(originally going to be part of my other post, but it got longwinded)
Apparently some people think your post was flamebait/troll. If it was intended as flamebait, you could have chosen a particular stance on any one of your issues, but rather you said it should be up to the local most feasible level of governance. For those who haven't read the Bill of Rights, that precedent was established with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Let's give some specific examples of why these crimes are not as clear cut as we'd like to believe.
1) Murder. What constitutes murder? Any killing of a human being? Ordering/hiring somebody to kill a human being? Aborting a fetus? Aborting a fetus solely because it's female? Is the death penalty murder? Killing somebody while driving drunk? Killing in defense of a loved one?
2) Obscenity. Is nudity obscene? Is sex obscene? Sex with animals? Bikinis? Breast feeding? Women showing more than just their eyes while in public? Nude pictures of children? A video of childbirth?
3) Wealth distribution. Sales tax? Property tax? Income tax? Estate tax? Corporate tax? Who gets the taxes? Poor people? Black people? Friends of the Bush family?
4) Theft. Is it always theft to take something that doesn't belong to you? A wallet on the side of the road? If it has contact info in it? If it belongs to a known drug dealer? Shoplifting? Taking milk from a store that lost power due to a powerful hurricane, when there is nobody working at the store and the goods would spoil anyway? Copyright infringement? Is it OK to take land from white farmers because their grandparents to the land from the native inhabitants?
5) Rape. (This is probably the one that got you tagged flamebait/troll) All non-consensual sex? Prostitution? Consensual sex with a 17 year old with a fake ID saying she's 22? What about sex forcibly carried out under court order in some other countries?
6) (from somebody else) Slavery. Even this is not as clear cut as one would like to think. Does indentured servitude count? What about child labor? Coal mining towns of old with a company store?
I don't know what all the right answers are, but I know where I stand on most of these issues. But I would not expect my opinion to be the same as somebody in Kabul, New Orleans, San Diego, or Amsterdam. There are many other items that could be added to the list: drug use and pollution come to mind.
Then the question becomes, "who should draw the line?" And that's a damn good question. I would like to agree with you, that the local most feasible level of government should define these things. I do with one exception: human rights. Things like the Civil Rights Movement have shown us that those in power at some of the local levels become corrupt. At times like these the federal government must step in to protect civil liberties. I think the same could be said about the UN stepping in and imposing sanctions on countries guilty of human rights abuses.
Of course, then the question becomes, where does protecting human rights end and micromanaging local legal standards begin? I have no idea. I am not wise enough to discern that sort of thing. (that, and I was supposed to get back to work twenty minutes ago.)
Exactly, Congress has no right to make the CDA, only the States could make such laws. So actually the Supreme Court *should* have picked up this case and ruled in favor of the plaintiff. Further, they should have summarily dismissed the CDA for violating the First, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
First, I think you misunderstood what just happened. The Court upheld a decision that did *not* address the issue of local versus federal government defining obscenity. Rather, the lower court's decision denied the plaintiffs pro-free-speech suit due to a lack of evidence that the CDA is chilling to free speech. From TFA "Because the CDA is a federal law, federal prosecutors have the luxury of choosing where to bring obscenity charges." Therefore, the Supreme Court is allowing the broadest local definition of obscenity apply to the entire Internet. I think that is the opposite of the view you support.
This is an inherent problem/benefit with the Internet. The community level is the same as the global level. Now what do we do?
Here's a simple solution for any offended party: stop "accidentally" searching for "latex" looking for LaTeX, or "teen watersports" looking for an underwater hockey league for your daughter. Or just use AOL.
I can't say that we need another arm of government; we just need three functioning branches that don't just say "I stand behind the President," even if he were a complete loon obstinantly claiming Constitutional Superpowers and made the Supreme Court sing his theme song, while he rounds up evil-doers and forces them to go on "hunting trips" with his elder sidekick Veeperman.
