The sin qua non issue here is volume. TFA speaks of 'stretching' the bottles. If you are allowed to increase volume enough when stretching, then, yes, a coke bottle might make it into space. It requires stretching the bottle so that it's volume is several orders of magnitude larger than the original, then putting on lots of carbon fiber ( as per TFA ) on it.
Since TFA speaks of A coke bottle, I assume we aren't allowed multi-staging. But some of the effects of staging could be achieved - I think - with different fluids. At the bottom would be a layer of mercury with some depleted uranium dissolved in it. Next is the water layer. Maybe the third layer would be a hydrocarbon of some sort ( perhaps chosen for it's ability to dissolve gasses under high pressure, thus using precious volume for both compressed air and reaction mass.
Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near this contraption at liftoff, when it is spraying tons of toxic heavy metals all over. But I do want to see the video on youtube.
How do you figure? They had massive famines following. Tens of millions died because Mao fucked up their economy so badly with his great leap. They literally could not manage bare subsistance rations for their country. From wikipedia:"The largest famine ever (in absolute terms) was the Chinese famine of 1958-61 that occurred as a result of the Great Leap Forward."
Relax. Take a deep breath. Hold it. Let it out slowly.
You're preaching to the choir.
Government can be limited by enumerating what it is allowed to do, or what it is not allowed to do. To speak of limiting government does not necessarily imply either. Nobody mentioned how it should be done.
Think calm thoughts. You're among friends here. Nobody wants to hurt the constitution. Everything is going to be ok. Relax...
You favor impeaching a Supreme Court justice for doing his job and providing his interpretation of the Constitution?
I don't support the use of torture, but jesus, the consequences of impeaching justices for not interpreting the Constitution the same way you do are far, far worse. It is not for his interpretation of the constitution, but for completely ignoring it.
The whole idea of the constitution is to limit the government. This means that sometimes you have to let the guilty go free, because an unrestrained government is far more dangerous than the few criminals who go unpunished.
What Scalia is saying is the opposite: that you can ignore the constitution based upon individual circumstances: in particular, that you can duck the constitution based on an imminent threat. Who gets to decide if the threat is credible? Who gets to decide if it is really imminent? Well, apparently, the president. As Scalia sees it, the president can order the torture of anyone with no judicial or congressional review. This is what I mean by completely ignoring the constitution.
By contrast, interpretation of the constitution would be something like saying 'waterboarding is not cruel and unusual.'
What kind of government are you running down there anyway? We made the mistake of letting people like you run it. Well, not exactly like you, but people who are like you in that they are absolutely sure that they know what is right and wrong.
And that was our mistake. We should have stuck with people who know what the constitution says. The US constitution, even with all it's shortcomings, at least provides some protection. Even allowing for differences in interpretation, it still provides some protection.
But if you put a guy in office who believes that he can do anything as long as it is right for his country, and who further believes that he gets to determine what is right and nobody can second guess him, then he can do anything.
You see, the issue is not 'is torture wrong?', the issue is 'is torture unconstitutional?'
Why are these guys still in power? Because we still have, embedded in our political processes, some remnants of respect for the constitution. And because of Monica.
We had a close call a few years back, almost impeaching a guy for a blow job. We scared ourselves on that one. Each self-rightous politician was determined to be greater in his criticism of the prez than the next guy, and it kinda got out of hand. Everybody knew that we really shouldn't do it, but nobody seemed to know exactly when to stop. I mean, nobody wanted wanted to be the guy who said 'Hey, I think blow jobs from interns are ok.' But eventually, enough people realized that if it went through, they wouldn't be getting blow jobs in the future, so it fell apart. When asked why they were changing their minds, they couldn't really come out in favor of blow jobs, so they invoked the constitution, noting that he really hadn't reached the constitutional definition of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
Like a sailor who tacks back and forth across his intended course, sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other, we sort of follow the constitution. Sometimes we are too liberal, sometimes too cautious.
Right now, post-blow-job, we are erring on the side of being too cautious. So faced with a president who probably does deserve to be inpeached for incompetence and the pointless deaths of 4000 of his countrymen, we pretend that the best way to get rid of him is just to let him serve out his term and then we will put someone else in by election.
Why prosecute when a SCOTUS justice indicates that he would reverse on appeal?
