TFA talks about England and Wales, not the United States, which is where I presume you live from the way you assert that a court "test" is relevant.
In the United States, but generally not elsewhere, you have a Fourth Amendment protecting you against "unreasonable" searches, and so while state legislatures are free to pass laws allowing the police to take your DNA against your will, you're right that the Supreme Court would have to agree such a law does not transgress the Fourth Amendment. Which is not likely for such a vague purpose as "might be useful if you commit a crime later."
However, I think you're totally wrong about the assault (non)issue. Don't you think if J. Random Citizen slapped the cuffs on you, shoved you into the backseat of a car without working door handles, put you in a cell, fingerprinted and photographed you, et cetera, they would be guilty of not only assault, but felony battery, kidnapping, et cetera and so forth? Sticking a needle into you and drawing some blood wouldn't add much to the list of crimes.
When you're in the custody of the police, they're allowed to interfere with your person in all kinds of ways ordinarily forbidden by assault and battery laws, so long as it's directly related to their job. They can restrain you if you resist, beat you with a stick if you fight, and kill you with the weapon of their choice if they reasonably think you're dangerous and there's no other way to stop you.
If taking your DNA is constitutional, which it almost certainly is, if there is reasonable cause to think you've committed a crime in which the DNA evidence is important, and not otherwise, then I think they can certainly take it by force, and your civil suit asserting the contrary would not even be heard by a jury, but tossed by the judge immediately as contrary to the principle of limited official immunity. If you really want to get anywhere, you need to raise the issue of whether it is constitutional to take your DNA in the first place, not whether it's constitutional to take it by force if you refuse.
Who's this "we" of which you speak? Do you mean you personally and the dozen people you know personally? In that case, you're right, you have no perceptible influence on a corporation employing tens of thousands and providing a service for millions. Nor should you. I'd object very strongly if you did, since I have no use for an all-powerful aristocracy of any kind.
Or by "we" do you mean "all 50 million of Exxon's customers?" In which case, it's obvious to anyone using a human brain instead of, say, a 50-line Perl script loaded up with 50 megabytes of mindless slogans from the past that that "we" has enormous influence. All that "we" needs to do is switch from Exxon gas to BP or Mobil gas for, say, six months or so, and Exxon would be totally ruined, driven completely out of business. Indeed, a corporation that large is so dependent on a continuous stream of income that I expect a single day during which no one bought their gas would be so horrifying to upper management that they'd do nearly anything to avoid it.
I suspect what you mean by "we" is something between these two extremes. A "we" that obviously does not include all customers of Exxon, but is somewhat larger than you and your personal friends. Say, you, your personal friends, and all the other clever in-the-know people. It's still pretty OK with me that this particular "we" has just about zero influence on Exxon, since it won't include me and my personal friends.
They only change in ways that are generally not possible to anticipate, hence which haven't been predicted.
And of course they would. Technology, like the stock market or the weather, is inherently a chaotic system over a certain characteristic timespan (1-2 weeks for the stock market and the weather, 25-50 years for technology). That is, over the characteristic timespan very small causes can produce enormous, system-wide effects, what you might call the butterfly wing flapping causing the hurricane phenomenon.
For example, a couple of guys (Jobs and Wozniak) screw around in the garage in the early 80s, trying to put together a really cheap personal computer. That's a very small cause. And twenty-five years later, it has had a giant effect: iMacs and iPods and iTunes oh my. Problem is, there was no practical way in the 1980s to distinguish the small cause that mattered (Jobs and Wozniak) from the other 50 zillion small causes that didn't matter (the other 50 zillion pairs of scruffy entrepreneurs in garages whose brilliant idea went nowhere).
This is why predictions of the future out more than 50 years usually end up looking hilarious in hindsight. When sf writers of the 50s and 60s predicted the present, they projected the dominant themes of their time (spaceflight, atomic physics, the struggle with Soviet Communism). They did not -- and could not -- realize that all three themes would pretty much abruptly and surprisingly come to an end in the 90s. When present writers predict the future, they project the dominant themes of our times (e.g. networked computing). It's very likely these projections, too, will end up wildly wrong. Networked computing is likely to become as humdrum and static as telephony within the next half-century or so.
That's nonsense. The industry grew around the physics, not vice versa. The fact that the industry is predicated on a constant improvement of speed and complexity is because such a thing is achievable in microelectronics, certainly not because microelectronics is the only industry where such a thing is desirable.
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
In very few industries other than microelectronics has anything like Moore's Law applied, and that's not from a lack of economic incentive, but from the plain uncooperativity of Mother Nature. You're arguing backwards, from effect (the economic structure of the industry) to cause (the physical nature of microelectronics).
What you can do about the goverment controllin' your life is...
(1) Ignore bogus Nightmare On Elm Street Hollywood-fantasy threats like that the goverment might install cameras everywhere and watch you like a hawk. They won't, and even if they did, it wouldn't matter.
