?
Basically what you are arguing is that there should never be any punishment for manslaughter, as the vast majority of healthy-thinking individuals would be pretty torn up about having killed someone.
But societal punishment has more nuanced aims than simply to provide a minimum assurance that people with functioning consciences will not want to repeat their mistakes.
Also,
I wouldn't be surprised if he winds up comitting suicide intentionally, with the same gun. I can't imagine how much this guy's hurting right now.
If that's the way he feels, maybe having an imposed punishment would free him of the need to punish himself, and ultimately give him some peace.
"9 women can't make a baby in 1 month"
Ah, yes, 1 baby per month is what you would expect for the classical case, but if we model the baby as a particle in a time box we actually expect 2/9*sin^2(n*pi*t/9) babies.
Some people just don't stop to think about the realism of their model!
I have found that I can either go to sleep at the same time every night, or go to sleep when I feel tired. The latter results in something like you describe. My sensation is that there are cycles of alertness and tiredness (which I guess is a good adaptation--your body should encourage you to get rest without constantly sabotaging your functionality) and you have to hit on the right point of the cycle in order to fall asleep peaceably.
I generally "reset" by going a day entirely without sleep or with only a small nap in the morning.
Bias is affecting the experiment even before it begins--hypotheses are made based on human intuition, and experiments are selected based on judgments of value. Historically, look how long science lagged in the same state simply because people didn't think outside of what they had come to expect. Even post-Newton, if it wasn't for chance discoveries--for example, Hertz' observation of the photoelectic effect--one wonders if the human mind would ever have ever dared to venture speculations beyond the 'sensible' mechanisms of classical mechanics. It's not a simple thing to divorce your expectations from the form the science has previously taken.
In any case, I was more specifically interested in the environmental aspect, as it was a central consideration of the article. Climate science (certainly at this stage of its development) does not quite lend to your criterion of "experiment, rinse, repeat." There's not really any experiments that can be run to analyze the sum nature of the system. At best you can confirm small elements of what is going on and try to incorporate them into an approximate model, which is speculative and requires many assumptions. There's also the matter of when certain results contradict other results, and you say "the sum of the evidence says this." But it is a weighted sum, obviously--there's no guarantee a slight discrepancy in one place doesn't represent a fundamental flaw in the model. Beyond that, there is the issue of understanding what the science you're testing states--how much is the methodology based on expectations?
If we accept the study's conclusion that people, when presented with actual facts, tend to select, discard, and reason around them based on their cultural identities, one would imagine a bias in cultural identity could infuse a bias into their net understanding of these statistical considerations. In which case, we may need to examine those biases before coming to such conclusions as "between the 90% and the 10% positions in field X, the 90% position is most probably correct by reason of being a greater proportion." What if that simply represents a proportion of personalties?
Not commenting on the debate, but I think it's interesting that in an article about cognitive biases (particularly group cognitive biases) that they don't ever bother to probe the question of how such biases affect things like "scientific consensus," they only view it from the perspective of how such biases affect the freshly germinated views of the uninitated. You would think scientists, being human beings as well, would be in some way subject the same effects, and as long as questions are being raised about the human proclivity for certain viewpoints, someone might stop to wonder "in what ratio do people who go into the environmental sciences tend to be individualist or communitarian, and how is this likely to affect their judgment of related information?"
If they want to check his presence, logging him in and out, there are other methods to do that. They don't need his fingerprints. It worked perfectly well with badges and/or company ID cards.
How exactly does an ID card verify his presence, rather than simply that someone possessing the card happened to run it through the machine?
And, yes, his fingerprints are all over the doorprint. Together with a gazillion of other fingerprints. And withoug registration that makes him one of the anonymous crowd.
As long as no one goes to the extraordinary effort of pre-emptively wiping the handle clean.
It's easy to ridicule people as paranoid. Instead, however, you should be thinking "why the heck are they requiring my fingerprints".
What I am comparing this to is, for example, using a social security number for identification, which seems to generate a large current of opposition here on slashdot precisely because it such a non-physical, easily reproducible security feature. I want anonymity as much as the next guy, but the one place I don't want it is in verifying my identity. (I would think most people could see the inherent contradiction in wanting both at the same time.) Ideally only one person will be able to gain access to things under my identity, that being me.
Fyi, pretty much any job working for the government or with children is much more invasive--you will actually have your prints submitted to a database for a background check, rather than simply having checksummed on the given machine. The latter doesn't seem that controversial to me.
