What did they do to IndyMedia? Are you talking about when they tried to subpoena the IP addresses of contributors to one of the nodes, or something else?
But if you educate the population, then they start thinking for themselves. Perhaps some of them start questioning whether massive economic disparity between the rich and everyone else is desirable, or even moral. Maybe they become smart enough to see through politicians' lies. Maybe they start questioning the necessity of paying taxes to support systemic, blatant corruption.
The Powers That Be don't want an educated population. They want complacent taxpayers who can be pacified by McDonalds and reality TV. Much easier to govern the latter population than the former.
Rather, you're probably not going to be liable if you injure the buglar with a bear trap... provided that bear traps are legal in your area, even when not actively hunting for bears. Bad form to respond to my own post, I know. So sue me. Figuratively speaking, of course.
1) Verify that bear traps are not barred by law, and
2) Post signs that say "WARNING: Bear traps in use! Do not enter!"
IANAL
IAALStudent. Covered this exact sort of thing last year, except it was a shotgun rigged to fire a shell toward a doorway when the door was opened. The lack of #2 was the important bit. As long as you put up a sign that says "Hey! There's a bear trap underneath this window, don't even try it", then you're probably not going to be liable if you injure the burglar.
My criminal law professor did say, though, that if somebody breaks into your house and you feel inclined to defend yourself, "you'd better kill the f*cker. If he survives, you can be sure he's going to sue, but dead men give no testimony."
This too.
I've got a really good sense of smell, so I can smell a rat from a mile away. This story's not hiding one. For all the lies the NSA does tell, they're not going to freakin' lie to Congress at every opportunity. Just because the Boy King did it for eight years straight didn't magically render it OK. I dunno if this guy was under oath or not, but still, that's not something you do lightly. Plus, this isn't the Director making the statement, it's one of the lesser Director bureaucritters (I think the dude's title was "Information Assurance Officer" or something); if he's caught lying to Congress, he's gone. He's one of the guys the Director would pin blame on if he ever got caught.
Wait a second...
<paranoia intensity="100%"> But maybe that's what they want me to think... oh no.
OK, say it's 10 Little Boys. Somebody on the ground is definitely going to notice that. I think the calculator's got some fuzzy math going on, 'cause I've been fiddling with it for a few minutes and I came up with this:
Distance from Impact: 1.00 km
Projectile Diameter: 70.00 m (10x the size of our rock)
Projectile Density: 3000 kg/m3 (dense rock)
Impact Velocity: 45.00 km/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
------
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 2730 meters = 8960 ft
The energy of the airburst is 5.14 x 1017 Joules = 1.23 x 10^2 MegaTons.
------
The air blast at this location would not be noticed. (The overpressure is less than 1 Pa)
------
There's no way a hundred-megaton blast at 9000 feet wouldn't be noticed, if you're fraking standing underneath it. Absolutely no way.
Uh... I punched in some numbers and got a figure of 24 kilotons for the air burst. That's... a Hiroshima bomb, give or take. I have trouble believing that people wouldn't at least hear it, even if it popped, as the estimate says, at 121,000 feet.
I thought the CIA wasn't allowed to do domestic intelligence?
They're not, but do you think that's going to be a serious impediment to them doing so anyway? First off, they're going to be trying really hard to keep their intelligence gathering a secret, so you probably won't know that they're doing it in the first place. Secondly, even if you did find out about it, what are you going to do? Sue? They'll claim state-secrets privilege within a couple minutes of you filing your complaint. Now you can't do discovery, and there goes your case.
Point being, "allowed to" is a complete non-issue here. They're going to do what they want, when they want, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
Actually, this discussion is over a website listing in a searchable way those who signed a petition to put gay-civil-unions on a ballot.
I think that's the wrong way around; if I'm reading the article correctly, the people in question are those who signed a petition to put Washington's version of Prop. 8 on the ballot, i.e. those who are against civil unions.
This is an important point. If it were pro-equality signatories who were being "exposed", then I'd be a lot more worried about it. Simply put, giving the radical right easy access to a list of people who are pro-equality would be very, very dangerous, much more so than giving "the gays and their allies" easy access to a list of bigots... the reason being that the right-wing reactionaries fighting against gay rights tend to be a whole lot more violent than those fighting for them. Tell me, have you ever heard of a fundamentalist Christian getting brutally beaten, tied to a fencepost, and left to die, just on account of their beliefs? When was the last time a right-wing megachurch got shotup?
