That's a very unfair characterization of Roth's actions. He employed two graduate students, one from China and then one from Iran. He had the Chinese student send him a file while he, Roth, was in China, at a Chinese professor's e-mail address. The material in the file was deemed sensitive, as was the research. I think the professor ended up in prison primarily because he didn't understand that the FBI didn't appreciate him speaking with the professorial authority, like Moses from the mountain, that he was accustomed to use in his lab and within his field of study. but he did not hire spies, at least knowingly, not that anyone knows. And, I'll just drop this in: If I were a professor in the sciences I can imagine that I might want to employ non-American grad. students. I worked with and was friends with grad. students in the STEM fields, and there were a lot of "foreign" ones, and many of those foreign ones were much harder working than the American ones, many of whom seemed to think that grad. school was just more undergrad. school.
Acrobat Pro will straighten text as it OCRs, and it tends to be sufficiently accurate. It also will blow thru just about all of the ways a PDF can be locked. I think I've only had to turn to another piece of software once or twice since I've been using PDFs for research. I think most academic/research PDF peddlers just flip some "don't modify me" bit, which Acrobat Pro can undo.
OTOH, I just plug up an iPod Touch, and it syncs perfectly. Upon moving to Android for a phone, it took me a while to find an app that wasn't full of myspace-esque glimmering gimmicks like some 80s boombox; after that it was manually managing files in a folder, which is simple but tedious. That was until I found doubleTwist, which made the Android simple and one-click like the iPhone/iPod Touch. Either iTunes must be really horrible on Windows, or it's because people just have to have their media files all over the drive. And, I know that last one gets a lot of hate: evil Apple oppresses me because it wants my files in one place!!! Well, a) there's an option to not do that, and b) why aren't you also complaining about apps like calibre that do the same thing? And, yes, iTunes wants one library. The model for MacOS is based on individual users that log in, like most modern OSs. So, well, they expect you to do that with iTunes too. And, frankly, it's trivial to get around that with a beginner-level hack (if I can do it, anyone can), or you can buy some $10 piece of shareware to do it for you. No bigs. Sure, Apple stuff is locked down. But not as badly as some say.
I wish I had mod points today. Paglia writes in my field, more or less, and I read her first two or three books, which were/are bullshit, but which impacted me a lot back when I was young and dumb. Anyway, yes, based on the reviews of this current book, it's an extended troll aimed at the art world. So, oddly, enough she's more or less on the same page of the people here pulling the smarter-than-thou/well-actually schtick.
Paglia is not an art critic and wouldn't like to be called one. The, which is basically an extended troll aimed at the art world, attacks art critics in particular for creating an elitist, decadent art scene. (It's so easy to go Godwin on her claim that I'll leave it to someone else.)
I'm grateful for the clarification about your opinion of me, but I'm confused by the first sentence. How exactly is the situational nature of what might be said relevant to my post, which didn't address situations but only the original blanket statement that hate speech is protected?
Hate speech is protected, but exclusions are made for "fighting words" that intended to incite or inflict injury. So, yes, hate speech is protected but the speech intended to incite violence or cause emotional harm is not. And, yes, those are gray areas, which is what the judiciary is for.
As a teacher, I'd like to say that this method really, really worked for me at a major midwestern university. Then I moved to the South and tried the same method; it did not work. I'm not saying it's a regional difference, perhaps just admissions policies. But I'm at a second Southern university now, and I'm surprised students even wipe themselves, as they'll do little else if they don't receive a grade for it. Maybe this teacher works with similar students, ones for whom only high-stakes grading is sufficient motivation to lift a finger. (Can you tell I just had to sit thru a long faculty meeting? I'm pissy as all get-out.)