The problems with your argument are as follows:
(1) "Mayor Tommy Battle" and his "task force to include 25 community leaders" does not equate to Alabama congresscritters, Alabama citizens in general, or the tea party movement.
(2) Nor do I really think if we took a poll of Alabama's citizens that we would find a majority who thought Obama was "fascist" or "communist".
(3) So far I haven't found anything definitive about Mr. Battle's political affiliation... maybe someone else can make a more skilled research. But the best lead I have is that he spoke at a conference for Democrat women. It may be the case your assumption he represents conservative groups is incorrect. Was it substantiated by anything other than seeing the word Alabama?
(4) Promoting small government does not preclude people from supporting the existence of certain government programs. I mean, theoretically you are talking about conservatives (or some crude caricature thereof), not anarcho-capitalists. As "the Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook," I think it there are probably some decent balancing arguments for maintaining the program.
I'm not saying that securing pork isn't likely to be among the motivations, or that there mightn't be some hypocrisy; but as far as establishing either of those points goes, all you did was rant off some wild generalizations.
Unmanned spaceflight isn't exactly justified by the costs, either, assuming we're only considering the utilitarian value. If things like learning Martian geology etc. are useful at all, it's certainly not in the short term. It would make much more sense to ignore space altogether until computer and materials science is much more advanced, and in the meantime limit ourselves strictly to earth-centric projects (mostly in the form of satellites).
However, I don't particularly care about simply optimizing every ounce of resource over the course of humanity's multi-million year future, or whatever it may chance to be. I'm looking at, say, 70 more years of life, and if it all at possible I want to see the Mars landing and semi-viable space colonies. Probably not going to happen, but as one of the people who is taxed to fund this program, I'm just putting in my vote.
Anyway, while it would be inordinately pleasant to convince ourselves that Obama just wants to see NASA's resources used more effectively, let's not kid. It's not like this idea is coming attached with any extra funds (such as would say, "I think this is a valuable effort"), and congress's unfailing habit has been to slash NASA's budget. If, as you say, the manned program is "pure pork and nationalism," well, what do you think is going to happen to our space program without those incentives for funding it? Is congress suddenly going to realize the value of pure research? Nah, they're just going to view it as an even more tempting piggy bank for when they want to bail out banks but also want to pretend they have some vague notions about balancing the budget.
Fortunately for you, I don't think anyone is ever going to ask to go for the ride. And if cheap commercial space flight gets shoved in the attic, I don't think any of your children will get the chance to say no either.
But if we're going to let people try to climb Everest, go cave diving, and test experimental aircraft, I don't see why we need to go nuts with space safety, assuming there are plenty of people eager to take the risk. I mean, trying to be super careful hasn't even worked--to this day we still learn about our mistakes when the whole thing goes kablooey. Trying to overengineer it doesn't make it safe, what we really need is just to get through this first phase of space flight where we are still heavily experimenting, and the only way to do that is to just go for it.
It seems entirely another thing to have the political leanings off my boss amplified through corporate profits which I help earn, whether I like it or not.
(1) It's not whether you like it or not--you can work where you please. But that is besides the point because the company *reimburses you* for what you contribute. I don't see why you think you have earned some additional right to dictate their actions by virtue of fulfilling the contract they paid you for.
(2) The real "pool of interests" is the shareholders, and if we were going to ok all political spending except by corporations, theoretically the shareholders can give themselves dividends and contribute that directly to a PAC created to represent the corporation, having the same result. Basically, a corporation *is* an interest organization (with itself as its interest) and you just happen to be a secular contractor.
(3) If the government can restrict speech at all, it can restrict speech disproportionately. It could say "big oil and medical organizations can spend on political ads but labor unions and movie companies cannot" fixing it so that Republicans tend to reap the benefits, or vice versa. The question is not whether corporations wielding influence is a good or bad thing--it's whether you want the government to have any jurisdiction over private speech in the first place. There are lots of instances where you could probably do a lot of "good" by shutting some people up. Personally, I'm pretty comfortable with the SC's idea that, if you really want to add a provision to America's free speech clause, it will have to be done by a constitutional amendment, not by the whim of the legislature.
You underestimate the amount of pressure that submerged objects are subject to. For roughly every 10 meters of depth, the pressure increases by a factor. At 90 meters depth, the pressure is about 1000% of Earth's atmosphere at sea level.