(2) Pay attention to the real threats to your liberty that might sneak under the radar while you're distracted by the bogus threats. Do you wonder, a bit, why the BBC, which wholeheartedly supports as massive and omnipresent a government as possible, is running this story? It's a distraction. Get scared about CCTV cameras, and maybe you won't notice that your ability to choose which doctor to see, or which school to send your kid to, has quietly vanished away.
So pay attention to stuff like the government pre-collecting much or most of your income right out of your pay, before you see it, giving it enormous wealth at its disposal. (Do you think you'll control what they do with that wealth? Could you control General Motors after buying 1 share of their stock?) Avoid letting the Federal government tell your state and local government what to do, with respect to property laws, drugs, et cetera. If you're European, avoid letting the EU tell your national government what to do. Avoid allowing the government to be the sole health-care and old-age pension provider, so you have zero choice about and zero economic leverage over what sort of health-care and old-age pension you'll get. (If you think it's tought influencing your HMO because all they'll lose if they piss you off is 0.001% of their income, imagine how much luck you'll have influencing the government health service when they can force you to pay.)
And so forth. Basically, avoid putting the important decisions about your life into the hands of a government bureucrat. Try to keep those decisions with yourself, or, at worst, with some local government for whom you are one out of (say) 100,000 votes, instead of one out of 100,000,000.
How you do this is simple: next time someone says Wouldn't it be a great idea if government did X or Y, so individuals didn't have to? or The government should DO something about problem Z! just shoot them, and then bury the body wearing gloves so you don't catch the virus.
A poor and sick person almost by definition can't commit economic crimes, crimes that requires some capital to get going, like phishing scams.
The argument that poor and sick people steal or rob in order to afford health care is one of the oldest and most ridiculous canards there is. Can you think of anyone, ever, anywhere who has been arrested repeatedly for, say, felony auto theft -- and it turned out he did it just to afford his cancer medicine? Neither can I.
Modern society is not Dickensian England, nor less 14th century France. If you have average intelligence and even a modest amount of self-discipline, you can make enough money to afford the bare minimum required to keep you alive and healthy, including a decent healthy diet (which may not include going out to McDonald's four times a week), and decent healthcare (which may not include liver transplants and heart stents, but will include immunizations and emergency care for car accidents).
Folks get into crime because just surviving isn't enough for them -- they want to live a life of ease and power, without having to work hard at all. And then they're not intelligent enough to realize that crime is not the clever "angle" to wealth and power that no one's thought of before.
Why do we keep acting like it is a good idea to have little nations all under their own regime?
Because it is?
I mean, let's try this braying poxy ass of an excuse for a "thought" in other arenas:
"Why do we keep acting like it is a good idea to let everyone run whatever operating system they like on their own computer? We need a global standard OS that everyone has to use, so all the application writers can do their work most efficiently. (And so can the virus writers, ha ha.)"
"Why do we keep acting like every state in the US should be able to make its own laws with respect to, e.g. coastal access or air quality or business law? What we need is a one national -- nay, global! -- standard that says that the rules must be exactly the same for Fresno fruit companies hiring seasonal grape pickers as for Frankfurt auto design firms hiring accountants, no matter what those silly short-sighted people who actually live and work there might think. Imagine how efficient it would be for the lawyers if one mighty emperor made all the rules!"
"Why do we keep acting like everyone should be able to pick out their own mate, live the way they want in the house they want, buy the car they want, et cetera and so forth? What's with all this damn freedom? Don't you people realize it naturally creates inefficiency? Do ants or termites act this way? No, and look at how much more effective and interesting their lives are! What we need is a global system where everyone has to follow the exact same procedure in picking a mate or buying a house, has to buy the same car, eat the same diet, et cetera and so forth. How very efficient and orderly that would be!"
Sheesh. The amazing thing about a fascist tyranny is that it hardly ever gets imposed on a people by some gang of thugs. Usually people do it themselves, gladly, in the name of security and efficiency.
You really figure the NSF is going to blow a few million on trying to figure out who said "The President has his head up his ass!" on/. as an AC?
What for? Who cares? Sounds kind of weirdly paranoid. Or like someone has delusions of being way more important and influential than he is.
I mean, who seriously thinks that anything posted anonymously on random Internet message boards can possibly have any important political effect? As if J. Random Teenager posting from the school computer is going to suddenly have the Big Insight that connects Bush, The War on Terror, General Electric, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and assorted Nazi schemes to achieve immortality for the elite by collecting the blood of virgins in secret Satanic rituals, and then expose the whole hideous plan for all to see on a World o' Warcraft forum. And only then will Congress, the Supreme Court, 50 state governors, and the entire mainstream media wake up. 'Cause, you know, otherwise all those grown-ups are just to damn stupid to understand the subtle connections that illuminate the Secret Evil Plan.
Sheesh. One might as well argue that the CIA is going to hunt down and secretly kill people who scrawl "BUSH SUXS!" on the doors of public bathroom stalls. Like they care. Like anyone cares.