US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Tuesday defended the use of harsh physical interrogation techniques, saying in an interview with Law in Action on BBC Radio 4 that they may be justified to deter an immediate threat. Scalia argued that "so-called torture" may not necessarily be prohibited by the US constitution, as he said the Eighth Amendment bar against "cruel and unusual punishment" was only intended to apply to criminal punishments:
Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to find out where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited under the Constitution? Because smacking someone in the face would violate the Eighth Amendment in a prison context. You can't go around smacking people about.
Is it obvious that what can't be done for punishment can't be done to exact information that is crucial to this society? It's not at all an easy question, to tell you the truth. Just to mollify shoot-the-messenge moderators, I favor impeaching Scalia for this.
You know....I'm willing to do this anyway...if it will still get us OFF the 'teet' of middle east oil. There are other ways of doing that: nuclear, or the massive oil fields in Alaska. But no politician seems willing to put them all on the table and compare the pros and cons of each.
Nope, sorry, too many crazy people on this list with lots of knowledge but questionable judgement.
But I'll meet you halfway: at your next job interview, ask the owner if he posts as Harmonious Botch on slashdot. If it is me, I'll admit to it. So you're covered. You won't end up working for me.
...if you're like most of the 'business owners' i've ever met, you probably think you're the only one who knows how to do things... That should be modded insightful. Seriously. Yes, every business owner does think he knows how to do it better than the other guy. That is why he started the business. And it can't be otherwise.
Please consider the possibilities here: when starting a business, you can do it worse, or the same, or better. Nobody in his right mind will start a business with the belief that he will do it worse. Nor will anybody start a business to do just doing the same as the other business, for the other business is established and thus has a head start. You only start a business if you believe that you can do it better in some manner...a better location, a cheaper supplier, a better product, more efficient software...whatever it is, the owner believes that it is better. If he is right, he makes money. If he is wrong, he goes broke.
It is a self-reinforcing process. A person starts a business with a certain idea, and if it makes money, he concludes that it does so because he was right.
Thus all businesses are founded on some proposition. They all have some core belief that defines who or what they are. It is just the inevitable result of the process by which they come into existence. It is almost like a religion.
I'm rather surprised at the vehemence of the responses to my original post, as if the responders thought that I was in favor of businesses being the way they are. I'm not - and never said that I was. I merely described how things are. Sorry if you folks don't like it, but please don't shoot the messenger.
About my business: Among my peers - other business owners in the same type of business here in the same city - I'm known for being the most flexible, and the easiest to work for. That is because I know that I have my biases and beliefs that underlie my business philosophy, and I know that they may well be irrational. And I tell my employees when I offer to hire them that there are certain ways we do things here, and that alternatives are heresy. So they know from the start what can be argued and what cannot.
The really dangerous boss is the one who thinks that he doesn't have a bias, who tells you that he will consider any alternative. Then, when you do say something that challenges some core belief that he didn't realize that he had - or does not want to admit that he has - he turns vicious.
They are going to "abandon my code for another product that replaces its function" by which he probably means he wrote some code to solve a back-end problem that has nothing to do with what the company does to make a profit... Everything the company does, it does to make a profit, however indirectly. That, really, is the definition of a company: a bunch of people working together to make money. That code, whatever it did, is part of a profit-making enterprise. And the people who paid him to write it believe that some such code is useful to make money.
It therefore follows that they believe that their competition needs such code also.
How are they going to feel when he suggests giving it to the competition? For free?
Memo to the guy who posted TFA: I'm a business owner. Been one for over two decades, with employees. I know how employers think.
Every company has certain corporate beliefs, some implicit, some explicit. If it is company policy to use MS, you don't go about praising Linux. If they rent cars from Hertz, you don't advocate Avis. If the CEO is jewish, you don't suggest that he pray towards Mecca. And if the company likes proprietary products, you don't suggest open-source.
I have some advice: DON'T DO THIS. Drop the idea completely. Right now. If you have been fool enough to mention this to any of your co-workers, deny it and claim that they misunderstood what you were talking about.
...the questions are stupid; are these issues really the most important things to slashdot readers? I'd just love to have one debate/interview here that didn't involve, whatever your position, a pot question. In this context it is not just a weed. It is a symbol for all of the ways that governments interfere with our lives for insufficient reasons. The pot question is really asking: "Are you going to leave me alone as long as I'm not hurting someone else?" And most politicians come back with a convoluted answer about protecting the world from the evils of pot, which translates as: "No, I'm not going to leave you along. I think that I know how to run your life better than you do."
Ron Paul told us that the feds will leave us alone when he is president.