I'll make this issue more puzzling by pointing out how, in the US, many systems are cheating on students' test results because of the high stakes instituted by No Child Left Behind. I know that Atlanta and Montgomery, AL, schools have recently been busted because administrators were changing test results. And, in Montgomery, making extreme changes, say like a 7 on a skills test being changed to a 70. Likely the situation is worse in Southern states, where education funding problems are often worse. But I strongly suspect that the US is no longer gathering credible data in many districts nation-wide.
I concur. I often find myself resisting the urge to make cat-calls at attractive women. It's hard for me not to run over and grab their seductive boobies. It is not enough for me to just shut my eyes or stay home. So I think we should level the playing field by making all attractive women wear full-length burlap sacks. Of course that may be unfair to women, so maybe it would be better if all men were chemically castrated instead. That seems fair.
I'll match your anecdote with another. I worked in a natural history museum where we had a Christian nut who harassed one of our Jewish employees constantly, putting Jews for Jesus tracts in her box, giving her Christmas cards, telling her Jesus loves her, etc. It doesn't sound so bad, but it was unrelenting and drove the Jewish woman to tears quite often. Sadly no one had the guts to can the Christian lady. She eventually converted one of my co-workers, turning a perfectly good astronomer into someone who proclaimed that various laws of physics were impious deceptions thrust upon us by Satan. So, now, there's my anecdote, canceling yours out, unless of course I'm just making this up to persecute all the poor long-suffering Christians in the world.
And that Milton quote is just dripping with irony, given his politics. Milton was like many of us, he wanted freedom for himself but was happy to set that and freedom for others aside when it came to the Cromwell government.
The motivations for many of Stalin's purges were political, realpolitik more than ideology or dogma. There's even some evidence that his purge of Jewish communists was motivated by political rather than antisemitic reasons (at least not his own personal antisemitism, which I don't doubt existed). Rather, it's possible that he purged Jewish communist leaders as a prelude to his pact with Hitler. And, yes, Christianity in quite a few cases supported fascism, in Italy, German, Romania, it certainly did.
Oh that's a complete crock. My father-in-law ran a research lab for one of the world's largest electronics companies. He supervised people who won international awards for their work. They did a lot of research sitting in vineyards drinking wine, smoking, and chatting. Sure, they worked long hours too, especially at crunch times. But leisure is key to creativity. And they ate well and exercised, having cycling and skiing teams they belonged to (and still belong to as retirees). And they were all men in single-income families who were cared for intensely by their wives. They were pampered, fed, rested, exercised like thoroughbreds because that's what they were. (Not to mention Nobel winners.) In my field I have worked with internationally renowned literature scholars, people who crank out books like mad, win big grants, lecture around the globe. They work hard, but they also take care of themselves, taking breaks, eating right, exercising, etc. --- This talk of round-the-clock work, with no time for exercise, for family, it's not something I've heard from really successful people. Yes, there's crunch time, and yes, you have to work, but this "Work work and smile! Arbeit macht frei!" is the mantra of a drone or a future burnout.
Amen. I am at this moment engaged in a possible move from academia into contracting for the military. Pretty much the same work, but the pay is about double. Go military!
A typical work week for me, an English professor, is 50-60 hours, mostly grading papers. That's during the period August-May. In June and July I typically run an honest 30 hours a week. Every three years or so I take a month off in the summer to visit relatives. My monthly income is $3000, after medical and all that is taken out. I should deduct from that about $400 a month for student loan repayment, and I should be making about the same amount in retirement contributions, but I can't afford it. Anyway, the salary is just under $50k/yr. I imagine a physics prof isn't too far off of that, though humanities people are cheaper because more common. Just go to any coffee shop, you'll find one behind the register! --- It is typical in my field to expect graduate students to teach three classes a year, attend three classes a semester, and write 30-60 pages of well-researched material a semester, typically while reading a book a week per course. (Where book can mean Kant's Critique of Judgment, some hefty Modernist tome, or a collection of Medieval manuscripts with associated criticism. Not lite reading at all.) And they're often doing this while trying to get by on $1,000 a month, which in itself is time-consuming, because you have to spend so much time shopping, fixing, cooking, etc. A lot of make-and-mend. --- Anyway, my rambling point is that grad. school is a bitch, and a bit of a hazing. Especially as you have all these old farts saying "Back in my day I lived on $100 a month and walked uphill both ways, blah blah blah." (Yeah, buddy, mastodon meat was only a nickel a pound.) And the pay-off, if you're a professor, of getting thru all the "thank you sir may I have another" is, in many respects, not so great.