There are 250,000 hits for "April 31." That doesn't make it real. I agree with your sentiment; new words are created all the time. I don't believe, though, that thousands of Google hits constitutes evidence that a word or usage is commonly accepted among educated people. Frankly, I think "cooptition" is a stupid word, and I will not us it. Instead I will call the concept "competeration." Although it looks like somebody already came up with that (pdf, page 59 of 70).:-( (R)
Also, there are 126,000 hits for "omgwtfbbq," but I'm not going to start using that either.;-p
You're absolutely right. I once sent the following email to a friend of mine: "I resent your email to the customer..."
When I meant to say: "I re-sent your email to the customer..."
That little hyphen nearly started a flame war. Luckily this was a friend, so he called me and said (sounding hurt), "I don't understand why you resent my letter." Anyway, after assuring him that I just left out a hyphen, I always think twice before sending an email. "Would this be better to communicate by a phone call?"
I didn't say anything about the latest scandal. The whole ear-mark/soft money thing is an ongoing problem, and it has been a problem for decades. Both major parties pretend to care about reform, while accepting hunting trips or book deals or whatever the loophole of the year is.
I think that's the point, though. If we're too busy working the night shift on the first Teusday after the first Monday this year, we won't be able to (or won't care to) vote out the opressors.
I don't buy it, though. I think the real reason is just that the voting public simply doesn't realise that their rights are being taken. Or worse they realise it, but they are making a gamble that if they give up certain rights, their favorite multistory building won't go up in smoke some day.
In the US the regime gets AT&T to do the tracking for them.
Well I guess if they're gonna spy on us, they might as well be efficient about it, right? I mean, there's no point in me getting spied on *and* paying extra tax money so the feds can re-develop a database that already exists.
I think you are right that true oppression is like that in 1984, where the proletariat is not even aware of it. However, I do not think we are there yet. The Republicrats are still at least doing lip service to ideas like ear-mark reform and campaign finance reform. If this were an Orwellian regime, they would not even bother because things like campaign finance scandals would not see the light of day.
you can be sure the US Gov will be interested in data for its program to put weapons in space...that do the same thing (with smaller rods) to earth.
Just in case people think you are kidding, both IEEE Spectrum and Popular Science have stories on how the US is already looking into using tungsten rods to hurtle at objects on Earth. They are known as Hypervelocity Rod Bundles, or Rods from God. However, there is serious doubt if this is a very good use of taxpayer money. Compared to conventional alternatives, they wouldn't do enough damage, and they wouldn't reach their targets very fast.
They're called "Tumor Suppression Genes" because that's their job - to suppress the development of tumors.
That was GP's point. The genes mentioned in the article supress tumors, but the article summary said they effect tumors. "Effect" is rarely used as a verb (in American English anyway), but when it is, it means to cause or to bring into being. When used as a noun it normally means a result.
I think this might be a gray area. If you look at the official government site it appears that the "performance" itself is not copyright-able unless it has been notated. So I guess the question is, do the statistics themselves constitute notation of the "performance"? IMHO, they do not. But even if they do, one would think the individual making the notation would own the copyright to the notation, not the performers themselves. For instance, if I do something that makes headlines, that could be considered a performand, too. In this case, may I now copyright my actions, since they have been notated? I would think not, but IANAL.
During Desert Storm, there weretrading cards. My little brother and I collected them. Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf were worth the most, though now they're only valuable if they're signed. Patriot Missle card was pretty good, too, but I don't think they put the stats on the back.
cost: $2.8 million success rate: 72% accuracy: 21% 1991 Rookie of the Year
Well it's about 90k pages per cord. And an acre can produce anywhere from 0.3 to 7 cords of wood, and professionals can get over 20 cords of aspen out of one acre. So depending on if you use Fordiman encoded data, or james72 encoded data, a 200GB hard drive would be anywhere from 0.1 to 2120 acres.
For extra credit: determine the conversion factor from Belgiums to Libraries of Congress.
