This ruling is actually a little more subtle than that. They ruled that the *teacher* can't be sued since the courts haven't decided if criticizing creationism is illegal or not. We've well established a legal precedent that teachers can't pray or teach religion. So the court threw the lawsuit out on the grounds that you can't sue someone for doing something the courts haven't established is illegal. Hence immunity. If the students had brought the case against the school and made it about policy (e.g. to change the curriculum) instead of against an individual then they could establish a precedent legally that criticizing religion is or is not a violation of the establishment clause.
This case establishes no legal precedent. Quite the opposite this case only establishes that there is no accepted legal precedent upon which to judge this case therefore the default ruling is to rule in favor of the defendant.
Now that the pedantics are out of the way... Even if they had ruled this is the correct ruling. Advancing *a* religion which is what was going on in 1994 is one thing. Criticizing the logic (using logic) of a religious believer is not to say that Christianity is false or that Atheism is true--it's criticizing a single logical argument. Similarly a creationist could criticize scientific theories if they are logically unsound without advancing creationism. When you dismantle bad arguments for any position you're strengthening it not denigrating it. Which is EXACTLY the argument that the teacher was making. When you criticize evolution you strengthen it by finding its weaknesses and eliminating them or solving them. When you criticize creationism you're "attacking someone's beliefs" and they double down to defend the position regardless if it's sound or not. That's not an attack on religion, that's an attack on narrow minded ideologues who reject learning. And those ideologues are an insult to religious thought.
If a student said "I know God exists because the bible tells me so." It's not promoting atheism to point out the believer's logical fallacy. In fact that's a huge part of philosophy and theology *WITHIN* a faith.
Atheism does get an unfair leg up on religion since it's by definition a non-establishment. In spite of the efforts to reclassify it as an equivalent belief system by the religious it depends on no beliefs of its own. Atheism ultimately is the argument that "I haven't heard a sound argument for a God from anyone so I maintain the default position of nothing on the subject." In fact Atheists are the least atheistic of all belief systems. As an atheist I will say "None of the 8 billion theories on God seem to hold any water or have sufficient proof." As a Christian I will say "There is one true God and *all other possible views* of God are therefore untrue"
The atheist rejects a finite number of belief systems as having insufficient evidence. Most theists reject an infinite number of belief systems other than the one.
The fact that every less argument for God gets you one step closer to Atheism does not logically follow that discrediting bad arguments for God is advancing Atheism. My dad is a Christian PhD Theologian and I am an atheist. We more often agree in debates than with most lay people. Why? Because most of the arguments that the religious advance have been rejected by theologians and philosophers for centuries as "nonsense".
Most people's faith and religion today is largely based on horribly outdated and overly simplistic arguments that are logical and philosophical sink holes of nonsense. Whether it's an atheist or a theologian who is dismissing such nonsense it's good for religion and Atheism that the old (in this court case's instance more than 1500 year old) logical fallacies are removed from public discourse.
It's not denigrating to religion to force its adherents to use sound arguments and logic for their positions. It *IS* denigrating to religion for idiots and assholes to use the cloak of religion to try and conceal their own stupidity and aversion to education. It makes the religious look stupid and lazy.
I've had a long list of tablets over the years. I have a Tab 10.1 that I picked up the first week it was out.
It's completely nonsense. If Microsoft can get an x86 tablet with 10 hour battery life out next year--it's going to wipe the floor with android.
Android: sometimes kind of supports thumb drives, printers etc. It sometimes kind of plays back a variety of video formats well. It sometimes kind of supports word, excel and editable pdfs. It sometimes kind of has a stripped down application you want.
Win8 should be the system that everyone is excited about. It has more open source applications written for it than Android and Ipad several times over.
It's easier to make the buttons bigger in your application and add some radial menus than to rewrite your application and strip out enough features to get it to run on a honeycomb tablet.
I have very little interest in ARM win8 but the hardware will be more than sufficient for x86 next year. I had a UMPC 2 years ago and it was a little sluggish but not terrible. Moore's law says we'll be about 4x faster than that by the time Win8 ships.