Think of the crater as a nice hole already drilled down 20-50 meters or so. A geologist's (or in this case areologist's) dream: you can examine all the strata over a fairly wide horizontal range without having to pick up a pick or shovel (which Opportunity isn't carrying anyway).
Yes, what was once in the crater is now obviously outside the crater, but the ejecta was spread over a large area by the impact that created the crater, and of course that materials was subject to much more violent shock and heating. I expect it wouldn't tell you nearly as much as the layers inside the crater, even assuming you could distinguish between a thin smudge of ejecta and the surrounding desert floor. Any relationship between the layers (this comes above that, et cetera) is also only preserved inside the crater.
I'm afraid once Opportunity enters the crater that's the last of it's exploring days, roaming the surface of Mars
Probably. That's why they waited this long to try it. But they have to balance what they might learn driving around outside the crater and what they might learn driving into the crater (and not getting out). They've probably concluded they've learned about all there is to learn outside the crater, and if they can't get out, it's worth what they'll find in the crater.
Also bear in mind Opportunity's tools are wearing out, so its ability to do geology (as opposed to just sending back pictures) is coming to an end anyway.
Keepers of the Kennedy torch would like you to think just that, but actually the Soviets took their missiles out of Cuba because Bobby Kennedy secretly told them we'd agree to take similar intermediate range missiles out of Turkey.
In other words, contrary to the Camelot mythology, the "resolution" of the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the Kennedys bent over for Nikita Khrushchev, and the old peasant got some fairly valuable concessions out of them for the price of some cheap, operationally-iffy installations in Cuba.
Oh, right...plus the USSR had to "look bad" in the UN, har har. That and $3 will get you a latte at Starbucks. All in all, not a bad day's work by Mr. Chairman, and kinda of a Bay o' Pigs Take 2 for the smug New Frontiers crowd, who were also in the process of dragging us into Vietnam. I believe modern Kennedy apologists tend to argue that Khrushchev lost power to Brezhnev a few years later because he was seen to climb down in 1962. Personally I think this greatly overstates how much the Soviets cared about how they were seen in the West, but whatever. PhD theses have been written on this, each contradicting the others.
No major power would play such a dangerous game. I think it's been generally recognized since the 60s that "national technical means" a/k/a spy satellites are, first of all, not particularly bothersome. It's not necessarily a bad idea for your enemies to know what you're up to, e.g. that you're building a large force of nuclear missile silos, or you've got umpty heavy bombers on standby all the time. This can give your enemies cause for long, thoughtful pauses before engaging in boisterous military adventurism within your sphere of influence.
About the only time you really fear spy satellites is if you've been bullshitting about your capabilities and you don't want your enemy to find out. But since bluffing on the international stage is incredibly risky anyway -- spy satellites are only one of the many ways your bluff can get called -- it's not a course of action taken routinely by any major power run by actual adults (e.g. excluding Iran and other such Third World riff-raff).
Secondly, each major power recognizes that the early-warning "eyes" of the other powers are guarded exceedingly jealously. During the Cold War he Soviets knew very well that an attack on American early-warning assets -- even a suspicious "accident" -- would be regarded with extreme paranoia by the Americans and would be very likely to provoke a violent, even hysterical response. The Americans knew likewise about Soviet space assets, and, not surprisingly, both sides were quite careful to steer clear of each other's space assets, however many games of "chicken" they may have played with ground-based forces (and there were plenty).
A simpler way to put it is this: anyone who uses "black" satellites for ASAT target practice is likely to find his ASAT launch and control facilities used for surface-to-surface missile target practice by the owner of the satellites.
Indeed, the Soviets used to do this routinely. When they knew American spy satellites were overhead, they'd get out big earthmoving equipment and dig strange holes in the ground, move large draped loads back and forth, et cetera. All the kinds of things they'd do if they were building a missile silo, or some other major military installation.
By doing this all over the place, they forced the Americans to spread out their intelligence resources covering all kinds of bogus chaff, thus increasing the chance that some real military work would slip in beneath the radar, so to speak.
Well, first of all, there aren't "thousands" up there. In the low hundreds is more like it.
Secondly, almost all of them are very well known. So you can easily sort out the GPS satellites and whatnot.
Thirdly, of the few remaining "black" satellites -- why is it a big problem to stay out of their way? If you have some operation that is sufficiently big that it attracts the attention of a national spy satellite that costs $millions to put up and probably $50,000 an hour to operate, then you've clearly got some major resources, and major investments to protect. Keeping track of when a half-dozen black satellites are overhead would seem to be about as elementary a precaution as making sure your couriers don't draw attention to themselves by wildly exceeding the speed limit on public highways.
There's a number of useful things you can know about a satellite, just knowing it's orbit.
* If it's geostationary, it's designed to look at or communicate with whatever is right underneath it. It's also unlikely to be a photorecon satellite, because your km-per-pixel sucks from 36,000 km away.
