In the alternate universe where electricity is stored in a battery that has as good an energy-to-mass ratio as hydrogen fuel does, that would make sense. But we don't have that. The reason electric cars have awful performance compared to gasoline cars is that gasoline fuel is just so efficient at storing a lot of chemical energy in a little bitty amount of matter. Hydrogen isn't as good as gasoline, but it's a lot better than a heavy electrical battery.
You miss the point. Laws don't prevent murder. Laws don't prevent theft. Laws don't prevent a jettisoned booster from landing on your house. They just create a large incentive for people to want to avoid doing these things by creating a large punishment if they do, and letting them know this large punishment exists. The theory of the poster you replied to, is that since being sued into oblivion is a big punishment all by itself, there is no need for the law because the incentive to avoid that outcome is already plenty large enough.
Of course, that's all a happy fantasy-land theory, but it is what the poster was trying to get at. I'd say that in reality the fact that a corporation is not a person (despite what the law may have to say on the issue, it's not), it doesn't incur the same risks for bad behaviour that a person does, and therefore the incentive to not go out of business is not as large as the Libertarians make them out to be.
If I kill someone recklessly, I get fined AND I can go to prison. If a corporation does it, it can only be fined. At most it can be disbanded, but the real people - the ones making the decisions behind the corporation, are protected by the false facade that the corporation is a thinking entity seperate from themselves that gets to "take the fall" for their decisions. They don't even end up having to pay the fines with their own money when they make a corporation do something illegal.
Corporations exist to make executives legally and financially blameless for their actions.
Airports are businesses that make money, often affiliated with, but not necessarily part of, the local city government (kind of like major league sports teams and stadiums). They choose who does and does not have landing rights at their airports, not the FAA, except in the case of emergencies where there are FAA rules that force them to allow a landing.
In the Pennsylvania example, the hijackers had already gotten quite a long way into their plan before the passengers realized what was going on (thanks to phone calls to the ground where the news of the other planes crashing was coming in). The pilots were already taken out. The cockpit was already in the hands of the hijackers. That's not the way it would happen if people were more paraniod from the start of the plan. And, it's useful to note that in that plane, ONLY the occupants died, not the occupants plus a bunch of people on the ground.
Technically speaking you can't actually pass a law who's purpuse is to penalize an already criminal act, because it wasn't criminal until the law itself was passed. There's constitutional rules against being retroactively punished for a law that didn't exist yet when you did the act.
Why only one pilot? I'm guessing it is still a matter of risk. Even with the most verbose disclaimers being signed, if people died there would still be a potential for financial damages, and perhaps even willing payout of damages. (Not every company is populated by jerks - some recognize the need to do all they can to help survivors after an accident.)
Then there's also training. To even just be a passenger still takes some degree of training, and by the terms of the prize, it's an unnecessary bit of training.
And don't forget that all these people knew each other and were friends from their time spent prepping for this. Would you send three friends into a deadly situation when doing so has the same likelyhood of success as just sending one?
It's impossible for a program to be "error-free" because people's definition of what is and is not an "error" is a moving target. Whichever features are most annoying will automatically get the label "error" hanged on them. Let's take a simple example: website fonts. Let's say that a CGI program produces a web page, and that web page is using a font under the assumption that all target browsers will have that font, when in reality some don't, and on those browsers that don't have that font, some small connotations are being lost in the meaning of the text because the italics aren't showing up as italics. Is this a bug or not? The answer depends on whether or not there are other more serious bugs or not. If there exist other bugs, then this font problem will just be flagged as a interface prettiness issue, and not be called an error. If there don't exist other worse bugs, then this font issue will be elevated in importance so that it is called an error.
Basically, from the user perspective, an "error" is "whichever existing feature is most annoying to me", and you can't get rid of the errors because their definition keeps getting wider and wider as you try.
Firefox is a browser. If a web server is allowing access to a file on the server that it shouldn't, then that's isn't a bug in Firefox - it's a bug in the web server. Any server that is dependant on the client playing nice in order to get proper security (like most online games) is broken by design.