Remember when Linux was going to carry the Netbook market since it was "designed for small lightweight devices". Remember how microsoft "Didn't stand a chance" and has anyone looked around at the netbook market lately? Hardware caught up in less than a year to run WinVista/7 just fine and now everything still runs windows.
The ipad has quite a few apps. Windows has millions more.
I did the lighting for a number of the TV commercials for the Galaxy S. The apple screen shots are pretty close to the 'official' home screen layout approved by T-Mobile and Samsung.
The most we'll get out of it is knowledge about how to fly at these speeds which may come in handy if we get a practical scramjet working.
And I'm glad we are getting some practical working knowledge. I would hate to get an engine functioning at scramjet speeds only to have to spend another 2 decades trying to control it.
If there was no ICBM application we would hopefully carry out the same research just under the auspices of "applicable science". I don't know that the military applications in the short term diminish the larger significance in researching future flight systems.
Hopefully this will also improve our aerodynamic models so that our scramjet engine research has better simulations.
"Just a heads up, we're gonna have a super conductor turned up full blast and pointed at you for the duration of this next test. I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do."
I'm not convinced. I'll have to talk to my friends in DX development to give me the final nod one way or another but I know this author is clueless about the subject.
There are a lot of times in computer graphics where something is seemingly wasteful--but is the most efficient solution.
For example the claim that "This is the most detailed parking barrier in cinema or game history" is untrue. Pixar's Renderman renderer at least for now is still probably the most popular renderer in VFX. For every pixel it renders it automatically tessellates multiple teeny tiny polygons. So if you rendered a 1080p parking barrier it would be more than 1080x1920 polygons. The wireframe if you could view one would just be solid.
I imagine what the crysis developers discovered was that being "dumb" about tesellation was more efficient than trying to adaptively tessellate the entire scene. GPUs can handle millions upon millions of polygons in rasterization. That's not a problem. What bogs down a modern GPU are shader networks.
If the Nvidia cards have a specialized (and largely unused) hardware tessellation engine that's not being put to use then it can probably tessellate everything within sight with minimal performance cost. What would cost it a lot of performance is evaluating every object on the fly to determine the proper level of tessellation.
Dumb is fast. Smart takes power. If there is a giant tessellated ocean wasting a 20k polygons under the ground but isn't being shaded... it's probably barely harming performance.
I'm sure they'll refine the system in the future and spend a lot of time on the art assets, but why hold back a feature if you can throw in a quick and dirty version now that's completely automatic and makes some of the game look better?
If there *actually* is crime there above average that's one thing. But simply *finding* crime in one area because of greater patrolling isn't necessarily confirming the prediction's effectiveness.
It's the same argument as profiling. If you search an African American and find drugs on them and then decide that it means African Americans have more drugs on them you'll find an excuse to search more African Americans and find more drugs. At some point you're only searching dark skinned people and only finding drugs on them.
Prejudices sometimes are based on real data and sometimes are just self-reinforcing biases without any basis in reality. I'm not saying that African Americans do or do not have more drugs in such an example but it's easy for a feedback loop to result in selective enforcement.
Is it a case where one group is committing more crimes or where one group is being more closely watched?
It doesn't intrinsically violate someone's civil rights but what about feedback loops?
If someone commits a crime in your neighborhood and it gets more policing then the policing will catch more criminals and by extension increase policing. Rinse and repeat until it reaches equilibrium.
For instance it would suck if your street through ticket based feedback became a speed trap and you had no choice but to go through it every day.
Then again when you're harboring a felon in your basement "OMG how did he get there?" and your uncle is a cop and paying your rent, best not to sell one of the cop's guns accidentally left behind during the bust on ebay .
There is a huge price jump from paying maybe an extra $150 on a CPU and having to buy a $1k motherboard in order to use that extra inexpensive CPU.
We're actually trying to decide how we're going to build our future render farms since it almost makes sense to just build a huge hero machine with 4 decacore CPU machines than to build out 10 quad core machines after software licensing, network infrastructure etc.