* If it's in a polar orbit, it's probably designed to look at big swathes of the Earth as the latter rotates under it. Polar orbits are too expensive otherwise.
* If it's in a low orbit with just enough inclination to get up to your latitude -- why, that sounds like it might be a photorecon satellite designed with you in mind...
* In which case, if you know when it's over you, and when it's not, then you have a rough idea of when you're in the crosshairs. That can be handy.
I don't necessarily disagree that the main way you keep your capabilities secret is to keep what the satellites do secret. But it probably helps, at least a little bit, to keep the existence and orbit of the thing secret, too.
Surely the wise course of action would be to deny the existence of all secret US satellites plus a smattering of somebody elses's satellites, too. Just to stir up the entropy pool a bit.
Dude, the important question isn't whether they get no attention from the media, it's whether they get no attention from search and rescue. Which would you rather have, if you were lost, huh? Or do you imagine that it's not possible to get attention from search and rescue unless you already have attention from the media? That would seem pretty silly -- most rescues happen without a speck of media attention. Folks just do their job without the TV cameras on them.
As for the question of whether there would be plenty o' media attention to a case where some poor soul lost in the wilderness was abandoned merely because he wasn't a rich Republican donor -- ha ha. You'd have to have been living in a cave for the past twenty years not to understand how our modern media would love to jump on such a story.
Very little. But if the person who made the claim that people who aren't famous don't get the kind of rescue effort Fossett is getting can't name even one such person, then either...
(1) He's got a terrible memory, or
(2) He's totally bullshitting because it "seems reasonable" to the politically-correct, non-independent-thinking mind, and not because he has any actual facts to back up his assertion.
Sorry, I don't understand your point. You have no idea who was in those six wrecks and what happened to them. For all you know, all six wrecks involved hard landings after which everyone was rescued immediately.
it is a bit ridiculous considering all the missing persons there are out there who get no attention...
Did you just make this up because it makes you seem like a Sensitive and Thoughtful Person? Or can you actually name someone who went missing in the wilderness and "got no attention"?
FYI, rangers and such take their jobs very seriously. So far as I know, everyone reported missing in the wilderness gets a full spare-no-expense search and rescue effort. They look for "nobodies" just as hard as they're looking for Fossett, and the dedicated folks who do those tough jobs would take great offense at your ignorant suggestion otherwise.
I sorted 100 images while you posted your advice
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Help Find Steve Fossett
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I mean...quite a lot of the country lives pretty close to New Mexico, e.g. in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas.
It's a bit of a haul from the East Coast, I guess. But if you're forking out $200,000 for a once in a lifetime ride I can't see the extra $500 airfare from the Sprawl making you blink.
If you could do anything you wanted, it would only be because you lived on a desert island all by yourself. In which case, I expect what you would want the most is something to eat besides raw grubs and muddy rainwater, and for the big cat that stalks you at night to have some kind of accident, and for the Sun to stop burning your skin every day.
What you were imagining is what you would do if there were plenty of other people -- but they all, somehow, took directions from you. This "money" of which you speak, for example, is nothing more than IOUs from one person to another. It doesn't, as they say, grow on trees. It's not a natural resource you can gather with your own lone effort, like food or an animal pelt to keep the cold out. If you had lots of money, that would mean you had lots of IOUs from other people without having given out any yourself. As I said, that would make you actually highly connected to society -- but living at the comfy tippy top.
I'd like to stop wasting money in Iraq
How are you wasting money on Iraq? How much are you personally spending on Iraq? If you earn the median income ($50,000) and pay normal taxes ($9000), and consider that the cost of the Iraq war runs about 10% of the Federal budget, then you've spent $900 on the Iraq war this year. That's not going to fund a lot of infrastructure. It probably wouldn't even fix a pothole in your own street. What you're really saying is that not only do you not want to waste money on Iraq, but you want me and everybody else in the country also not to waste our money on Iraq. Put that way, some of the fundamental arrogance of the position comes out a bit, doesn't it? Who are you that you should have any influence on how I spend my money? Or any of the rest of us?
but there's a hundred million or so other voters out there that oppose me on that.
See, to a true Jeffersonian democrat, this makes no sense. If a hundred million voters favor doing X with the collective tax receipts, and only one opposes it (or at least a minority), then you should want to do X, too. Otherwise, you're just saying that you (or a minority) should decide what to do with everbody else's money.
I'm not trying to be a smart-ass here. I'm trying to point out that what you've written is a fundamentally self-contradictory mix of wanting your own freedom but also wanting the advantages of acting collectively with millions of others. There are only two ways to have both, and that's (1) to be the Big Tyrant, so your will is what everybody collectively acts out, or (2) to be the total herd beast that always finds what everybode else is thinking congenial. Otherwise, you really need to choose individual liberty or the power of collective action. You can't have both, not in this world.
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TFA talks about England and Wales, not the United States, which is where I presume you live from the way you assert that a court "test" is relevant.