I love literature, so it's almost heart-breaking to read that people's life-changing books are The Hobbit, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or, saddest of all, something by Ayn Rand. If The Hobbit is your life-changing book, take a look at your life. Is your primary sexual relationship between you and your computer monitor? Seriously, it's a good book, but it's high-fantasy and intentionally denies all aspects of modernity and contemporary human society. Maybe some Dickens? Like David Copperfield? If you're reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or that author one-step lower on the thought-chain, Richard Bach, maybe you could read some actual Buddhism or actual Presocratic thought? Thich Nhat Hanh has several books laying out the foundations of Buddhist thought, and wouldn't be bad. And any collection of the Presocratics would probably blow your mind. Parmenides, especially, is a hoot. Ayn Rand. Dear lord. Go ask the Wizard for a heart. And maybe a brain. Or you could, if you want to be open-minded and see if there's anything worthwhile in the idea of mutual obligation, you could read some John Rawls. Or, if you're not ready to go that far, you could try Schopenhauer, at least he has the grace to be honest about his occasional misanthropy and doesn't try to base an "ethical" system on it.
Your poll numbers are nonexistent. Your donations don't meet the minimum. Sure, I'd like to hear you. But they have rules because they need to keep their little sideshow confined to a reasonable number of contestants. If they accede to your demand to be included, they'll also have to include Mr. Spock and Pope Moonbat. Which, let's be honest, is the crowd they think you're in if you're not at the trough like the rest of them. ----- And to those who kvetch about the appropriateness of this topic to Slashdot: let me remind you that libertarianism is the preferred political philosophy of Slashdot. No other set of political theories has the magical combination of marijuana legalization, appeals to uncomplicated meritocracy, and pugnacious antiauthoritarian individualism that libertarianism brings neckbeards nation-wide. (Granted, gimme-gimme, info-wants-to-sleep-with-me anarchism runs a close second.)
I think we have a different idea about the "spirit" of the game. No one reads the part of Adam Smith that talks about obligations, and few people give more than lip service to societal obligations. So, to me, the "spirit" or "invisible hand" of capitalism is flipping society the bird. That is Ayn Rand is more representative of the capitalist ethos than is Smith.
From what I understand, such practices are completely in the spirit of the free market. These traders have created and exploited an advantage for profit. There is not altruistic component of capitalism that demands "contributing something back."
No, HFTs certainly skim off the top of genuine traders and investors. If they were just transferring money from each other, the practice would never have become so pervasive.
They do it by spending millions on computers, programmers, interconnects, and physical proximity and connectivity to exchanges. This gives them a fundamental and practically (for a small time player) unbeatable advantage over other users of the system, which is
What they are doing is consuming the service to the detriment of other users, and extracting a tax with their unfair advantage over other users, while contributing exactly nothing back.