So it can go either way but there are absolute limits on sockets for motherboards. Not many companies make more than 4 CPU sockets so while we could build out a similar spec'ed AMD machine with 6 CPUs instead of 4 for the same price in CPUs... where would we find the motherboard?
It is a geek thing. We wonder if you could run a website from a Commodore 64 (I will be nice and not link to that one), a two-axis panning time lapse rig built from Lego, or build a nuclear reactor. You don't need a practical purpose to do these things. The point is to see if they can be done.
I disagree completely. All of those things are things which *shouldn't* be possible but are. That shows the adventurous spirit to explore the unknown.
Installing Linux on a 386 is more akin to restoring a 1990 Huffy kids bike to mint condition. The path is obvious, we know it can be done and the reward is stupid since you're restoring crap back to its original state.
When I hear someone built a nuclear reactor in their kitchen I go "Whoa cool!" when I hear someone installed linux on their old computer I think "Isn't that the point of linux?"
I would hope in 2,000 years your average archaeologist would have the tools to scan the disk at a molecular level and have an AI extract any important information based on historical archives of data formats.
The difference is (and the S&P even mentioned this in their analysis) that our political process is broken.
Other countries don't have belligerent ideological fanatics who aren't willing to negotiate or compromise and are willing to cost the country billions in order to save a few million.
Remember the GOP turned down a $4T package because it included revenue even though about 75% of people think revenue should be part of debt reduction.
I remember an excellent interview a long time ago by a researcher in antimatter who was asked about weapons. His reply was 2 fold insightful:
1) Who cares, we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case, how much smaller do we really need to get?
2) It's very very difficult to mix anti-matter instantaneously with a large quantity of matter. You would most likely just get a sustained very hot burn not an explosion. It's the old Fuel/Air conundrum. Per gram gasoline has more explosive power than gun powder. But you have to mix it to get it to react.
The nation right now is "unemployed". Do you sell your house, pull from retirement, cut your health insurance and stop job training when you're out of work? No, you might stop going out to eat but your main priority should be getting a new job to pay the mortgage not selling your house at a loss when that first pay check doesn't arrive.
The Tea Party though now has completely changed the debate. We can't go to job interviews now because a car costs money and we can't spend on a bus. We can't buy a suit or get a hair cut for a job interview because those all cost money. We're going to try and pay down the car loan and mortgage for god only knows what reason.
Sure it would have been great to have a huge surplus and almost no debt going into the crisis so that we could spend what we needed to get out of it--but most of our government deficit is from lack of revenue not increased spending. When you're unemployed most of your debt will be incurred not because we're suddenly eating steak every night but because you've lost all income so every penny going out goes to the deficit.
We need to be focusing on finding jobs not paying off the house.
They work because 100 kids converging from different parts of the city are easy to individually pick-off.
Once in a mob, they're all but unstoppable. Also you can't arrest a group of 3-4 kids walking down the street just because they're walking down the street so you have to wait until they start breaking the law *within sight*.
Curfews are effective because the *only* people out on the street are people that are breaking the law and they're by definition breaking the law as soon as you see them.
If there is a curfew they also can't use public transit to get to the riot so they are slower, more vulnerable and again easier to pick up before they actually cause havoc.
You can say whatever you want, but if there is a problem with rioting youth on a regular basis then my rights are being infringed since I can't safely use my city. A policy which lets me safely use public property without being assaulted is protecting my rights.
Or it's because we've weakened labor, deregulated markets protecting workers and passed 'business friendly' legislation which makes it cost effective to evade taxes.
An argument can be made for both sides. Wages have fallen while productivity has climbed. Your claim that "high wages" are the cause of our GDP not being higher might be true, but it also means that you want to see our wages fall even faster-- so let me ask you a question: would it be worth it?
We need to start having a large debate about our priorities in this country. Do we want to see the stock market continue to gain year over year at the cost of the average person's wages and security or do we want to put wall street first and hope that they take pitty on the average american and donate really nice food to the food bank.