In the United States, but generally not elsewhere, you have a Fourth Amendment protecting you against "unreasonable" searches, and so while state legislatures are free to pass laws allowing the police to take your DNA against your will, you're right that the Supreme Court would have to agree such a law does not transgress the Fourth Amendment. Which is not likely for such a vague purpose as "might be useful if you commit a crime later."
However, I think you're totally wrong about the assault (non)issue. Don't you think if J. Random Citizen slapped the cuffs on you, shoved you into the backseat of a car without working door handles, put you in a cell, fingerprinted and photographed you, et cetera, they would be guilty of not only assault, but felony battery, kidnapping, et cetera and so forth? Sticking a needle into you and drawing some blood wouldn't add much to the list of crimes.
When you're in the custody of the police, they're allowed to interfere with your person in all kinds of ways ordinarily forbidden by assault and battery laws, so long as it's directly related to their job. They can restrain you if you resist, beat you with a stick if you fight, and kill you with the weapon of their choice if they reasonably think you're dangerous and there's no other way to stop you.
If taking your DNA is constitutional, which it almost certainly is, if there is reasonable cause to think you've committed a crime in which the DNA evidence is important, and not otherwise, then I think they can certainly take it by force, and your civil suit asserting the contrary would not even be heard by a jury, but tossed by the judge immediately as contrary to the principle of limited official immunity. If you really want to get anywhere, you need to raise the issue of whether it is constitutional to take your DNA in the first place, not whether it's constitutional to take it by force if you refuse.
So you're saying all human economic endeavors grow exponentially until they can't?
Amazing! Who'd have thought?
so we have no say.
Who's this "we" of which you speak? Do you mean you personally and the dozen people you know personally? In that case, you're right, you have no perceptible influence on a corporation employing tens of thousands and providing a service for millions. Nor should you. I'd object very strongly if you did, since I have no use for an all-powerful aristocracy of any kind.
Or by "we" do you mean "all 50 million of Exxon's customers?" In which case, it's obvious to anyone using a human brain instead of, say, a 50-line Perl script loaded up with 50 megabytes of mindless slogans from the past that that "we" has enormous influence. All that "we" needs to do is switch from Exxon gas to BP or Mobil gas for, say, six months or so, and Exxon would be totally ruined, driven completely out of business. Indeed, a corporation that large is so dependent on a continuous stream of income that I expect a single day during which no one bought their gas would be so horrifying to upper management that they'd do nearly anything to avoid it.
I suspect what you mean by "we" is something between these two extremes. A "we" that obviously does not include all customers of Exxon, but is somewhat larger than you and your personal friends. Say, you, your personal friends, and all the other clever in-the-know people. It's still pretty OK with me that this particular "we" has just about zero influence on Exxon, since it won't include me and my personal friends.
They only change in ways that are generally not possible to anticipate, hence which haven't been predicted.
And of course they would. Technology, like the stock market or the weather, is inherently a chaotic system over a certain characteristic timespan (1-2 weeks for the stock market and the weather, 25-50 years for technology). That is, over the characteristic timespan very small causes can produce enormous, system-wide effects, what you might call the butterfly wing flapping causing the hurricane phenomenon.
For example, a couple of guys (Jobs and Wozniak) screw around in the garage in the early 80s, trying to put together a really cheap personal computer. That's a very small cause. And twenty-five years later, it has had a giant effect: iMacs and iPods and iTunes oh my. Problem is, there was no practical way in the 1980s to distinguish the small cause that mattered (Jobs and Wozniak) from the other 50 zillion small causes that didn't matter (the other 50 zillion pairs of scruffy entrepreneurs in garages whose brilliant idea went nowhere).
This is why predictions of the future out more than 50 years usually end up looking hilarious in hindsight. When sf writers of the 50s and 60s predicted the present, they projected the dominant themes of their time (spaceflight, atomic physics, the struggle with Soviet Communism). They did not -- and could not -- realize that all three themes would pretty much abruptly and surprisingly come to an end in the 90s. When present writers predict the future, they project the dominant themes of our times (e.g. networked computing). It's very likely these projections, too, will end up wildly wrong. Networked computing is likely to become as humdrum and static as telephony within the next half-century or so.
That's nonsense. The industry grew around the physics, not vice versa. The fact that the industry is predicated on a constant improvement of speed and complexity is because such a thing is achievable in microelectronics, certainly not because microelectronics is the only industry where such a thing is desirable.
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
In very few industries other than microelectronics has anything like Moore's Law applied, and that's not from a lack of economic incentive, but from the plain uncooperativity of Mother Nature. You're arguing backwards, from effect (the economic structure of the industry) to cause (the physical nature of microelectronics).
What you can do about the goverment controllin' your life is...
(1) Ignore bogus Nightmare On Elm Street Hollywood-fantasy threats like that the goverment might install cameras everywhere and watch you like a hawk. They won't, and even if they did, it wouldn't matter.