The death of thousands of raptors at Altamont Pass is disproportionate in the worst way. You are absolutely right. From what I can tell, about 5 to 15% of the turbine kills in the US have been raptors, substantially higher than would be expected based on population alone. An even more provocative question would be "what percent of raptors are killed by turbine strikes?" Hopefully as larger turbines are installed (higher and slower), fewer raptors will be killed.
Similarly, migratory birds are disproportionately more likely to hit lit transmission towers, though not in the same quantities. Environmentalists have had a harder time getting people to do anything about this, since the mechanisms involved aren't as readily understood. I'd imagine that columbidae suffer most from vehicular accidents, but nobody really cares about pigeons.
The planned wind farm locations that I've heard of have all been screened for impact on endangered species. Granted, I'm not in the power business anymore, but I imagine they still make these checks. I don't think any energy company wants that kind of media attention anymore.
You're right. There are no perfect energy sources. Hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar, gas turbines, and coal all have their problems. And each of these affect wildlife and the environment in ways we don't fully understand. I'm just glad to see so much open discussion about the pros and cons of each without (too many) people resorting to dogma and namecalling.
I think you guys are saying the same thing. You're saying the process moves the heat. NeutronCowboy is saying it removes *local* heat. Those are different reference frames for the same Qdot.
It depends on how you define substantial. In the case of raptors in California, I would agree that thousands a year is substantial. But I think GP was referring to a common public opinion that all wind farms are bird blenders. That idea is patently false.
Disclaimer: I used to work for GE Energy, a company that makes wind turbines.
As you can see here, the number of dead birds due to buildings is highly disputed. There's a 300-fold difference between the upper and lower bounds. There are some cool things being done to improve the problem. Lets pick a number somewhere in the middle, say, 100,000,000 birds per year in the US killed by buildings. By comparison, various organizations estimate that cats kill between 8 and 200 million birds in the US each year, and motor vehicles account for 50 to 100 million as well.
There are several different sites that report the numbers of birds killed by wind turbines in the US and around the world.
So we see numbers ranging from 1 to 37 birds/turbine/year. There are somewhere around 70,000 wind turbines installed around the world. So we are looking at something less than 3 million worldwide, and US estimates are typically in the tens of thousands, even by environmentalists.
Disclaimer: I used to work for GE Energy, which makes wind turbines.
I'm trying to figure out where the $1.5B in the article came from. The copy of the bill on THOMAS says $990MM; that's still 12,375,000 housholds (at least). As of the 2000 Census, there were 105,480,101 occupied household, though. So that means that means somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 4 households will get vouchers. Then I looked at the other number in TFA. Only 20MM of the 70MM non-D TVs aren't hooked up to cable or satellite. If that's the case the $990MM will be more than enough to get boxes for all of us. I'll be interested to see if they keep people from getting vouchers if they subscribe to cable.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but what do you "avocate"?
(originally going to be part of my other post, but it got longwinded)
Apparently some people think your post was flamebait/troll. If it was intended as flamebait, you could have chosen a particular stance on any one of your issues, but rather you said it should be up to the local most feasible level of governance. For those who haven't read the Bill of Rights, that precedent was established with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Let's give some specific examples of why these crimes are not as clear cut as we'd like to believe.
1) Murder. What constitutes murder? Any killing of a human being? Ordering/hiring somebody to kill a human being? Aborting a fetus? Aborting a fetus solely because it's female? Is the death penalty murder? Killing somebody while driving drunk? Killing in defense of a loved one?
2) Obscenity. Is nudity obscene? Is sex obscene? Sex with animals? Bikinis? Breast feeding? Women showing more than just their eyes while in public? Nude pictures of children? A video of childbirth?
3) Wealth distribution. Sales tax? Property tax? Income tax? Estate tax? Corporate tax? Who gets the taxes? Poor people? Black people? Friends of the Bush family?