Businesses keep telling us that we have to compete with the chinese. I say, fuck that. There was a time when we made good wages, had healthcare and benefits and worked a 40 hour work week. I'm not sure why I want to follow any economic path that has us competing to lower our wages, work 60+ hour weeks without safety or environmental oversights and leaves us without any benefits.
Protectionism might have retarded economic growth but if it was responsible for the quality of life for most of labor then maybe we need to strangle our economy.
"Raising the national debt" is a play on words that doesn't actually reflect Obama's actions. "Raising" makes it sound like he spent an extra $3T. What happened was our income dropped substantially (and we spent extra on stimulus).
Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the solution to our current fiscal crisis is to boost GDP so that we can increase revenue back to previous levels. If we had 1999 revenues in 2009 we wouldn't be "raising the national debt" even with present spending levels.
Even including Obama since 1972 our spending as a % of GDP has been decreasing. If the stimulus worked [Insert Debate] then arguably even the "spending" Obama had saved even more in revenue. The Bailout has almost completely paid itself off and is expected to actually return a profit. Did the stimulus pay for itself? Maybe. But one thing we do know thanks to the CBO is that the 2003 Tax Cuts are responsible for a huge portion of our deficit. Obama tried to end those Tax Cuts--he was blocked by the Minority Republicans.
Obama has tried to reduce the deficit, he even proposed a larger spending cut than the GOP--but the GOP has lost their fucking minds trying to please a tiny fraction of the US population who is completely unwilling to raise taxes or close loop holes. They rejected trillions in spending cuts because there were also some revenue increases to go along.
This is the first time in history that we've cut taxes during a War. Not just one war, 2 wars. If we're supposed to look to business to learn how to operate an organization then we need to be realistic and acknowledge that "sometimes you have to raise prices to not go bankrupt". We continue to vote and poll that we like our government services. That's fine. There is nothing wrong with liking social security and medicare etc. But now we have to be adults and pay what it costs to run those organizations.
That's right! No one in authority in the US has never, ever manipulated laws because a lobbyist gave them money. Furthermore no one in authority has ever harmed a non-lawbreaker.
So we shouldn't have any laws then because they *might* be unjust or because law enforcement could potentially overstep their authority?
This site broke the law. They got shut down. They happened to have a forum. If you have a church in a meth lab you can't claim freedom of religion when the building is seized.
The Second Amendment provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
ACLU POSITION Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.
The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.
The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.
ANALYSIS Although ACLU policy cites the Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Miller as support for our position on the Second Amendment, our policy was never dependent on Miller. Rather, like all ACLU policies, it reflects the ACLU's own understanding of the Constitution and civil liberties.
Heller takes a different approach than the ACLU has advocated. At the same time, it leaves many unresolved questions, including what firearms are protected by the Second Amendment, what regulations (short of an outright ban) may be upheld, and how that determination will be made.
Those questions will, presumably, be answered over time.
Isn't this just a far fetched plan to try to eat into the Valve SOURCE engine developers? It's great and all, don't get me wrong, holding up the tradition of releasing the source of old Id games; but announcing the release at a Keynote seems a tad bit show-boating, and headline grabbing?
I don't think anyone is expecting Source engine source to be released (again:P) seeing as Valve is still using Source in new games.
Maybe the Half Life 1 engine would be comparable. This is a bit of a poke in Valve's face since they're still running the same engine for the last 5 years with only minimal improvements.
Neither. 'Open Platform' just means the data is available through documented APIs and SDKs.
You can be completely closed source but offer hooks to the data. For instance Facebook is closed source but it's an open platform since developers can access all of the data and write their own plugins to interface with the application.
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This ruling is actually a little more subtle than that. They ruled that the *teacher* can't be sued since the courts haven't decided if criticizing creationism is illegal or not. We've well established a legal precedent that teachers can't pray or teach religion. So the court threw the lawsuit out on the grounds that you can't sue someone for doing something the courts haven't established is illegal. Hence immunity. If the students had brought the case against the school and made it about policy (e.g. to change the curriculum) instead of against an individual then they could establish a precedent legally that criticizing religion is or is not a violation of the establishment clause.