There are legitimate reasons that high-speed rail won't work in the U.S.. I say this as someone who LOVES high-speed rail when I'm in Europe. But the U.S. is bigger, cities are farther apart, and we have far more autos already. It is often cheaper and more convenient to drive. That's hard to beat. It's also very difficult to find economically feasible routes to create. And to create such routes would require tremendous investments in infrastructure overhaul/creation. And to cap it off, we have a relatively cheap air transport system in place. It's a tough situation. Again, I'd love to see high speed or even moderate speed rail. But. Say there was a moderate-speed train to Atlanta, a trip my family takes a few times a year, three or four hours by car. It would be very unlikely that this would economically better for us. There already exists an extremely cheap bus system, $10 a person to ATL. But gas is cheaper. And even if it weren't, we'd be dropped in a city that has a workable but not great public transport system, so that getting around for a day's recreation, we'd lose hours of time and spend even more money. That's what you're up against in the U.S.: the whole transportation system is designed around cars, and it works well enough that there's a big performance gap between the auto-focused system and a system of public transport that would be economically viable and convenient enough to get people to use it. So we're in a situation where someone like me, who used to be in the Green party when I had one to be in, will drive instead of use mass-transit, simply because it would probably cost me $75 more for a day's travel and would take prohibitive amounts of time, at least for the typical day we spend in ATL now and then.
I lived in that area, and these people were in the news every year around August 5th (the Hiroshima anniversary). They and a lot of others gather to protest outside Y-12. You might look for better coverage in the local press, like the Knoxville News Sentinel. The linked article seems to exaggerate a bit, or at least to overstate the situation. At any rate, these people aren't violent, so far, and aren't likely to be, and I doubt they were actually near any "nuclear material," unless you're talking about the radioactive duck shit or "hot frogs on the loose." As to security and problems, well, oh boy. There are some there. Fires. Leaks and the aforementioned radioactive fauna. And then there are the Billy Bob Bubba approaches to security. And there's stuff that has gone on, at least according to hearsay that is more serious and that doesn't get covered, things like people watching the place and following the shipping trucks around.
Not really. That trio is there every year around August 5th. They are well-known to everyone in the area and to the security staff. I'd say the risk of discharging a firearm would be greater than the risk of a bomb being in the bag. And then there's a whole other sort of fall-out from shooting a nun.
There are a few studies out showing that bicycle helmets make injuries more frequent and, under some circumstances, worse. The increase in injuries is supposedly because the helmet makes your "head" larger and more likely to strike something. the increase in severity occurs at some speeds and is because the greater size of your "head" with a helmet means greater rotational energies are applied to your neck.
That's a very unfair characterization of Roth's actions. He employed two graduate students, one from China and then one from Iran. He had the Chinese student send him a file while he, Roth, was in China, at a Chinese professor's e-mail address. The material in the file was deemed sensitive, as was the research. I think the professor ended up in prison primarily because he didn't understand that the FBI didn't appreciate him speaking with the professorial authority, like Moses from the mountain, that he was accustomed to use in his lab and within his field of study. but he did not hire spies, at least knowingly, not that anyone knows. And, I'll just drop this in: If I were a professor in the sciences I can imagine that I might want to employ non-American grad. students. I worked with and was friends with grad. students in the STEM fields, and there were a lot of "foreign" ones, and many of those foreign ones were much harder working than the American ones, many of whom seemed to think that grad. school was just more undergrad. school.
Acrobat Pro will straighten text as it OCRs, and it tends to be sufficiently accurate. It also will blow thru just about all of the ways a PDF can be locked. I think I've only had to turn to another piece of software once or twice since I've been using PDFs for research. I think most academic/research PDF peddlers just flip some "don't modify me" bit, which Acrobat Pro can undo.
OTOH, I just plug up an iPod Touch, and it syncs perfectly. Upon moving to Android for a phone, it took me a while to find an app that wasn't full of myspace-esque glimmering gimmicks like some 80s boombox; after that it was manually managing files in a folder, which is simple but tedious. That was until I found doubleTwist, which made the Android simple and one-click like the iPhone/iPod Touch. Either iTunes must be really horrible on Windows, or it's because people just have to have their media files all over the drive. And, I know that last one gets a lot of hate: evil Apple oppresses me because it wants my files in one place!!! Well, a) there's an option to not do that, and b) why aren't you also complaining about apps like calibre that do the same thing? And, yes, iTunes wants one library. The model for MacOS is based on individual users that log in, like most modern OSs. So, well, they expect you to do that with iTunes too. And, frankly, it's trivial to get around that with a beginner-level hack (if I can do it, anyone can), or you can buy some $10 piece of shareware to do it for you. No bigs. Sure, Apple stuff is locked down. But not as badly as some say.