As to the idea of having a solar-powered 'gas station' for the hydrogen recharging, why bother doing the solar collecting at the gas station? Wouldn't it be a lot more practical to just hook up to the electrical power grid, and then let the power company run a large farm of solar panels. That's pretty much the main reason electricity is such a useful form of energy - you can put the machinery that produces it quite far from the consumer that uses it, and thereby consolodate the energy production into a few places. And if you're concerned about the environment, keep in mind that checking for pollution at a small number of large facilities works better than checking for the sum of all pollution made by each individual's own usage.
Why does the FCC have any jurisdiction over speech in the first place?
For the same reason it always happens - when one has control over who has access to a thing, one ends up having control over what is done with that access (do it our way or we rip away your access rights).
And as to why the FCC has power over who has access to the airwaves, well, that was an idea that started out making sense and then quickly blew out of hand. Basically, if I pay enough money to buy a big radio transmitter, and then decide to be a grade-A number one ass about it, I can set up that transmitter to drown out all broadcasts in the vacinity and render them totally useless, and it's really easy to do. Then if the people running the drowned-out broadcasts still want to be heard, they have to up their power to drown out mine, and thus a transmitting power struggle is begun - one that has NOTHING to do with what the consumer wants and everything to do with who can afford the more powerful transmitter to deny the competitor access to the marketplace.
Imagine if two companies are competing on making widgets, and one decides to try to ruin the other's business by buying a bunch of trucks and parking them on the public road just outside the competitor's factory, blocking up the exit and preventing them from shipping products. The cops would be along pretty quick to bust that up, because it's denying someone access to a public resource.
When the FCC was first set up, that was its purpose. Becuase it is very, very easy to walk all over someone else's use of the airwaves unless everyone plays nice and agrees to stay off each other's frequencies, the FCC licensing system was made to ensure that people stick within their allotted broadcast frequencies and not try to screw their competitors with radio jamming techniques. This even extended to small devices like garage-door openers and handheld remote phones, so that companies making these little devices don't end up accidentally screwing with your neighbor's TV reception every time you use them.
But, as always, once they had the ability to decide who was and wasn't allowed to buy a broadcast license, they started using that to insist upon certain content restrictions as part of the agreement, and that goes outside their original charter.
that there are outer limits to the things Congress may regulate
"outer limits"? Do not attempt to adjust your television set. There is nothing wrong with your TV. We can control the horizontal. We can control the vertical. We can control whether your record button works or not.
Both of the top parties are now in the pockets of large corporations - the only real difference is in what *kind* of corporations. Big Media slightly more so for the Democrats, Big Industry slightly more so for the Republicans, and IT being split between the two. But it's a problem that ignores party lines. While most Democrat Senators are supporters of Big Media protectionist laws, the staunchest opposing senator of those laws (Feingold) is also a Democrat.
The DMCA doesn't give any sort of definition what sort of content proteciton measures count. It's so fuzzy in its definition that technically it would count to encode a book in the standard "encryption" format known as "ASCII". Are you using a device that translates ASCII into pictures of letters on a monitor, and are you using it with copyrighted content? Then it's illegal under DMCA. Basically, if it's copyrighted, then the DMCA is activated no matter what, because of this stupid hole in the law (or, if you're feeling more cynical, it's not a hole - it's the way it was designed to work).
The bigger problem is that Christianity simultaneously posits:
1 - a god that is omniscient about not just the present, but the future too. and
2 - that there exist people other than god who have free will.
#1 and #2 cannot exist in the same universe. They describe mutually exclusive concepts. The only way for some being to be omniscient about the future is for that being to have a perfect prediction of what will happen, in a manner that makes that prediction inevitable and inescapable. If that is the case, then events in the universe are fated to happen the way they do, and thus there is no free will.
For us to have free will, god has to be capable of being mistaken in his prediction of what we are going to do.
Agreed. But I'm not going to be convinced by the same repeated assertion that expending the *same* effort for a shorter time is somehow going to be a smarter way to train.
I'm not trying to push harder. I'm trying to lengthen the time spent doing it. With a quality low-drag road bike, I end up getting home in under 20 minutes. I want it to last longer than that.
With either goal in mind, my point still works: Doing the same amount of effort for a longer period has more effect than doing it for a shorter period. Where we disagree is that you keep trying to claim that it's not really the same amount of effort when someone goes slow on a high-drag bike versus going fast on a low-drag bike.
The current democratic party, with a very, very few exceptions (Russ Fiengold) aren't siginifigantly different from the Republican party anymore. The RIAA and MPAA are not the only examples of this sort of law (And you will note that Republican support for these laws is very, very strong.)