This case establishes no legal precedent. Quite the opposite this case only establishes that there is no accepted legal precedent upon which to judge this case therefore the default ruling is to rule in favor of the defendant.
Now that the pedantics are out of the way... Even if they had ruled this is the correct ruling. Advancing *a* religion which is what was going on in 1994 is one thing. Criticizing the logic (using logic) of a religious believer is not to say that Christianity is false or that Atheism is true--it's criticizing a single logical argument. Similarly a creationist could criticize scientific theories if they are logically unsound without advancing creationism. When you dismantle bad arguments for any position you're strengthening it not denigrating it. Which is EXACTLY the argument that the teacher was making. When you criticize evolution you strengthen it by finding its weaknesses and eliminating them or solving them. When you criticize creationism you're "attacking someone's beliefs" and they double down to defend the position regardless if it's sound or not. That's not an attack on religion, that's an attack on narrow minded ideologues who reject learning. And those ideologues are an insult to religious thought.
If a student said "I know God exists because the bible tells me so." It's not promoting atheism to point out the believer's logical fallacy. In fact that's a huge part of philosophy and theology *WITHIN* a faith.
Atheism does get an unfair leg up on religion since it's by definition a non-establishment. In spite of the efforts to reclassify it as an equivalent belief system by the religious it depends on no beliefs of its own. Atheism ultimately is the argument that "I haven't heard a sound argument for a God from anyone so I maintain the default position of nothing on the subject." In fact Atheists are the least atheistic of all belief systems. As an atheist I will say "None of the 8 billion theories on God seem to hold any water or have sufficient proof." As a Christian I will say "There is one true God and *all other possible views* of God are therefore untrue"
The atheist rejects a finite number of belief systems as having insufficient evidence. Most theists reject an infinite number of belief systems other than the one.
The fact that every less argument for God gets you one step closer to Atheism does not logically follow that discrediting bad arguments for God is advancing Atheism. My dad is a Christian PhD Theologian and I am an atheist. We more often agree in debates than with most lay people. Why? Because most of the arguments that the religious advance have been rejected by theologians and philosophers for centuries as "nonsense".
Most people's faith and religion today is largely based on horribly outdated and overly simplistic arguments that are logical and philosophical sink holes of nonsense. Whether it's an atheist or a theologian who is dismissing such nonsense it's good for religion and Atheism that the old (in this court case's instance more than 1500 year old) logical fallacies are removed from public discourse.
It's not denigrating to religion to force its adherents to use sound arguments and logic for their positions. It *IS* denigrating to religion for idiots and assholes to use the cloak of religion to try and conceal their own stupidity and aversion to education. It makes the religious look stupid and lazy.
I've had a long list of tablets over the years. I have a Tab 10.1 that I picked up the first week it was out.
It's completely nonsense. If Microsoft can get an x86 tablet with 10 hour battery life out next year--it's going to wipe the floor with android.
Android: sometimes kind of supports thumb drives, printers etc. It sometimes kind of plays back a variety of video formats well. It sometimes kind of supports word, excel and editable pdfs. It sometimes kind of has a stripped down application you want.
Win8 should be the system that everyone is excited about. It has more open source applications written for it than Android and Ipad several times over.
It's easier to make the buttons bigger in your application and add some radial menus than to rewrite your application and strip out enough features to get it to run on a honeycomb tablet.
I have very little interest in ARM win8 but the hardware will be more than sufficient for x86 next year. I had a UMPC 2 years ago and it was a little sluggish but not terrible. Moore's law says we'll be about 4x faster than that by the time Win8 ships.
Remember when Linux was going to carry the Netbook market since it was "designed for small lightweight devices". Remember how microsoft "Didn't stand a chance" and has anyone looked around at the netbook market lately? Hardware caught up in less than a year to run WinVista/7 just fine and now everything still runs windows.