It has to be designed to accommodate massive pressure anyway--this is a gun, creating massive internal pressure is how it works. In fact, if the explosion pressure is more than the water pressure then the increased water pressure actually decreases the maximum net pressure the barrel needs to be capable of withstanding. Also, it's depicted as being at a ~45 degree angle, which means that the water pressure factor is reduced by the square root of two relative to the length of the chamber.
Right click --> Properties --> Autohide
There you go you have all of your premium pixels back.
Speaking as someone who has an "extra wide" laptop screen I much prefer having the top/bottom taskbars as they provide faster access--on my touchpad it takes 2 strokes to traverse the screen top-to-bottom vs. 4.5 strokes to traverse the screen left-to-right.
Yes, well, do you need to need to perform a neurological and skeletal exam to re-fill someone's acne medication?
Obviously there are some things this works well for and others that it doesn't. I don't see why you automatically assume this will be used for the latter. Presumably a doctor is conscious of the holes in the information obtained this way and thus if able to state if he requires a personal visit.
On that note, you are also assuming you have the given patient at your mercy. The truth is a lot of people simply do not visit the doctor unless they can no longer help doing so. For all its possible deficiencies, a cheap, fast, unobtrusive examination process that people will actually use is a million times better than no examination at all.
What if the military has arranged a backdoor in this particular software package? That could result in an awful lot of valuable intelligence for them. Handing out a few unencrypted drone feeds to bait the trap might not be such a terrible tradeoff.
Not saying that's how it is, of course, but it's a possibility.
Personal cheques are a purely a cost to the average bank, shuffling paper and checking signatures does not make them scads of cash.
Au contraire, they make plenty of money off of bounced checks.
People who use checks often do so to take advantage of the time it takes to be mailed/cashed/processed, i.e., they are living on the edge of their account's holdings.
It is also easier to lose track of how much you actually have if you keep track on paper.
There's not really any kind of transactions banks don't make plenty of money off us. (why would they continue to honor any other kind?)
How about I was pointing out the fact that they are experts in economics, not climatology or any related field?
Well, they certainly could themselves be operating from a perspective that would itself introduce in-built prejudices into their conclusion. That is fair to bring up and discuss.
But as for whether they are qualified to analyze the data, I would say that if they are capable in their field that they are extremely well qualified to do so. Applied economics is all-about statistical analysis of datasets and the identification of trends. You may need a degree in climatology to build a climate model from the ground up, but as for actually applying the model or simply looking at raw data, anyone who is capable of doing that in any other field is certainly capable of branching out, no problem at all. (actually I wouldn't be at all surprised if your average economist was more skilled in that respect than your average climatologist)
You're certainly right that there is a difference of scale.
On the one hand you (hypothetically) have the possibility of lots of money from the oil company. Call it ~$300k annual as I believe that is what geophysicists (i.e. finding oil) make.
On the other hand you have the possibility of working at an academic institution (say ~$100k plus setting your own hours, etc.), actually being published, and advancing your career and reputation in the field.
What do you think someone who spends 10 years earning a Ph.D. is more interested in? Gaining prestige or padding an already decently padded lifestyle? It's gonna be the first option, which coincidentally is the option chosen by the people who will be training that person in their field in the first place, judging their thesis, etc., and it's not as though you can *plan* when you're writing your original research on eventually be picked up and paid off by the oil companies.
Given the common personality traits in academia (arrogance, career-obsession, the stuff exhibited in the CRU emails) and the nature of advancing and securing grants in a cut-throat field, it is really not surprising that certain systemic biases enter the system. The way to eliminate those is to have transparency, so that people in the field have to worry about being massively embarrassed when people outside the field deconstruct their methods. Then they actually have to be rigorous in how they approach the problem--not just expect that if they make assumptions in line with existing biases that they will safely go unchallenged.
If you have some nutty system where price curves aren't really defined beyond an individual level, prices aren't widely available, etc., all the usual pricing signals, resource allocation by the "invisible hand", etc., get a lot more muddled, and probably begin to break down.
Companies already have all sorts of way to optimize price models besides looking at a supply demand curve so as to pick one point of intersect. Coupons and discounts allow you to charge more for wealthier individuals, who are less conscerned with spending their Sunday afternoons clipping newspapers. Charging less for over-the-weekend flights means you are effectively able to set higher prices for business trips. Those Pepsi-codes that give people prizes effectively makes Pepsi cheaper to the consumer based on his/her willingness to invest some extra time in winning contests.
And overall this is no different than paying Michael Phelps $x-million to appear on a box of cereal, except now the $x-million is being distributed to somewhat more ordinary people who act as local rather than national advertisers.