4) Theft. Is it always theft to take something that doesn't belong to you? A wallet on the side of the road? If it has contact info in it? If it belongs to a known drug dealer? Shoplifting? Taking milk from a store that lost power due to a powerful hurricane, when there is nobody working at the store and the goods would spoil anyway? Copyright infringement? Is it OK to take land from white farmers because their grandparents to the land from the native inhabitants?
5) Rape. (This is probably the one that got you tagged flamebait/troll) All non-consensual sex? Prostitution? Consensual sex with a 17 year old with a fake ID saying she's 22? What about sex forcibly carried out under court order in some other countries?
6) (from somebody else) Slavery. Even this is not as clear cut as one would like to think. Does indentured servitude count? What about child labor? Coal mining towns of old with a company store?
I don't know what all the right answers are, but I know where I stand on most of these issues. But I would not expect my opinion to be the same as somebody in Kabul, New Orleans, San Diego, or Amsterdam. There are many other items that could be added to the list: drug use and pollution come to mind.
Then the question becomes, "who should draw the line?" And that's a damn good question. I would like to agree with you, that the local most feasible level of government should define these things. I do with one exception: human rights. Things like the Civil Rights Movement have shown us that those in power at some of the local levels become corrupt. At times like these the federal government must step in to protect civil liberties. I think the same could be said about the UN stepping in and imposing sanctions on countries guilty of human rights abuses.
Of course, then the question becomes, where does protecting human rights end and micromanaging local legal standards begin? I have no idea. I am not wise enough to discern that sort of thing. (that, and I was supposed to get back to work twenty minutes ago.)
Exactly, Congress has no right to make the CDA, only the States could make such laws. So actually the Supreme Court *should* have picked up this case and ruled in favor of the plaintiff. Further, they should have summarily dismissed the CDA for violating the First, Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
First, I think you misunderstood what just happened. The Court upheld a decision that did *not* address the issue of local versus federal government defining obscenity. Rather, the lower court's decision denied the plaintiffs pro-free-speech suit due to a lack of evidence that the CDA is chilling to free speech. From TFA "Because the CDA is a federal law, federal prosecutors have the luxury of choosing where to bring obscenity charges." Therefore, the Supreme Court is allowing the broadest local definition of obscenity apply to the entire Internet. I think that is the opposite of the view you support.
This is an inherent problem/benefit with the Internet. The community level is the same as the global level. Now what do we do?
Here's a simple solution for any offended party: stop "accidentally" searching for "latex" looking for LaTeX, or "teen watersports" looking for an underwater hockey league for your daughter. Or just use AOL.
I can't say that we need another arm of government; we just need three functioning branches that don't just say "I stand behind the President," even if he were a complete loon obstinantly claiming Constitutional Superpowers and made the Supreme Court sing his theme song, while he rounds up evil-doers and forces them to go on "hunting trips" with his elder sidekick Veeperman.
Also, there are 126,000 hits for "omgwtfbbq," but I'm not going to start using that either. ;-p
You're absolutely right. I once sent the following email to a friend of mine:
"I resent your email to the customer..."
When I meant to say:
"I re-sent your email to the customer..."
That little hyphen nearly started a flame war. Luckily this was a friend, so he called me and said (sounding hurt), "I don't understand why you resent my letter." Anyway, after assuring him that I just left out a hyphen, I always think twice before sending an email. "Would this be better to communicate by a phone call?"
I didn't say anything about the latest scandal. The whole ear-mark/soft money thing is an ongoing problem, and it has been a problem for decades. Both major parties pretend to care about reform, while accepting hunting trips or book deals or whatever the loophole of the year is.
mmmm... a Beowulf cluster of hot grits.... mmmmm
I don't buy it, though. I think the real reason is just that the voting public simply doesn't realise that their rights are being taken. Or worse they realise it, but they are making a gamble that if they give up certain rights, their favorite multistory building won't go up in smoke some day.