(2) Pay attention to the real threats to your liberty that might sneak under the radar while you're distracted by the bogus threats. Do you wonder, a bit, why the BBC, which wholeheartedly supports as massive and omnipresent a government as possible, is running this story? It's a distraction. Get scared about CCTV cameras, and maybe you won't notice that your ability to choose which doctor to see, or which school to send your kid to, has quietly vanished away.
So pay attention to stuff like the government pre-collecting much or most of your income right out of your pay, before you see it, giving it enormous wealth at its disposal. (Do you think you'll control what they do with that wealth? Could you control General Motors after buying 1 share of their stock?) Avoid letting the Federal government tell your state and local government what to do, with respect to property laws, drugs, et cetera. If you're European, avoid letting the EU tell your national government what to do. Avoid allowing the government to be the sole health-care and old-age pension provider, so you have zero choice about and zero economic leverage over what sort of health-care and old-age pension you'll get. (If you think it's tought influencing your HMO because all they'll lose if they piss you off is 0.001% of their income, imagine how much luck you'll have influencing the government health service when they can force you to pay.)
And so forth. Basically, avoid putting the important decisions about your life into the hands of a government bureucrat. Try to keep those decisions with yourself, or, at worst, with some local government for whom you are one out of (say) 100,000 votes, instead of one out of 100,000,000.
How you do this is simple: next time someone says Wouldn't it be a great idea if government did X or Y, so individuals didn't have to? or The government should DO something about problem Z! just shoot them, and then bury the body wearing gloves so you don't catch the virus.
A poor and sick person almost by definition can't commit economic crimes, crimes that requires some capital to get going, like phishing scams.
The argument that poor and sick people steal or rob in order to afford health care is one of the oldest and most ridiculous canards there is. Can you think of anyone, ever, anywhere who has been arrested repeatedly for, say, felony auto theft -- and it turned out he did it just to afford his cancer medicine? Neither can I.
Modern society is not Dickensian England, nor less 14th century France. If you have average intelligence and even a modest amount of self-discipline, you can make enough money to afford the bare minimum required to keep you alive and healthy, including a decent healthy diet (which may not include going out to McDonald's four times a week), and decent healthcare (which may not include liver transplants and heart stents, but will include immunizations and emergency care for car accidents).
Folks get into crime because just surviving isn't enough for them -- they want to live a life of ease and power, without having to work hard at all. And then they're not intelligent enough to realize that crime is not the clever "angle" to wealth and power that no one's thought of before.
Why do we keep acting like it is a good idea to have little nations all under their own regime?
Because it is?
I mean, let's try this braying poxy ass of an excuse for a "thought" in other arenas:
"Why do we keep acting like it is a good idea to let everyone run whatever operating system they like on their own computer? We need a global standard OS that everyone has to use, so all the application writers can do their work most efficiently. (And so can the virus writers, ha ha.)"
"Why do we keep acting like every state in the US should be able to make its own laws with respect to, e.g. coastal access or air quality or business law? What we need is a one national -- nay, global! -- standard that says that the rules must be exactly the same for Fresno fruit companies hiring seasonal grape pickers as for Frankfurt auto design firms hiring accountants, no matter what those silly short-sighted people who actually live and work there might think. Imagine how efficient it would be for the lawyers if one mighty emperor made all the rules!"
"Why do we keep acting like everyone should be able to pick out their own mate, live the way they want in the house they want, buy the car they want, et cetera and so forth? What's with all this damn freedom? Don't you people realize it naturally creates inefficiency? Do ants or termites act this way? No, and look at how much more effective and interesting their lives are! What we need is a global system where everyone has to follow the exact same procedure in picking a mate or buying a house, has to buy the same car, eat the same diet, et cetera and so forth. How very efficient and orderly that would be!"
Sheesh. The amazing thing about a fascist tyranny is that it hardly ever gets imposed on a people by some gang of thugs. Usually people do it themselves, gladly, in the name of security and efficiency.
You really figure the NSF is going to blow a few million on trying to figure out who said "The President has his head up his ass!" on /. as an AC?
What for? Who cares? Sounds kind of weirdly paranoid. Or like someone has delusions of being way more important and influential than he is.
I mean, who seriously thinks that anything posted anonymously on random Internet message boards can possibly have any important political effect? As if J. Random Teenager posting from the school computer is going to suddenly have the Big Insight that connects Bush, The War on Terror, General Electric, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and assorted Nazi schemes to achieve immortality for the elite by collecting the blood of virgins in secret Satanic rituals, and then expose the whole hideous plan for all to see on a World o' Warcraft forum. And only then will Congress, the Supreme Court, 50 state governors, and the entire mainstream media wake up. 'Cause, you know, otherwise all those grown-ups are just to damn stupid to understand the subtle connections that illuminate the Secret Evil Plan.
Sheesh. One might as well argue that the CIA is going to hunt down and secretly kill people who scrawl "BUSH SUXS!" on the doors of public bathroom stalls. Like they care. Like anyone cares.