The ipad has quite a few apps. Windows has millions more.
I did the lighting for a number of the TV commercials for the Galaxy S. The apple screen shots are pretty close to the 'official' home screen layout approved by T-Mobile and Samsung.
e.g. http://galaxy-s.t-mobile.com/
I think the lawsuit is stupid but Apple didn't really game the homescreen in any way. That's an approved Samsung screenshot.
The most we'll get out of it is knowledge about how to fly at these speeds which may come in handy if we get a practical scramjet working.
And I'm glad we are getting some practical working knowledge. I would hate to get an engine functioning at scramjet speeds only to have to spend another 2 decades trying to control it.
If there was no ICBM application we would hopefully carry out the same research just under the auspices of "applicable science". I don't know that the military applications in the short term diminish the larger significance in researching future flight systems.
Hopefully this will also improve our aerodynamic models so that our scramjet engine research has better simulations.
"Just a heads up, we're gonna have a super conductor turned up full blast and pointed at you for the duration of this next test. I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do."
-Cave Johnson
I'm not convinced. I'll have to talk to my friends in DX development to give me the final nod one way or another but I know this author is clueless about the subject.
There are a lot of times in computer graphics where something is seemingly wasteful--but is the most efficient solution.
For example the claim that "This is the most detailed parking barrier in cinema or game history" is untrue. Pixar's Renderman renderer at least for now is still probably the most popular renderer in VFX. For every pixel it renders it automatically tessellates multiple teeny tiny polygons. So if you rendered a 1080p parking barrier it would be more than 1080x1920 polygons. The wireframe if you could view one would just be solid.
I imagine what the crysis developers discovered was that being "dumb" about tesellation was more efficient than trying to adaptively tessellate the entire scene. GPUs can handle millions upon millions of polygons in rasterization. That's not a problem. What bogs down a modern GPU are shader networks.
If the Nvidia cards have a specialized (and largely unused) hardware tessellation engine that's not being put to use then it can probably tessellate everything within sight with minimal performance cost. What would cost it a lot of performance is evaluating every object on the fly to determine the proper level of tessellation.
Dumb is fast. Smart takes power. If there is a giant tessellated ocean wasting a 20k polygons under the ground but isn't being shaded... it's probably barely harming performance.
I'm sure they'll refine the system in the future and spend a lot of time on the art assets, but why hold back a feature if you can throw in a quick and dirty version now that's completely automatic and makes some of the game look better?
If there *actually* is crime there above average that's one thing. But simply *finding* crime in one area because of greater patrolling isn't necessarily confirming the prediction's effectiveness.
It's the same argument as profiling. If you search an African American and find drugs on them and then decide that it means African Americans have more drugs on them you'll find an excuse to search more African Americans and find more drugs. At some point you're only searching dark skinned people and only finding drugs on them.
Prejudices sometimes are based on real data and sometimes are just self-reinforcing biases without any basis in reality. I'm not saying that African Americans do or do not have more drugs in such an example but it's easy for a feedback loop to result in selective enforcement.
Is it a case where one group is committing more crimes or where one group is being more closely watched?
It doesn't intrinsically violate someone's civil rights but what about feedback loops?
If someone commits a crime in your neighborhood and it gets more policing then the policing will catch more criminals and by extension increase policing. Rinse and repeat until it reaches equilibrium.
For instance it would suck if your street through ticket based feedback became a speed trap and you had no choice but to go through it every day.
Then again when you're harboring a felon in your basement "OMG how did he get there?" and your uncle is a cop and paying your rent, best not to sell one of the cop's guns accidentally left behind during the bust on ebay .
Have you ever specc'ed out a multi-CPU system?
There is a huge price jump from paying maybe an extra $150 on a CPU and having to buy a $1k motherboard in order to use that extra inexpensive CPU.
We're actually trying to decide how we're going to build our future render farms since it almost makes sense to just build a huge hero machine with 4 decacore CPU machines than to build out 10 quad core machines after software licensing, network infrastructure etc.