Of course she can be manipulated. Bill does it. How do you think he prevents her from divorcing him when he has affairs more often that I turn pages on my calendar? He manipulates her easily and has done so for decades.
...if Ron Paul were elected President, he would be persona non grata on the Hill, and therefore could get nothing done. Just based on the powers of the president that every sixth-grader knows about:
1) He is commander-in-chief: he can tell the military to leave Iraq immediately. 2) He is head of the executive branch: he could order the justice dept to either charge all the people in Guatanamo, or let them go. 3) He can pardon: he could pardon every prisoner in the country who is in for consensual drug crimes ( this is something like 1/3 ). 4) He could nominate SCOTUS replacements who have read the constitution recently.
And that is just the obvious stuff. Then there are all kinds of obscure powers, such as directives and signing statements.
We performed a pre-emptive strike on a foreign land without the backing of an international coalition and without just cause. We have thrown tens of millions of lives into chaos because of it. All because of what I would call a knee jerk reaction to 9/11. Now we are feeling the financial pain of an irresponsible guns and butter plan. We are feeling the political effects of jumping in like cowboys with guns a blazin' into Iraq. Our borders are less safe, our military is run down, and our irresponsible foreign policy has created more terrorists than Al Qaeda ever will. ..and the deaths of almost four thousand American soldiers.
Internal combustion engines can be muffled with only minor losses of power output, for the noise comes out of one place ( the exhaust manifold ) and the power comes out in a second place ( the drive shaft ).
But a jet pack, the power and the noise both come from the same place, and it is difficult to cut noise without substantially cutting power.
Furthermore, the most successful noise-limiting devices on any jet - I'm thinking passby fans on turbines - adds a great deal of weight. On a jetliner this can work, but on a jetpack adding lots of weight will render it useless. ( Remember, the power-to-weight ratio for a modern jetliner is less than 10% of the power-to-weight ratio of a jetpack. )
And there is the noise. I've been within 100 yards of one in operation, and conversation with the person next to me was impossible. They really are not fit for urban areas.
...the desire to make a buck does not make every such effort acceptable. I never said that it should be acceptable. I did say that it should be expected, and I also indicated where one should look to cure the root causes.
I like the Mafia metaphor here. They too make a buck satisfying certain markets. In particular they make a bundle with drugs and prostitution. And we expend a lot of time and money trying to stop them rather than dealing with the root legislation that makes their behavior profitable. All we would have to do would be to legalize drugs and sex among consenting adults, and many of the Mafia's unpleasant behaviors would cease.
Back to the BSA: I'm not sure exactly what legislation would be neccesary to stop them, for I have not studied copyright as much as I have studied sex and drugs. But if you change the laws so that their behavior is not profitable, they will quit.
After 20 Years, Critics Question the BSA's Real Motives... The real motive? Money, obviously. I'm not trying to flame here, but their motives are just like almost every other business: they wanna make a buck.
And they have found a market in which to do it. I'm not saying that they are angels, but if the market is what it is, we should not be surprised if someone satisfies it.
The real culprits here are the legislators who make the laws that cause such a market to exist.
There may be more a question of how similar the tasks are. I used to play simultaneous games of chess for fun, ie: strees-free. My play would degrade a little bit with two games, a bit more with three, and so on. But then one day I tried two games of chess and one of bridge. All three games went to hell real quickly.
My guess is that there is a big difference in the types of switching: changing to new entry points into the same code, or swapping in a whole new code segment.
Slashdot Mirror
The sin qua non issue here is volume. TFA speaks of 'stretching' the bottles. If you are allowed to increase volume enough when stretching, then, yes, a coke bottle might make it into space. It requires stretching the bottle so that it's volume is several orders of magnitude larger than the original, then putting on lots of carbon fiber ( as per TFA ) on it.
Since TFA speaks of A coke bottle, I assume we aren't allowed multi-staging. But some of the effects of staging could be achieved - I think - with different fluids. At the bottom would be a layer of mercury with some depleted uranium dissolved in it. Next is the water layer. Maybe the third layer would be a hydrocarbon of some sort ( perhaps chosen for it's ability to dissolve gasses under high pressure, thus using precious volume for both compressed air and reaction mass.
Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near this contraption at liftoff, when it is spraying tons of toxic heavy metals all over. But I do want to see the video on youtube.
Relax. Take a deep breath. Hold it. Let it out slowly.
You're preaching to the choir.
Government can be limited by enumerating what it is allowed to do, or what it is not allowed to do. To speak of limiting government does not necessarily imply either. Nobody mentioned how it should be done.