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Think of the crater as a nice hole already drilled down 20-50 meters or so. A geologist's (or in this case areologist's) dream: you can examine all the strata over a fairly wide horizontal range without having to pick up a pick or shovel (which Opportunity isn't carrying anyway).
Yes, what was once in the crater is now obviously outside the crater, but the ejecta was spread over a large area by the impact that created the crater, and of course that materials was subject to much more violent shock and heating. I expect it wouldn't tell you nearly as much as the layers inside the crater, even assuming you could distinguish between a thin smudge of ejecta and the surrounding desert floor. Any relationship between the layers (this comes above that, et cetera) is also only preserved inside the crater.
I'm afraid once Opportunity enters the crater that's the last of it's exploring days, roaming the surface of Mars
Probably. That's why they waited this long to try it. But they have to balance what they might learn driving around outside the crater and what they might learn driving into the crater (and not getting out). They've probably concluded they've learned about all there is to learn outside the crater, and if they can't get out, it's worth what they'll find in the crater.
Also bear in mind Opportunity's tools are wearing out, so its ability to do geology (as opposed to just sending back pictures) is coming to an end anyway.
Keepers of the Kennedy torch would like you to think just that, but actually the Soviets took their missiles out of Cuba because Bobby Kennedy secretly told them we'd agree to take similar intermediate range missiles out of Turkey.
In other words, contrary to the Camelot mythology, the "resolution" of the Cuban Missile Crisis was that the Kennedys bent over for Nikita Khrushchev, and the old peasant got some fairly valuable concessions out of them for the price of some cheap, operationally-iffy installations in Cuba.
Oh, right...plus the USSR had to "look bad" in the UN, har har. That and $3 will get you a latte at Starbucks. All in all, not a bad day's work by Mr. Chairman, and kinda of a Bay o' Pigs Take 2 for the smug New Frontiers crowd, who were also in the process of dragging us into Vietnam. I believe modern Kennedy apologists tend to argue that Khrushchev lost power to Brezhnev a few years later because he was seen to climb down in 1962. Personally I think this greatly overstates how much the Soviets cared about how they were seen in the West, but whatever. PhD theses have been written on this, each contradicting the others.
No major power would play such a dangerous game. I think it's been generally recognized since the 60s that "national technical means" a/k/a spy satellites are, first of all, not particularly bothersome. It's not necessarily a bad idea for your enemies to know what you're up to, e.g. that you're building a large force of nuclear missile silos, or you've got umpty heavy bombers on standby all the time. This can give your enemies cause for long, thoughtful pauses before engaging in boisterous military adventurism within your sphere of influence.
About the only time you really fear spy satellites is if you've been bullshitting about your capabilities and you don't want your enemy to find out. But since bluffing on the international stage is incredibly risky anyway -- spy satellites are only one of the many ways your bluff can get called -- it's not a course of action taken routinely by any major power run by actual adults (e.g. excluding Iran and other such Third World riff-raff).
Secondly, each major power recognizes that the early-warning "eyes" of the other powers are guarded exceedingly jealously. During the Cold War he Soviets knew very well that an attack on American early-warning assets -- even a suspicious "accident" -- would be regarded with extreme paranoia by the Americans and would be very likely to provoke a violent, even hysterical response. The Americans knew likewise about Soviet space assets, and, not surprisingly, both sides were quite careful to steer clear of each other's space assets, however many games of "chicken" they may have played with ground-based forces (and there were plenty).
A simpler way to put it is this: anyone who uses "black" satellites for ASAT target practice is likely to find his ASAT launch and control facilities used for surface-to-surface missile target practice by the owner of the satellites.
Indeed, the Soviets used to do this routinely. When they knew American spy satellites were overhead, they'd get out big earthmoving equipment and dig strange holes in the ground, move large draped loads back and forth, et cetera. All the kinds of things they'd do if they were building a missile silo, or some other major military installation.
By doing this all over the place, they forced the Americans to spread out their intelligence resources covering all kinds of bogus chaff, thus increasing the chance that some real military work would slip in beneath the radar, so to speak.
Well, first of all, there aren't "thousands" up there. In the low hundreds is more like it.
Secondly, almost all of them are very well known. So you can easily sort out the GPS satellites and whatnot.
Thirdly, of the few remaining "black" satellites -- why is it a big problem to stay out of their way? If you have some operation that is sufficiently big that it attracts the attention of a national spy satellite that costs $millions to put up and probably $50,000 an hour to operate, then you've clearly got some major resources, and major investments to protect. Keeping track of when a half-dozen black satellites are overhead would seem to be about as elementary a precaution as making sure your couriers don't draw attention to themselves by wildly exceeding the speed limit on public highways.
There's a number of useful things you can know about a satellite, just knowing it's orbit.