Now, granted, there may be instances where right-wingers have felt intimidated because of their stance against equal rights. There may have been threats made. Someone's feelings may, in fact, have been hurt. But I maintain that any intimidation coming from the pro-rights camp doesn't even begin to come close to that perpetrated by the right wing. I'm sure the poster who was wharrgarbling above about pro-gay intimidation will have something to say to this, but I'll nip it in the bud by requesting that any corroborating links in a reply not come from Michelle Malkin or other shrill, obviously biased, right-wing mouthpieces.
What's that? Can't find any examples from actual, reputable sources? Well, that's going to be a problem, then, isn't it?
should be to retool half of Tonawanda (it's a small industrial city immediately north of Buffalo, for those who aren't from the area) to make the parts for those turbines. There's a GM plant there that currently makes car transmissions. I'll bet they could switch over to making turbine innards pretty easily. I'm also quite confident that there are vacant factories large enough to accommodate making the blades. Then, when we've got the parts built, they can be shipped up the Great Lakes to the windy parts of the country.
This would: 1) create jobs where they're desperately needed; 2) bring some money back to a region that's been struggling mightily for the past 20-30 years; 3) get us going on the path towards green energy; 4) possibly spur more green industry to come to Buffalo and set up shop on our wonderfully ample supply of brownfields.
The rewards are, in fact, very good. As any self-respecting IT geek knows, one of the best ways to protect your data is through multiple, redundant, off-site backups. Homo sapiens currently has no such backups.
Also, if you can physically get to an asteroid, that's the first step towards mining it, or perhaps nudging it (very, very carefully) towards Earth orbit, so as to mine it more easily.
So they've discovered WinZip for laser pulses? That's what this sounds like to me... 2.5 nanosecond / 24 bit laser pulse goes in, 92 picosecond / 24 bit laser pulse comes out, with the same information encoded. It's lossless compression, basically.
"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.
Actually it does, for reasons that you stated in your next sentence!
"Survival of the fittest" [...] means leaving more offspring"
I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more... shall we say... mating potential, and thus a higher chance of producing offspring, than a nocturnal Mom's-basement-cave-dweller. (By the way, I'm not at all accusing you of being the latter, I'm just making an observation. No offense intended!)
The 40-year average life expectancy for cavemen (which, I presume, is what you're referring to) isn't because they all tended to die around age 40; rather, IIRC, it's because they practiced infanticide with alarming regularity. That tends to drag the average down.
ex: Caveman Ug lives to be 78. Caveman Zug lives to be 72. However, Lil' Ug and Lil' Zug were both rather weak and sickly-looking babies, so they were both thrown off a cliff at age 2.
OK, I think I've got it. It's a series of parallel Flatlands. One can move backwards and forwards through time, just like "normal", but one can also cross the parallels. Maybe? Possibly? That's some seriously twisted, mind-bending stuff there.
No, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Sales tax is the most regressive tax imaginable; it hits hardest at the low end of the economic spectrum. Let me illustrate:
Joe Sixpack makes $12,000/yr working at McDonalds. He purchases $8000 worth of taxable goods and services, with an 18% tax rate. Mr. Sixpack has just kicked up $1440 to Uncle Sam, which represents 12% of his income.
Joe the Plumber makes $60,000/yr as... well... a plumber. He purchases the same $8000 worth of goods and services and pays the same tax. However, that $1440 represents only 2.4% of Mr. Plumber's income.
Finally, Joseph Fatcat makes $400,000/yr as a claims adjuster for Blue Shield. He purchases the same stuff and pays the same tax, but that's only 0.36% of his income.
Granted, Plumber and Fatcat are probably going to buy more stuff, but the fact remains that lower- and working-class Americans spend a greater percentage of their income, generally speaking. No matter how you slice it, sales tax is always going to disproportionally (and unjustly, IMHO) affect the people at the bottom. It sounds nice in theory (your post is evidence of that,) but in reality, it helps the rich get richer and the poor get even more f*cked over than they already are.
every living organism share more or less the same DNA with less than 1% of differences,
You've got the general idea, but the specifics are off. IIRC, we share 99.9% of our DNA with bonobos and gorillas, slightly less with chimps, less with other mammals, and so on and so forth as you get further and further away from our "branch" of the evolutionary tree. I believe we share something like 12% of our DNA with the banana. But yeah, there's a lot of commonality there.
Slashdot Mirror
What did they do to IndyMedia? Are you talking about when they tried to subpoena the IP addresses of contributors to one of the nodes, or something else?
So what you're saying is that Kilz white primer paint killz r3s1due?