I wish I had mod points today. Paglia writes in my field, more or less, and I read her first two or three books, which were/are bullshit, but which impacted me a lot back when I was young and dumb. Anyway, yes, based on the reviews of this current book, it's an extended troll aimed at the art world. So, oddly, enough she's more or less on the same page of the people here pulling the smarter-than-thou/well-actually schtick.
Paglia is not an art critic and wouldn't like to be called one. The, which is basically an extended troll aimed at the art world, attacks art critics in particular for creating an elitist, decadent art scene. (It's so easy to go Godwin on her claim that I'll leave it to someone else.)
I'm grateful for the clarification about your opinion of me, but I'm confused by the first sentence. How exactly is the situational nature of what might be said relevant to my post, which didn't address situations but only the original blanket statement that hate speech is protected?
Hate speech is protected, but exclusions are made for "fighting words" that intended to incite or inflict injury. So, yes, hate speech is protected but the speech intended to incite violence or cause emotional harm is not. And, yes, those are gray areas, which is what the judiciary is for.
As a teacher, I'd like to say that this method really, really worked for me at a major midwestern university. Then I moved to the South and tried the same method; it did not work. I'm not saying it's a regional difference, perhaps just admissions policies. But I'm at a second Southern university now, and I'm surprised students even wipe themselves, as they'll do little else if they don't receive a grade for it. Maybe this teacher works with similar students, ones for whom only high-stakes grading is sufficient motivation to lift a finger. (Can you tell I just had to sit thru a long faculty meeting? I'm pissy as all get-out.)
I'll make this issue more puzzling by pointing out how, in the US, many systems are cheating on students' test results because of the high stakes instituted by No Child Left Behind. I know that Atlanta and Montgomery, AL, schools have recently been busted because administrators were changing test results. And, in Montgomery, making extreme changes, say like a 7 on a skills test being changed to a 70. Likely the situation is worse in Southern states, where education funding problems are often worse. But I strongly suspect that the US is no longer gathering credible data in many districts nation-wide.
I concur. I often find myself resisting the urge to make cat-calls at attractive women. It's hard for me not to run over and grab their seductive boobies. It is not enough for me to just shut my eyes or stay home. So I think we should level the playing field by making all attractive women wear full-length burlap sacks. Of course that may be unfair to women, so maybe it would be better if all men were chemically castrated instead. That seems fair.
I'll match your anecdote with another. I worked in a natural history museum where we had a Christian nut who harassed one of our Jewish employees constantly, putting Jews for Jesus tracts in her box, giving her Christmas cards, telling her Jesus loves her, etc. It doesn't sound so bad, but it was unrelenting and drove the Jewish woman to tears quite often. Sadly no one had the guts to can the Christian lady. She eventually converted one of my co-workers, turning a perfectly good astronomer into someone who proclaimed that various laws of physics were impious deceptions thrust upon us by Satan. So, now, there's my anecdote, canceling yours out, unless of course I'm just making this up to persecute all the poor long-suffering Christians in the world.
And that Milton quote is just dripping with irony, given his politics. Milton was like many of us, he wanted freedom for himself but was happy to set that and freedom for others aside when it came to the Cromwell government.
Fisting without lube is painful.
The motivations for many of Stalin's purges were political, realpolitik more than ideology or dogma. There's even some evidence that his purge of Jewish communists was motivated by political rather than antisemitic reasons (at least not his own personal antisemitism, which I don't doubt existed). Rather, it's possible that he purged Jewish communist leaders as a prelude to his pact with Hitler. And, yes, Christianity in quite a few cases supported fascism, in Italy, German, Romania, it certainly did.