Think calm thoughts. You're among friends here. Nobody wants to hurt the constitution. Everything is going to be ok. Relax...
It lists at 500 pounds. That is over 1000 US dollars. Why is it so expensive? It's just a waveform generator, an amp, and a speaker, right?
The whole idea of the constitution is to limit the government. This means that sometimes you have to let the guilty go free, because an unrestrained government is far more dangerous than the few criminals who go unpunished.
What Scalia is saying is the opposite: that you can ignore the constitution based upon individual circumstances: in particular, that you can duck the constitution based on an imminent threat. Who gets to decide if the threat is credible? Who gets to decide if it is really imminent? Well, apparently, the president. As Scalia sees it, the president can order the torture of anyone with no judicial or congressional review. This is what I mean by completely ignoring the constitution.
By contrast, interpretation of the constitution would be something like saying 'waterboarding is not cruel and unusual.'
And that was our mistake. We should have stuck with people who know what the constitution says. The US constitution, even with all it's shortcomings, at least provides some protection. Even allowing for differences in interpretation, it still provides some protection.
But if you put a guy in office who believes that he can do anything as long as it is right for his country, and who further believes that he gets to determine what is right and nobody can second guess him, then he can do anything.
You see, the issue is not 'is torture wrong?', the issue is 'is torture unconstitutional?' Why are these guys still in power? Because we still have, embedded in our political processes, some remnants of respect for the constitution. And because of Monica.
We had a close call a few years back, almost impeaching a guy for a blow job. We scared ourselves on that one. Each self-rightous politician was determined to be greater in his criticism of the prez than the next guy, and it kinda got out of hand. Everybody knew that we really shouldn't do it, but nobody seemed to know exactly when to stop. I mean, nobody wanted wanted to be the guy who said 'Hey, I think blow jobs from interns are ok.' But eventually, enough people realized that if it went through, they wouldn't be getting blow jobs in the future, so it fell apart. When asked why they were changing their minds, they couldn't really come out in favor of blow jobs, so they invoked the constitution, noting that he really hadn't reached the constitutional definition of "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
Like a sailor who tacks back and forth across his intended course, sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other, we sort of follow the constitution. Sometimes we are too liberal, sometimes too cautious.
Right now, post-blow-job, we are erring on the side of being too cautious. So faced with a president who probably does deserve to be inpeached for incompetence and the pointless deaths of 4000 of his countrymen, we pretend that the best way to get rid of him is just to let him serve out his term and then we will put someone else in by election.
Actually about 7.25x, which makes parent's point even stronger. And to get around most of the rockies, go through El Paso, now it is more like 8x.
Nope, sorry, too many crazy people on this list with lots of knowledge but questionable judgement.
But I'll meet you halfway: at your next job interview, ask the owner if he posts as Harmonious Botch on slashdot. If it is me, I'll admit to it. So you're covered. You won't end up working for me.
PS: please read my reply to doktorjayd above.
...if you're like most of the 'business owners' i've ever met, you probably think you're the only one who knows how to do things... That should be modded insightful. Seriously. Yes, every business owner does think he knows how to do it better than the other guy. That is why he started the business. And it can't be otherwise.Please consider the possibilities here: when starting a business, you can do it worse, or the same, or better. Nobody in his right mind will start a business with the belief that he will do it worse. Nor will anybody start a business to do just doing the same as the other business, for the other business is established and thus has a head start. You only start a business if you believe that you can do it better in some manner...a better location, a cheaper supplier, a better product, more efficient software...whatever it is, the owner believes that it is better. If he is right, he makes money. If he is wrong, he goes broke.
It is a self-reinforcing process. A person starts a business with a certain idea, and if it makes money, he concludes that it does so because he was right.
Thus all businesses are founded on some proposition. They all have some core belief that defines who or what they are. It is just the inevitable result of the process by which they come into existence. It is almost like a religion.
I'm rather surprised at the vehemence of the responses to my original post, as if the responders thought that I was in favor of businesses being the way they are. I'm not - and never said that I was. I merely described how things are. Sorry if you folks don't like it, but please don't shoot the messenger.
About my business: Among my peers - other business owners in the same type of business here in the same city - I'm known for being the most flexible, and the easiest to work for. That is because I know that I have my biases and beliefs that underlie my business philosophy, and I know that they may well be irrational. And I tell my employees when I offer to hire them that there are certain ways we do things here, and that alternatives are heresy. So they know from the start what can be argued and what cannot.