I think you are right that true oppression is like that in 1984, where the proletariat is not even aware of it. However, I do not think we are there yet. The Republicrats are still at least doing lip service to ideas like ear-mark reform and campaign finance reform. If this were an Orwellian regime, they would not even bother because things like campaign finance scandals would not see the light of day.
Is that anything like "Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition!"? http://my.execpc.com/~dschaaf/praise.html
That was GP's point. The genes mentioned in the article supress tumors, but the article summary said they effect tumors. "Effect" is rarely used as a verb (in American English anyway), but when it is, it means to cause or to bring into being. When used as a noun it normally means a result.
Was anybody else thinking of this poster when they read that title?
I think this might be a gray area. If you look at the official government site it appears that the "performance" itself is not copyright-able unless it has been notated. So I guess the question is, do the statistics themselves constitute notation of the "performance"? IMHO, they do not. But even if they do, one would think the individual making the notation would own the copyright to the notation, not the performers themselves. For instance, if I do something that makes headlines, that could be considered a performand, too. In this case, may I now copyright my actions, since they have been notated? I would think not, but IANAL.
During Desert Storm, there were trading cards. My little brother and I collected them. Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf were worth the most, though now they're only valuable if they're signed. Patriot Missle card was pretty good, too, but I don't think they put the stats on the back.
cost: $2.8 million
success rate: 72%
accuracy: 21%
1991 Rookie of the Year
Sorry... I couldn't resist.
For extra credit: determine the conversion factor from Belgiums to Libraries of Congress.
Similarly, migratory birds are disproportionately more likely to hit lit transmission towers, though not in the same quantities. Environmentalists have had a harder time getting people to do anything about this, since the mechanisms involved aren't as readily understood. I'd imagine that columbidae suffer most from vehicular accidents, but nobody really cares about pigeons.
The planned wind farm locations that I've heard of have all been screened for impact on endangered species. Granted, I'm not in the power business anymore, but I imagine they still make these checks. I don't think any energy company wants that kind of media attention anymore.
You're right. There are no perfect energy sources. Hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar, gas turbines, and coal all have their problems. And each of these affect wildlife and the environment in ways we don't fully understand. I'm just glad to see so much open discussion about the pros and cons of each without (too many) people resorting to dogma and namecalling.
Let's not forget the LEGO pipe organ at the Abston Church of Christ. And Fuzzy Coatimundi's Opus 1.
I think you guys are saying the same thing. You're saying the process moves the heat. NeutronCowboy is saying it removes *local* heat. Those are different reference frames for the same Qdot.
It depends on how you define substantial. In the case of raptors in California, I would agree that thousands a year is substantial. But I think GP was referring to a common public opinion that all wind farms are bird blenders. That idea is patently false. Disclaimer: I used to work for GE Energy, a company that makes wind turbines.
There are several different sites that report the numbers of birds killed by wind turbines in the US and around the world.
- http://web.syr.edu/~bpburtt/Birds/Aug08-04.htm
- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-04-wi
n dmills-usat_x.htm
- DOE.gov
- http://www.njaudubon.org/conservation/Opinions/07
- 03.html
So we see numbers ranging from 1 to 37 birds/turbine/year. There are somewhere around 70,000 wind turbines installed around the world. So we are looking at something less than 3 million worldwide, and US estimates are typically in the tens of thousands, even by environmentalists.Disclaimer: I used to work for GE Energy, which makes wind turbines.
I'm trying to figure out where the $1.5B in the article came from. The copy of the bill on THOMAS says $990MM; that's still 12,375,000 housholds (at least). As of the 2000 Census, there were 105,480,101 occupied household, though. So that means that means somewhere between 1 in 8 and 1 in 4 households will get vouchers. Then I looked at the other number in TFA. Only 20MM of the 70MM non-D TVs aren't hooked up to cable or satellite. If that's the case the $990MM will be more than enough to get boxes for all of us. I'll be interested to see if they keep people from getting vouchers if they subscribe to cable.