But if you educate the population, then they start thinking for themselves. Perhaps some of them start questioning whether massive economic disparity between the rich and everyone else is desirable, or even moral. Maybe they become smart enough to see through politicians' lies. Maybe they start questioning the necessity of paying taxes to support systemic, blatant corruption. The Powers That Be don't want an educated population. They want complacent taxpayers who can be pacified by McDonalds and reality TV. Much easier to govern the latter population than the former.
Rather, you're probably not going to be liable if you injure the buglar with a bear trap ... provided that bear traps are legal in your area, even when not actively hunting for bears. Bad form to respond to my own post, I know. So sue me. Figuratively speaking, of course.
IAALStudent. Covered this exact sort of thing last year, except it was a shotgun rigged to fire a shell toward a doorway when the door was opened. The lack of #2 was the important bit. As long as you put up a sign that says "Hey! There's a bear trap underneath this window, don't even try it", then you're probably not going to be liable if you injure the burglar.
My criminal law professor did say, though, that if somebody breaks into your house and you feel inclined to defend yourself, "you'd better kill the f*cker. If he survives, you can be sure he's going to sue, but dead men give no testimony."
<include standard_dislclaimer.h>
This too. I've got a really good sense of smell, so I can smell a rat from a mile away. This story's not hiding one. For all the lies the NSA does tell, they're not going to freakin' lie to Congress at every opportunity. Just because the Boy King did it for eight years straight didn't magically render it OK. I dunno if this guy was under oath or not, but still, that's not something you do lightly. Plus, this isn't the Director making the statement, it's one of the lesser Director bureaucritters (I think the dude's title was "Information Assurance Officer" or something); if he's caught lying to Congress, he's gone. He's one of the guys the Director would pin blame on if he ever got caught.
...
... oh no.
Wait a second
<paranoia intensity="100%"> But maybe that's what they want me to think
Ahhh, okay, serves me right for not RTFDocumentation... thanks for the clarification.
OK, say it's 10 Little Boys. Somebody on the ground is definitely going to notice that. I think the calculator's got some fuzzy math going on, 'cause I've been fiddling with it for a few minutes and I came up with this:
Distance from Impact: 1.00 km
Projectile Diameter: 70.00 m (10x the size of our rock)
Projectile Density: 3000 kg/m3 (dense rock)
Impact Velocity: 45.00 km/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2500 kg/m3
Target Type: Sedimentary Rock
------
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 2730 meters = 8960 ft
The energy of the airburst is 5.14 x 1017 Joules = 1.23 x 10^2 MegaTons.
------
The air blast at this location would not be noticed. (The overpressure is less than 1 Pa)
------
There's no way a hundred-megaton blast at 9000 feet wouldn't be noticed, if you're fraking standing underneath it. Absolutely no way.
Uh... I punched in some numbers and got a figure of 24 kilotons for the air burst. That's ... a Hiroshima bomb, give or take. I have trouble believing that people wouldn't at least hear it, even if it popped, as the estimate says, at 121,000 feet.
It's a damn shame, too, some of those New Agey women are real freaky. Some of them even shave!
They're not, but do you think that's going to be a serious impediment to them doing so anyway? First off, they're going to be trying really hard to keep their intelligence gathering a secret, so you probably won't know that they're doing it in the first place. Secondly, even if you did find out about it, what are you going to do? Sue? They'll claim state-secrets privilege within a couple minutes of you filing your complaint. Now you can't do discovery, and there goes your case.
Point being, "allowed to" is a complete non-issue here. They're going to do what they want, when they want, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
I think that's the wrong way around; if I'm reading the article correctly, the people in question are those who signed a petition to put Washington's version of Prop. 8 on the ballot, i.e. those who are against civil unions.
This is an important point. If it were pro-equality signatories who were being "exposed", then I'd be a lot more worried about it. Simply put, giving the radical right easy access to a list of people who are pro-equality would be very, very dangerous, much more so than giving "the gays and their allies" easy access to a list of bigots... the reason being that the right-wing reactionaries fighting against gay rights tend to be a whole lot more violent than those fighting for them. Tell me, have you ever heard of a fundamentalist Christian getting brutally beaten, tied to a fencepost, and left to die, just on account of their beliefs? When was the last time a right-wing megachurch got shot up?
Now, granted, there may be instances where right-wingers have felt intimidated because of their stance against equal rights. There may have been threats made. Someone's feelings may, in fact, have been hurt. But I maintain that any intimidation coming from the pro-rights camp doesn't even begin to come close to that perpetrated by the right wing. I'm sure the poster who was wharrgarbling above about pro-gay intimidation will have something to say to this, but I'll nip it in the bud by requesting that any corroborating links in a reply not come from Michelle Malkin or other shrill, obviously biased, right-wing mouthpieces.