* If it's geostationary, it's designed to look at or communicate with whatever is right underneath it. It's also unlikely to be a photorecon satellite, because your km-per-pixel sucks from 36,000 km away.
* If it's in a polar orbit, it's probably designed to look at big swathes of the Earth as the latter rotates under it. Polar orbits are too expensive otherwise.
* If it's in a low orbit with just enough inclination to get up to your latitude -- why, that sounds like it might be a photorecon satellite designed with you in mind...
* In which case, if you know when it's over you, and when it's not, then you have a rough idea of when you're in the crosshairs. That can be handy.
I don't necessarily disagree that the main way you keep your capabilities secret is to keep what the satellites do secret. But it probably helps, at least a little bit, to keep the existence and orbit of the thing secret, too.
Surely the wise course of action would be to deny the existence of all secret US satellites plus a smattering of somebody elses's satellites, too. Just to stir up the entropy pool a bit.
Dude, the important question isn't whether they get no attention from the media, it's whether they get no attention from search and rescue. Which would you rather have, if you were lost, huh? Or do you imagine that it's not possible to get attention from search and rescue unless you already have attention from the media? That would seem pretty silly -- most rescues happen without a speck of media attention. Folks just do their job without the TV cameras on them.
As for the question of whether there would be plenty o' media attention to a case where some poor soul lost in the wilderness was abandoned merely because he wasn't a rich Republican donor -- ha ha. You'd have to have been living in a cave for the past twenty years not to understand how our modern media would love to jump on such a story.
But they haven't. Because no such story exists.
Very little. But if the person who made the claim that people who aren't famous don't get the kind of rescue effort Fossett is getting can't name even one such person, then either...
(1) He's got a terrible memory, or
(2) He's totally bullshitting because it "seems reasonable" to the politically-correct, non-independent-thinking mind, and not because he has any actual facts to back up his assertion.
Sorry, I don't understand your point. You have no idea who was in those six wrecks and what happened to them. For all you know, all six wrecks involved hard landings after which everyone was rescued immediately.
it is a bit ridiculous considering all the missing persons there are out there who get no attention...
Did you just make this up because it makes you seem like a Sensitive and Thoughtful Person? Or can you actually name someone who went missing in the wilderness and "got no attention"?
FYI, rangers and such take their jobs very seriously. So far as I know, everyone reported missing in the wilderness gets a full spare-no-expense search and rescue effort. They look for "nobodies" just as hard as they're looking for Fossett, and the dedicated folks who do those tough jobs would take great offense at your ignorant suggestion otherwise.
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I mean...quite a lot of the country lives pretty close to New Mexico, e.g. in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas.
It's a bit of a haul from the East Coast, I guess. But if you're forking out $200,000 for a once in a lifetime ride I can't see the extra $500 airfare from the Sprawl making you blink.
If you could do anything you wanted, it would only be because you lived on a desert island all by yourself. In which case, I expect what you would want the most is something to eat besides raw grubs and muddy rainwater, and for the big cat that stalks you at night to have some kind of accident, and for the Sun to stop burning your skin every day.
What you were imagining is what you would do if there were plenty of other people -- but they all, somehow, took directions from you. This "money" of which you speak, for example, is nothing more than IOUs from one person to another. It doesn't, as they say, grow on trees. It's not a natural resource you can gather with your own lone effort, like food or an animal pelt to keep the cold out. If you had lots of money, that would mean you had lots of IOUs from other people without having given out any yourself. As I said, that would make you actually highly connected to society -- but living at the comfy tippy top.
I'd like to stop wasting money in Iraq
How are you wasting money on Iraq? How much are you personally spending on Iraq? If you earn the median income ($50,000) and pay normal taxes ($9000), and consider that the cost of the Iraq war runs about 10% of the Federal budget, then you've spent $900 on the Iraq war this year. That's not going to fund a lot of infrastructure. It probably wouldn't even fix a pothole in your own street. What you're really saying is that not only do you not want to waste money on Iraq, but you want me and everybody else in the country also not to waste our money on Iraq. Put that way, some of the fundamental arrogance of the position comes out a bit, doesn't it? Who are you that you should have any influence on how I spend my money? Or any of the rest of us?
but there's a hundred million or so other voters out there that oppose me on that.
See, to a true Jeffersonian democrat, this makes no sense. If a hundred million voters favor doing X with the collective tax receipts, and only one opposes it (or at least a minority), then you should want to do X, too. Otherwise, you're just saying that you (or a minority) should decide what to do with everbody else's money.
I'm not trying to be a smart-ass here. I'm trying to point out that what you've written is a fundamentally self-contradictory mix of wanting your own freedom but also wanting the advantages of acting collectively with millions of others. There are only two ways to have both, and that's (1) to be the Big Tyrant, so your will is what everybody collectively acts out, or (2) to be the total herd beast that always finds what everybode else is thinking congenial. Otherwise, you really need to choose individual liberty or the power of collective action. You can't have both, not in this world.
No argument from me. Sounds like a sensible philosophy.