So it can go either way but there are absolute limits on sockets for motherboards. Not many companies make more than 4 CPU sockets so while we could build out a similar spec'ed AMD machine with 6 CPUs instead of 4 for the same price in CPUs... where would we find the motherboard?
It is a geek thing. We wonder if you could run a website from a Commodore 64 (I will be nice and not link to that one), a two-axis panning time lapse rig built from Lego, or build a nuclear reactor. You don't need a practical purpose to do these things. The point is to see if they can be done.
I disagree completely. All of those things are things which *shouldn't* be possible but are. That shows the adventurous spirit to explore the unknown.
Installing Linux on a 386 is more akin to restoring a 1990 Huffy kids bike to mint condition. The path is obvious, we know it can be done and the reward is stupid since you're restoring crap back to its original state.
When I hear someone built a nuclear reactor in their kitchen I go "Whoa cool!" when I hear someone installed linux on their old computer I think "Isn't that the point of linux?"
I would hope in 2,000 years your average archaeologist would have the tools to scan the disk at a molecular level and have an AI extract any important information based on historical archives of data formats.
The difference is (and the S&P even mentioned this in their analysis) that our political process is broken.
Other countries don't have belligerent ideological fanatics who aren't willing to negotiate or compromise and are willing to cost the country billions in order to save a few million.
Remember the GOP turned down a $4T package because it included revenue even though about 75% of people think revenue should be part of debt reduction.
I remember an excellent interview a long time ago by a researcher in antimatter who was asked about weapons. His reply was 2 fold insightful:
1) Who cares, we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case, how much smaller do we really need to get?
2) It's very very difficult to mix anti-matter instantaneously with a large quantity of matter. You would most likely just get a sustained very hot burn not an explosion. It's the old Fuel/Air conundrum. Per gram gasoline has more explosive power than gun powder. But you have to mix it to get it to react.
Each soldier on average costs about $1m for training, equipment and deployment.
I don't know how much one of these costs but if it saves two soldiers it can have a huge ROI.
The nation right now is "unemployed". Do you sell your house, pull from retirement, cut your health insurance and stop job training when you're out of work? No, you might stop going out to eat but your main priority should be getting a new job to pay the mortgage not selling your house at a loss when that first pay check doesn't arrive.
The Tea Party though now has completely changed the debate. We can't go to job interviews now because a car costs money and we can't spend on a bus. We can't buy a suit or get a hair cut for a job interview because those all cost money. We're going to try and pay down the car loan and mortgage for god only knows what reason.
Sure it would have been great to have a huge surplus and almost no debt going into the crisis so that we could spend what we needed to get out of it--but most of our government deficit is from lack of revenue not increased spending. When you're unemployed most of your debt will be incurred not because we're suddenly eating steak every night but because you've lost all income so every penny going out goes to the deficit.
We need to be focusing on finding jobs not paying off the house.
They work because 100 kids converging from different parts of the city are easy to individually pick-off.
Once in a mob, they're all but unstoppable. Also you can't arrest a group of 3-4 kids walking down the street just because they're walking down the street so you have to wait until they start breaking the law *within sight*.
Curfews are effective because the *only* people out on the street are people that are breaking the law and they're by definition breaking the law as soon as you see them.
If there is a curfew they also can't use public transit to get to the riot so they are slower, more vulnerable and again easier to pick up before they actually cause havoc.
You can say whatever you want, but if there is a problem with rioting youth on a regular basis then my rights are being infringed since I can't safely use my city. A policy which lets me safely use public property without being assaulted is protecting my rights.
Or it's because we've weakened labor, deregulated markets protecting workers and passed 'business friendly' legislation which makes it cost effective to evade taxes.
An argument can be made for both sides. Wages have fallen while productivity has climbed. Your claim that "high wages" are the cause of our GDP not being higher might be true, but it also means that you want to see our wages fall even faster-- so let me ask you a question: would it be worth it?