What's that? Can't find any examples from actual, reputable sources? Well, that's going to be a problem, then, isn't it?
Nah, now it'll just get modded "Funny".
should be to retool half of Tonawanda (it's a small industrial city immediately north of Buffalo, for those who aren't from the area) to make the parts for those turbines. There's a GM plant there that currently makes car transmissions. I'll bet they could switch over to making turbine innards pretty easily. I'm also quite confident that there are vacant factories large enough to accommodate making the blades. Then, when we've got the parts built, they can be shipped up the Great Lakes to the windy parts of the country.
This would: 1) create jobs where they're desperately needed; 2) bring some money back to a region that's been struggling mightily for the past 20-30 years; 3) get us going on the path towards green energy; 4) possibly spur more green industry to come to Buffalo and set up shop on our wonderfully ample supply of brownfields.
I fail to see a downside here.
The rewards are, in fact, very good. As any self-respecting IT geek knows, one of the best ways to protect your data is through multiple, redundant, off-site backups. Homo sapiens currently has no such backups.
Also, if you can physically get to an asteroid, that's the first step towards mining it, or perhaps nudging it (very, very carefully) towards Earth orbit, so as to mine it more easily.
So they've discovered WinZip for laser pulses? That's what this sounds like to me... 2.5 nanosecond / 24 bit laser pulse goes in, 92 picosecond / 24 bit laser pulse comes out, with the same information encoded. It's lossless compression, basically.
I wish I had mod points to give this a boost. The revolution won't be televised, it'll be DIYed. I like it.
"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.
... shall we say ... mating potential, and thus a higher chance of producing offspring, than a nocturnal Mom's-basement-cave-dweller. (By the way, I'm not at all accusing you of being the latter, I'm just making an observation. No offense intended!)
Actually it does, for reasons that you stated in your next sentence!
"Survival of the fittest" [...] means leaving more offspring"
I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more
Oh, thank the Gods. I thought the weirdness was caused by my brain booting into blinding, skull-rattling hangover mode.
I'd love to try some quantum nanomushrooms. Would they simultaneously do nothing and cause me to trip my face off?
The 40-year average life expectancy for cavemen (which, I presume, is what you're referring to) isn't because they all tended to die around age 40; rather, IIRC, it's because they practiced infanticide with alarming regularity. That tends to drag the average down.
ex: Caveman Ug lives to be 78. Caveman Zug lives to be 72. However, Lil' Ug and Lil' Zug were both rather weak and sickly-looking babies, so they were both thrown off a cliff at age 2.
(78 + 72 + 2 + 2) / 4 = 38.5, QED
OK, I think I've got it. It's a series of parallel Flatlands. One can move backwards and forwards through time, just like "normal", but one can also cross the parallels. Maybe? Possibly? That's some seriously twisted, mind-bending stuff there.
No, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Sales tax is the most regressive tax imaginable; it hits hardest at the low end of the economic spectrum. Let me illustrate:
... well ... a plumber. He purchases the same $8000 worth of goods and services and pays the same tax. However, that $1440 represents only 2.4% of Mr. Plumber's income.
Joe Sixpack makes $12,000/yr working at McDonalds. He purchases $8000 worth of taxable goods and services, with an 18% tax rate. Mr. Sixpack has just kicked up $1440 to Uncle Sam, which represents 12% of his income.
Joe the Plumber makes $60,000/yr as
Finally, Joseph Fatcat makes $400,000/yr as a claims adjuster for Blue Shield. He purchases the same stuff and pays the same tax, but that's only 0.36% of his income.
Granted, Plumber and Fatcat are probably going to buy more stuff, but the fact remains that lower- and working-class Americans spend a greater percentage of their income, generally speaking. No matter how you slice it, sales tax is always going to disproportionally (and unjustly, IMHO) affect the people at the bottom. It sounds nice in theory (your post is evidence of that,) but in reality, it helps the rich get richer and the poor get even more f*cked over than they already are.
How do you feel about probation then? There are a whole slew of restrictions that come along with that. (I'm not trolling, I'm actually curious)
You've got the general idea, but the specifics are off. IIRC, we share 99.9% of our DNA with bonobos and gorillas, slightly less with chimps, less with other mammals, and so on and so forth as you get further and further away from our "branch" of the evolutionary tree. I believe we share something like 12% of our DNA with the banana. But yeah, there's a lot of commonality there.