Oh that's a complete crock. My father-in-law ran a research lab for one of the world's largest electronics companies. He supervised people who won international awards for their work. They did a lot of research sitting in vineyards drinking wine, smoking, and chatting. Sure, they worked long hours too, especially at crunch times. But leisure is key to creativity. And they ate well and exercised, having cycling and skiing teams they belonged to (and still belong to as retirees). And they were all men in single-income families who were cared for intensely by their wives. They were pampered, fed, rested, exercised like thoroughbreds because that's what they were. (Not to mention Nobel winners.) In my field I have worked with internationally renowned literature scholars, people who crank out books like mad, win big grants, lecture around the globe. They work hard, but they also take care of themselves, taking breaks, eating right, exercising, etc. --- This talk of round-the-clock work, with no time for exercise, for family, it's not something I've heard from really successful people. Yes, there's crunch time, and yes, you have to work, but this "Work work and smile! Arbeit macht frei!" is the mantra of a drone or a future burnout.
Amen. I am at this moment engaged in a possible move from academia into contracting for the military. Pretty much the same work, but the pay is about double. Go military!
A typical work week for me, an English professor, is 50-60 hours, mostly grading papers. That's during the period August-May. In June and July I typically run an honest 30 hours a week. Every three years or so I take a month off in the summer to visit relatives. My monthly income is $3000, after medical and all that is taken out. I should deduct from that about $400 a month for student loan repayment, and I should be making about the same amount in retirement contributions, but I can't afford it. Anyway, the salary is just under $50k/yr. I imagine a physics prof isn't too far off of that, though humanities people are cheaper because more common. Just go to any coffee shop, you'll find one behind the register! --- It is typical in my field to expect graduate students to teach three classes a year, attend three classes a semester, and write 30-60 pages of well-researched material a semester, typically while reading a book a week per course. (Where book can mean Kant's Critique of Judgment, some hefty Modernist tome, or a collection of Medieval manuscripts with associated criticism. Not lite reading at all.) And they're often doing this while trying to get by on $1,000 a month, which in itself is time-consuming, because you have to spend so much time shopping, fixing, cooking, etc. A lot of make-and-mend. --- Anyway, my rambling point is that grad. school is a bitch, and a bit of a hazing. Especially as you have all these old farts saying "Back in my day I lived on $100 a month and walked uphill both ways, blah blah blah." (Yeah, buddy, mastodon meat was only a nickel a pound.) And the pay-off, if you're a professor, of getting thru all the "thank you sir may I have another" is, in many respects, not so great.
I love literature, so it's almost heart-breaking to read that people's life-changing books are The Hobbit, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or, saddest of all, something by Ayn Rand. If The Hobbit is your life-changing book, take a look at your life. Is your primary sexual relationship between you and your computer monitor? Seriously, it's a good book, but it's high-fantasy and intentionally denies all aspects of modernity and contemporary human society. Maybe some Dickens? Like David Copperfield? If you're reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or that author one-step lower on the thought-chain, Richard Bach, maybe you could read some actual Buddhism or actual Presocratic thought? Thich Nhat Hanh has several books laying out the foundations of Buddhist thought, and wouldn't be bad. And any collection of the Presocratics would probably blow your mind. Parmenides, especially, is a hoot. Ayn Rand. Dear lord. Go ask the Wizard for a heart. And maybe a brain. Or you could, if you want to be open-minded and see if there's anything worthwhile in the idea of mutual obligation, you could read some John Rawls. Or, if you're not ready to go that far, you could try Schopenhauer, at least he has the grace to be honest about his occasional misanthropy and doesn't try to base an "ethical" system on it.