We need to start having a large debate about our priorities in this country. Do we want to see the stock market continue to gain year over year at the cost of the average person's wages and security or do we want to put wall street first and hope that they take pitty on the average american and donate really nice food to the food bank.
Businesses keep telling us that we have to compete with the chinese. I say, fuck that. There was a time when we made good wages, had healthcare and benefits and worked a 40 hour work week. I'm not sure why I want to follow any economic path that has us competing to lower our wages, work 60+ hour weeks without safety or environmental oversights and leaves us without any benefits.
Protectionism might have retarded economic growth but if it was responsible for the quality of life for most of labor then maybe we need to strangle our economy.
"Raising the national debt" is a play on words that doesn't actually reflect Obama's actions. "Raising" makes it sound like he spent an extra $3T. What happened was our income dropped substantially (and we spent extra on stimulus).
Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the solution to our current fiscal crisis is to boost GDP so that we can increase revenue back to previous levels. If we had 1999 revenues in 2009 we wouldn't be "raising the national debt" even with present spending levels.
Even including Obama since 1972 our spending as a % of GDP has been decreasing. If the stimulus worked [Insert Debate] then arguably even the "spending" Obama had saved even more in revenue. The Bailout has almost completely paid itself off and is expected to actually return a profit. Did the stimulus pay for itself? Maybe. But one thing we do know thanks to the CBO is that the 2003 Tax Cuts are responsible for a huge portion of our deficit. Obama tried to end those Tax Cuts--he was blocked by the Minority Republicans.
Obama has tried to reduce the deficit, he even proposed a larger spending cut than the GOP--but the GOP has lost their fucking minds trying to please a tiny fraction of the US population who is completely unwilling to raise taxes or close loop holes. They rejected trillions in spending cuts because there were also some revenue increases to go along.
This is the first time in history that we've cut taxes during a War. Not just one war, 2 wars. If we're supposed to look to business to learn how to operate an organization then we need to be realistic and acknowledge that "sometimes you have to raise prices to not go bankrupt". We continue to vote and poll that we like our government services. That's fine. There is nothing wrong with liking social security and medicare etc. But now we have to be adults and pay what it costs to run those organizations.
That's right! No one in authority in the US has never, ever manipulated laws because a lobbyist gave them money. Furthermore no one in authority has ever harmed a non-lawbreaker.
So we shouldn't have any laws then because they *might* be unjust or because law enforcement could potentially overstep their authority?
This site broke the law. They got shut down. They happened to have a forum. If you have a church in a meth lab you can't claim freedom of religion when the building is seized.
Or, like... don't break the law.
http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice_prisoners-rights_drug-law-reform_immigrants-rights/second-amendment
The Second Amendment provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
ACLU POSITION
Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.
The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.
The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.
ANALYSIS
Although ACLU policy cites the Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Miller as support for our position on the Second Amendment, our policy was never dependent on Miller. Rather, like all ACLU policies, it reflects the ACLU's own understanding of the Constitution and civil liberties.
Heller takes a different approach than the ACLU has advocated. At the same time, it leaves many unresolved questions, including what firearms are protected by the Second Amendment, what regulations (short of an outright ban) may be upheld, and how that determination will be made.
Those questions will, presumably, be answered over time.
Isn't this just a far fetched plan to try to eat into the Valve SOURCE engine developers? It's great and all, don't get me wrong, holding up the tradition of releasing the source of old Id games; but announcing the release at a Keynote seems a tad bit show-boating, and headline grabbing?
I don't think anyone is expecting Source engine source to be released (again :P) seeing as Valve is still using Source in new games.
Maybe the Half Life 1 engine would be comparable. This is a bit of a poke in Valve's face since they're still running the same engine for the last 5 years with only minimal improvements.
http://www.data.gov/
They're at least making efforts to add transparency.
Neither. 'Open Platform' just means the data is available through documented APIs and SDKs.
You can be completely closed source but offer hooks to the data. For instance Facebook is closed source but it's an open platform since developers can access all of the data and write their own plugins to interface with the application.