Sounds to me as if you would even advocate using deliberately emotive language with everyone you talk to...?
No. I didn't say it was a bad idea to give out any tolerance at all to these people. I said it was a bad idea to give out EXTRA tolerance. When I used the word "extra", it was deliberate, and quite important to the point I was making.
Will this work with user-created mods? For example, can I download the infamous flashlight-duct-tape mod and make it work on linux, or is that mod going to only work on Windows? (I don't know the format of how mods work - are they distributed as snippets of executable binaries?)
Easy, just redefine "get into space" to mean "100 meters up" and then go drive to a big city, find some skyscraper and take the elevator. The difference between that and what SS1 did is roughly the same as the difference between what SS1 did and what Tito paid for.
Something I've often wondered about lighter-than-air ships is - how practical is it to just build one that uses a vacuum or near-vacuum? Instead of filling the shell with a light gas, just make a strong hollow shell designed to withstand pressure from the outside instead of from the inside, and fill it with - nothing. (i.e. pump out the air, or at least pump out some of it so it is lower pressure and thus "lighter than air").
If this could work, one possible advantage would be that the ship's cruising altitude could be adjusted on the spot by how much air is pumped out or let in.
Helium: It's not really much safer - just a lot less efficient since it's heavier so you need more of it to achive the same lift. The truth is that the fact that the Hindenburg used hydrogen simply caused the fire to grow a bit faster than it otherwise would have. It didn't cause the fire, and it wouldn't have saved the ship to have been using Helium - it just would have made the fireball take longer to complete instead of taking just a few seconds. There still wouldn't have been enough time for passengers to save themselves.
The fire was caused by the choice of paint on the shell.
So, yes, this does support the theory that faulty public perceptions can kill a fledgeling industry.
How about, on an unrelated note, taxing companies that lie by using the word "innovation" when it doesn't apply, like Microsoft? I'd be fully in favor of that. (But if truth in advertising laws were actually enforced, it wouldn't be necessary).
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In the alternate universe where electricity is stored in a battery that has as good an energy-to-mass ratio as hydrogen fuel does, that would make sense. But we don't have that. The reason electric cars have awful performance compared to gasoline cars is that gasoline fuel is just so efficient at storing a lot of chemical energy in a little bitty amount of matter. Hydrogen isn't as good as gasoline, but it's a lot better than a heavy electrical battery.
You miss the point. Laws don't prevent murder. Laws don't prevent theft. Laws don't prevent a jettisoned booster from landing on your house. They just create a large incentive for people to want to avoid doing these things by creating a large punishment if they do, and letting them know this large punishment exists. The theory of the poster you replied to, is that since being sued into oblivion is a big punishment all by itself, there is no need for the law because the incentive to avoid that outcome is already plenty large enough.
Of course, that's all a happy fantasy-land theory, but it is what the poster was trying to get at. I'd say that in reality the fact that a corporation is not a person (despite what the law may have to say on the issue, it's not), it doesn't incur the same risks for bad behaviour that a person does, and therefore the incentive to not go out of business is not as large as the Libertarians make them out to be.
If I kill someone recklessly, I get fined AND I can go to prison. If a corporation does it, it can only be fined. At most it can be disbanded, but the real people - the ones making the decisions behind the corporation, are protected by the false facade that the corporation is a thinking entity seperate from themselves that gets to "take the fall" for their decisions. They don't even end up having to pay the fines with their own money when they make a corporation do something illegal.
Corporations exist to make executives legally and financially blameless for their actions.
Airports are businesses that make money, often affiliated with, but not necessarily part of, the local city government (kind of like major league sports teams and stadiums). They choose who does and does not have landing rights at their airports, not the FAA, except in the case of emergencies where there are FAA rules that force them to allow a landing.
In the Pennsylvania example, the hijackers had already gotten quite a long way into their plan before the passengers realized what was going on (thanks to phone calls to the ground where the news of the other planes crashing was coming in). The pilots were already taken out. The cockpit was already in the hands of the hijackers. That's not the way it would happen if people were more paraniod from the start of the plan. And, it's useful to note that in that plane, ONLY the occupants died, not the occupants plus a bunch of people on the ground.