Your poll numbers are nonexistent. Your donations don't meet the minimum. Sure, I'd like to hear you. But they have rules because they need to keep their little sideshow confined to a reasonable number of contestants. If they accede to your demand to be included, they'll also have to include Mr. Spock and Pope Moonbat. Which, let's be honest, is the crowd they think you're in if you're not at the trough like the rest of them. ----- And to those who kvetch about the appropriateness of this topic to Slashdot: let me remind you that libertarianism is the preferred political philosophy of Slashdot. No other set of political theories has the magical combination of marijuana legalization, appeals to uncomplicated meritocracy, and pugnacious antiauthoritarian individualism that libertarianism brings neckbeards nation-wide. (Granted, gimme-gimme, info-wants-to-sleep-with-me anarchism runs a close second.)
I think we have a different idea about the "spirit" of the game. No one reads the part of Adam Smith that talks about obligations, and few people give more than lip service to societal obligations. So, to me, the "spirit" or "invisible hand" of capitalism is flipping society the bird. That is Ayn Rand is more representative of the capitalist ethos than is Smith.
No, HFTs certainly skim off the top of genuine traders and investors. If they were just transferring money from each other, the practice would never have become so pervasive.
They do it by spending millions on computers, programmers, interconnects, and physical proximity and connectivity to exchanges. This gives them a fundamental and practically (for a small time player) unbeatable advantage over other users of the system, which is
What they are doing is consuming the service to the detriment of other users, and extracting a tax with their unfair advantage over other users, while contributing exactly nothing back.
There are legitimate reasons that high-speed rail won't work in the U.S.. I say this as someone who LOVES high-speed rail when I'm in Europe. But the U.S. is bigger, cities are farther apart, and we have far more autos already. It is often cheaper and more convenient to drive. That's hard to beat. It's also very difficult to find economically feasible routes to create. And to create such routes would require tremendous investments in infrastructure overhaul/creation. And to cap it off, we have a relatively cheap air transport system in place. It's a tough situation. Again, I'd love to see high speed or even moderate speed rail. But. Say there was a moderate-speed train to Atlanta, a trip my family takes a few times a year, three or four hours by car. It would be very unlikely that this would economically better for us. There already exists an extremely cheap bus system, $10 a person to ATL. But gas is cheaper. And even if it weren't, we'd be dropped in a city that has a workable but not great public transport system, so that getting around for a day's recreation, we'd lose hours of time and spend even more money. That's what you're up against in the U.S.: the whole transportation system is designed around cars, and it works well enough that there's a big performance gap between the auto-focused system and a system of public transport that would be economically viable and convenient enough to get people to use it. So we're in a situation where someone like me, who used to be in the Green party when I had one to be in, will drive instead of use mass-transit, simply because it would probably cost me $75 more for a day's travel and would take prohibitive amounts of time, at least for the typical day we spend in ATL now and then.
I lived in that area, and these people were in the news every year around August 5th (the Hiroshima anniversary). They and a lot of others gather to protest outside Y-12. You might look for better coverage in the local press, like the Knoxville News Sentinel. The linked article seems to exaggerate a bit, or at least to overstate the situation. At any rate, these people aren't violent, so far, and aren't likely to be, and I doubt they were actually near any "nuclear material," unless you're talking about the radioactive duck shit or "hot frogs on the loose." As to security and problems, well, oh boy. There are some there. Fires. Leaks and the aforementioned radioactive fauna. And then there are the Billy Bob Bubba approaches to security. And there's stuff that has gone on, at least according to hearsay that is more serious and that doesn't get covered, things like people watching the place and following the shipping trucks around.
Not really. That trio is there every year around August 5th. They are well-known to everyone in the area and to the security staff. I'd say the risk of discharging a firearm would be greater than the risk of a bomb being in the bag. And then there's a whole other sort of fall-out from shooting a nun.
There are a few studies out showing that bicycle helmets make injuries more frequent and, under some circumstances, worse. The increase in injuries is supposedly because the helmet makes your "head" larger and more likely to strike something. the increase in severity occurs at some speeds and is because the greater size of your "head" with a helmet means greater rotational energies are applied to your neck.