The really dangerous boss is the one who thinks that he doesn't have a bias, who tells you that he will consider any alternative. Then, when you do say something that challenges some core belief that he didn't realize that he had - or does not want to admit that he has - he turns vicious.
It therefore follows that they believe that their competition needs such code also.
How are they going to feel when he suggests giving it to the competition? For free?
Memo to the guy who posted TFA: I'm a business owner. Been one for over two decades, with employees. I know how employers think.
Every company has certain corporate beliefs, some implicit, some explicit. If it is company policy to use MS, you don't go about praising Linux. If they rent cars from Hertz, you don't advocate Avis. If the CEO is jewish, you don't suggest that he pray towards Mecca. And if the company likes proprietary products, you don't suggest open-source.
I have some advice: DON'T DO THIS. Drop the idea completely. Right now. If you have been fool enough to mention this to any of your co-workers, deny it and claim that they misunderstood what you were talking about.
...the questions are stupid; are these issues really the most important things to slashdot readers? I'd just love to have one debate/interview here that didn't involve, whatever your position, a pot question. In this context it is not just a weed. It is a symbol for all of the ways that governments interfere with our lives for insufficient reasons. The pot question is really asking: "Are you going to leave me alone as long as I'm not hurting someone else?" And most politicians come back with a convoluted answer about protecting the world from the evils of pot, which translates as: "No, I'm not going to leave you along. I think that I know how to run your life better than you do."Ron Paul told us that the feds will leave us alone when he is president.
Of course she can be manipulated. Bill does it. How do you think he prevents her from divorcing him when he has affairs more often that I turn pages on my calendar? He manipulates her easily and has done so for decades.
Godammit, Taco, where can we post about Ron Paul??? If you don't want him in the article on Republican candidates, how about here?
...if Ron Paul were elected President, he would be persona non grata on the Hill, and therefore could get nothing done. Just based on the powers of the president that every sixth-grader knows about:1) He is commander-in-chief: he can tell the military to leave Iraq immediately.
2) He is head of the executive branch: he could order the justice dept to either charge all the people in Guatanamo, or let them go.
3) He can pardon: he could pardon every prisoner in the country who is in for consensual drug crimes ( this is something like 1/3 ).
4) He could nominate SCOTUS replacements who have read the constitution recently.
And that is just the obvious stuff. Then there are all kinds of obscure powers, such as directives and signing statements.
Then there is the ability to veto.
Ducted fans tend to be more efficient as speed increases ( levels off around 300-400 mph, I think ). At hovering speeds they are horribly inefficient.
Internal combustion engines can be muffled with only minor losses of power output, for the noise comes out of one place ( the exhaust manifold ) and the power comes out in a second place ( the drive shaft ). But a jet pack, the power and the noise both come from the same place, and it is difficult to cut noise without substantially cutting power.
Furthermore, the most successful noise-limiting devices on any jet - I'm thinking passby fans on turbines - adds a great deal of weight. On a jetliner this can work, but on a jetpack adding lots of weight will render it useless. ( Remember, the power-to-weight ratio for a modern jetliner is less than 10% of the power-to-weight ratio of a jetpack. )
And there is the noise. I've been within 100 yards of one in operation, and conversation with the person next to me was impossible. They really are not fit for urban areas.
...the desire to make a buck does not make every such effort acceptable. I never said that it should be acceptable. I did say that it should be expected, and I also indicated where one should look to cure the root causes.I like the Mafia metaphor here. They too make a buck satisfying certain markets. In particular they make a bundle with drugs and prostitution. And we expend a lot of time and money trying to stop them rather than dealing with the root legislation that makes their behavior profitable. All we would have to do would be to legalize drugs and sex among consenting adults, and many of the Mafia's unpleasant behaviors would cease.
Back to the BSA: I'm not sure exactly what legislation would be neccesary to stop them, for I have not studied copyright as much as I have studied sex and drugs. But if you change the laws so that their behavior is not profitable, they will quit.
The real culprits here are the legislators who make the laws that cause such a market to exist.
There may be more a question of how similar the tasks are. I used to play simultaneous games of chess for fun, ie: strees-free. My play would degrade a little bit with two games, a bit more with three, and so on. But then one day I tried two games of chess and one of bridge. All three games went to hell real quickly.
My guess is that there is a big difference in the types of switching: changing to new entry points into the same code, or swapping in a whole new code segment.