Technically speaking you can't actually pass a law who's purpuse is to penalize an already criminal act, because it wasn't criminal until the law itself was passed. There's constitutional rules against being retroactively punished for a law that didn't exist yet when you did the act.
Why only one pilot? I'm guessing it is still a matter of risk. Even with the most verbose disclaimers being signed, if people died there would still be a potential for financial damages, and perhaps even willing payout of damages. (Not every company is populated by jerks - some recognize the need to do all they can to help survivors after an accident.)
Then there's also training. To even just be a passenger still takes some degree of training, and by the terms of the prize, it's an unnecessary bit of training.
And don't forget that all these people knew each other and were friends from their time spent prepping for this. Would you send three friends into a deadly situation when doing so has the same likelyhood of success as just sending one?
It's impossible for a program to be "error-free" because people's definition of what is and is not an "error" is a moving target. Whichever features are most annoying will automatically get the label "error" hanged on them. Let's take a simple example: website fonts. Let's say that a CGI program produces a web page, and that web page is using a font under the assumption that all target browsers will have that font, when in reality some don't, and on those browsers that don't have that font, some small connotations are being lost in the meaning of the text because the italics aren't showing up as italics. Is this a bug or not? The answer depends on whether or not there are other more serious bugs or not. If there exist other bugs, then this font problem will just be flagged as a interface prettiness issue, and not be called an error. If there don't exist other worse bugs, then this font issue will be elevated in importance so that it is called an error.
Basically, from the user perspective, an "error" is "whichever existing feature is most annoying to me", and you can't get rid of the errors because their definition keeps getting wider and wider as you try.
Firefox is a browser. If a web server is allowing access to a file on the server that it shouldn't, then that's isn't a bug in Firefox - it's a bug in the web server. Any server that is dependant on the client playing nice in order to get proper security (like most online games) is broken by design.
As to the idea of having a solar-powered 'gas station' for the hydrogen recharging, why bother doing the solar collecting at the gas station? Wouldn't it be a lot more practical to just hook up to the electrical power grid, and then let the power company run a large farm of solar panels. That's pretty much the main reason electricity is such a useful form of energy - you can put the machinery that produces it quite far from the consumer that uses it, and thereby consolodate the energy production into a few places. And if you're concerned about the environment, keep in mind that checking for pollution at a small number of large facilities works better than checking for the sum of all pollution made by each individual's own usage.
Why does the FCC have any jurisdiction over speech in the first place?
For the same reason it always happens - when one has control over who has access to a thing, one ends up having control over what is done with that access (do it our way or we rip away your access rights).
And as to why the FCC has power over who has access to the airwaves, well, that was an idea that started out making sense and then quickly blew out of hand. Basically, if I pay enough money to buy a big radio transmitter, and then decide to be a grade-A number one ass about it, I can set up that transmitter to drown out all broadcasts in the vacinity and render them totally useless, and it's really easy to do. Then if the people running the drowned-out broadcasts still want to be heard, they have to up their power to drown out mine, and thus a transmitting power struggle is begun - one that has NOTHING to do with what the consumer wants and everything to do with who can afford the more powerful transmitter to deny the competitor access to the marketplace.
Imagine if two companies are competing on making widgets, and one decides to try to ruin the other's business by buying a bunch of trucks and parking them on the public road just outside the competitor's factory, blocking up the exit and preventing them from shipping products. The cops would be along pretty quick to bust that up, because it's denying someone access to a public resource.
When the FCC was first set up, that was its purpose. Becuase it is very, very easy to walk all over someone else's use of the airwaves unless everyone plays nice and agrees to stay off each other's frequencies, the FCC licensing system was made to ensure that people stick within their allotted broadcast frequencies and not try to screw their competitors with radio jamming techniques. This even extended to small devices like garage-door openers and handheld remote phones, so that companies making these little devices don't end up accidentally screwing with your neighbor's TV reception every time you use them.
But, as always, once they had the ability to decide who was and wasn't allowed to buy a broadcast license, they started using that to insist upon certain content restrictions as part of the agreement, and that goes outside their original charter.
that there are outer limits to the things Congress may regulate
"outer limits"?
Do not attempt to adjust your television set.
There is nothing wrong with your TV.
We can control the horizontal.
We can control the vertical.
We can control whether your record button works or not.
Both of the top parties are now in the pockets of large corporations - the only real difference is in what *kind* of corporations. Big Media slightly more so for the Democrats, Big Industry slightly more so for the Republicans, and IT being split between the two. But it's a problem that ignores party lines. While most Democrat Senators are supporters of Big Media protectionist laws, the staunchest opposing senator of those laws (Feingold) is also a Democrat.
The DMCA doesn't give any sort of definition what sort of content proteciton measures count. It's so fuzzy in its definition that technically it would count to encode a book in the standard "encryption" format known as "ASCII". Are you using a device that translates ASCII into pictures of letters on a monitor, and are you using it with copyrighted content? Then it's illegal under DMCA. Basically, if it's copyrighted, then the DMCA is activated no matter what, because of this stupid hole in the law (or, if you're feeling more cynical, it's not a hole - it's the way it was designed to work).
The bigger problem is that Christianity simultaneously posits:
1 - a god that is omniscient about not just the present, but the future too.
and
2 - that there exist people other than god who have free will.
#1 and #2 cannot exist in the same universe. They describe mutually exclusive concepts. The only way for some being to be omniscient about the future is for that being to have a perfect prediction of what will happen, in a manner that makes that prediction inevitable and inescapable. If that is the case, then events in the universe are fated to happen the way they do, and thus there is no free will.
For us to have free will, god has to be capable of being mistaken in his prediction of what we are going to do.
Normally, going by distance would be a great idea. But my situation is such that the distance is a fixed quantity due to the nature of the route.
you should train smart, not hard.
Agreed. But I'm not going to be convinced by the same repeated assertion that expending the *same* effort for a shorter time is somehow going to be a smarter way to train.
I'm not trying to push harder. I'm trying to lengthen the time spent doing it. With a quality low-drag road bike, I end up getting home in under 20 minutes. I want it to last longer than that.
With either goal in mind, my point still works: Doing the same amount of effort for a longer period has more effect than doing it for a shorter period. Where we disagree is that you keep trying to claim that it's not really the same amount of effort when someone goes slow on a high-drag bike versus going fast on a low-drag bike.
The current democratic party, with a very, very few exceptions (Russ Fiengold) aren't siginifigantly different from the Republican party anymore. The RIAA and MPAA are not the only examples of this sort of law (And you will note that Republican support for these laws is very, very strong.)
Yes, and that pattern is "this person is a conspiract theorist".
Sounds to me as if you would even advocate using deliberately emotive language with everyone you talk to...?
No. I didn't say it was a bad idea to give out any tolerance at all to these people. I said it was a bad idea to give out EXTRA tolerance. When I used the word "extra", it was deliberate, and quite important to the point I was making.
Will this work with user-created mods? For example, can I download the infamous flashlight-duct-tape mod and make it work on linux, or is that mod going to only work on Windows? (I don't know the format of how mods work - are they distributed as snippets of executable binaries?)
Easy, just redefine "get into space" to mean "100 meters up" and then go drive to a big city, find some skyscraper and take the elevator. The difference between that and what SS1 did is roughly the same as the difference between what SS1 did and what Tito paid for.
Something I've often wondered about lighter-than-air ships is - how practical is it to just build one that uses a vacuum or near-vacuum? Instead of filling the shell with a light gas, just make a strong hollow shell designed to withstand pressure from the outside instead of from the inside, and fill it with - nothing. (i.e. pump out the air, or at least pump out some of it so it is lower pressure and thus "lighter than air").
If this could work, one possible advantage would be that the ship's cruising altitude could be adjusted on the spot by how much air is pumped out or let in.
Helium: It's not really much safer - just a lot less efficient since it's heavier so you need more of it to achive the same lift. The truth is that the fact that the Hindenburg used hydrogen simply caused the fire to grow a bit faster than it otherwise would have. It didn't cause the fire, and it wouldn't have saved the ship to have been using Helium - it just would have made the fireball take longer to complete instead of taking just a few seconds. There still wouldn't have been enough time for passengers to save themselves.
The fire was caused by the choice of paint on the shell.
So, yes, this does support the theory that faulty public perceptions can kill a fledgeling industry.
How about, on an unrelated note, taxing companies that lie by using the word "innovation" when it doesn't apply, like Microsoft? I'd be fully in favor of that. (But if truth in advertising laws were actually enforced, it wouldn't be necessary).