It is probaably wise of India to reject spending $100,000,000 of their own money on laptops for children. India really doesn't have that kind of money and has many more pressing social needs, particularly in the field of health care.
India also varies in income from some of the poorest areas on earth to quite modern and industrialized areas filled with software engineers. One laptop per child probably wouldn't make sense for either the richest Indians or the poorest.
What might make sense for India is a far more limited program of purchasing laptops and training on how to use them for teachers in poor rural areas. This could give the teachers greater access to information and materials for the students.
There are other countries in which the laptop program might make more sense. Developing countries with some amount of money and some degree of public services might be the most appropriate. Vacinations and antibiotics are more important to a child's well-being than laptops and if a country is too poor to afford the most basic medicine for children than spending $100 per laptop is not the best use of money. Chile, Thailand, and Morocco are some potential countries that come to mind.
Folks this is coming from Fox News' science department. I wasn't aware Fox News had a science department and after reading the story I am still unaware of any reporting on science by Fox News.
Snakes being a major force in the evolution of mammals including humans? I want to see some pretty strong evidence first.
Reading the other comments I don't think posters have a good understanding of the failings of public education in the US.
I went to the public school in a smaller college town and I have taught in an inner-city public school.
As a policy matter the US politically treats the failings of public education in isolation without addressing root causes. This is very foolish and has not worked well for at least two decades of reform of public education efforts.
The biggest problem in US public education is poverty of the parents and students because poverty causes other problems such as lack of health care and instability in children's lives.
Children really, really need stability in their lives to develop well. Children also need a lot of steady stable individual attention from caring adults. If parents are moving frequently (lack of affordable housing), getting divorced, losing their jobs, working three jobs, or going to jail the impact on their children is horrible.
Poor people in the US lose their jobs frequently, and have to move due to lack of affordable housing frequently. Poor people also are more likely to get convicted and go to jail for their crimes (steal a pizza go to jail, embezzle $20,000 from the company get probation if ever prosecuted at all). Poor people also often have all of the adult family members working sometimes multiple jobs leaving little time for child care/attention.
Children also need health care. Lack of health care is still a huge problem for many lower income families. It is not atypical for a poor kid to stay home from school for a week because s/he has pink eye and the parents cannot afford prescription eye drops. Also, the general level of health care and healthiness of a family is important. Nagging health problems anywhere in the family are very disruptive to children's lives.
The problem of children moving frequently is particularly pronounced in poor urban areas. In rural and some suburban areas there is more lower class homeownership and housing is much less expensive. One of the worst possible things for a child's education is to move the kid during the school year. Children need stable environments and it is hard to describe the dire psychological toll that leaving in the middle of the school year has on kids. Even moving a child from school to school every few years is very bad.
The American criminal justice system does not help education at all. The goal of the system is to lock people up and hence the US has about the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. Locking people up, especially for minor offenses such as drug possession, breaks up families. (It also creates a pool in which more serious criminals teach minor criminals how to be worse.) Taking a parent away and sending them to jail is generally horrible for children. Over a million children presently have an incarcerated parent in the US, I believe.
The violence in public schools is often a reflection of the violence in children's lives. It does not happen in isolation. There are a lot of sources of violence in children's lives from the society. Domestic violence is a big one. Drug crime is another factor. The mass media's (RIAA, MPAA) use of violence instead of substance in their content is probably a factor, although not as big as say domestic violence.
The present US solution to failing schools is testing. Lots of testing will measure things and then we'll really know the children are doing poorly and maybe we can hold some more of them back and fiddle with the curriculum. Obviously testing does not address any root causes of the difficulties that children have.
THE SOLUTION IS TO ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSES OF CHILDREN'S PROBLEMS. Universal health care would substantially improve public education in the US. It wouldn't have much impact on private education though as almost all of those who can afford private education can afford health care. Increasing wages for low income workers an
Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.
Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.
III. "Intercept" means the aural or other acquisition of, or the recording of, the contents of any telecommunication or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device.
First, I am not a lawyer. I am a law student and this analysis may not be correct and should not be relied on for anything whatsoever!
There are at least two interesting legal questions here. First, is this arrest based on the facts available a proper application of the statute? Second, is this application of the statute Constitutional?
The part of the statute that I think the police were attempting to use is... I. A person is guilty of a class B felony if, except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter or without the consent of all parties to the communication, the person:
(a) Wilfully intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any telecommunication or oral communication;
This translates roughly to you are guilty if without everyone's permission you record telecommunication or oral communication. For the purpose of a guy recording something the video is not a problem here, but the audio could be.
I would speculate that the police are accusing the NH man of recording audio (oral communication) of a police officer without the officer's consent. The NH man asserts that he made the police officer aware of the recording. The police don't necessarily agree with that. This is a question of fact that the courts get to sort out. If the officer was aware of the recording and continued to converse he would have assented to the recording. See State v. Lott, 152 N.H. 436. If the officer assented to the recording there is no violation of the law.
Without addressing the constitutional issues, there is a law here against audio recording of persons without consent of all parties and the police are theoretically attempting to enforce that law on the premise that the officer who was recorded did not consent.
Now is this application of the law constitutional?
I will assume that this interaction between the family members and the police took place on the door stoop, and not inside the home.
For purposes of seeing things and hearing things one's door stoop is normally a public, not private, place.
People have a First Amendment right to witness and record by videotape police activity in public. Does this particular application of the First Amendment extend to audiotape of a conversation with a police officer in public (door stoop)?
However, there is also a question of a reasonable expectation of privacy that a person has in his or her conversation. This comes up more frequently in cases involving the federal wiretapping statute that is similar to New Hampshire's, but perhaps not quite as broad. 18 USCS 2510.
The Ninth Circuit (out west and not controlling in NH) has dealt with these situations some. One case involved the videotaping of a police chief speaking over police radio in a park. Johnson v. Hawe, 388 F.3d 676 The state court ultimately found that the police chief was not covered by Washington State's Privacy Act.
Some cases have held that remarks made in a store and captured on videotape do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. See Commonwealth v. Rivera, 445 Mass. 119, 129 (Mass. 2005). The US Supreme Court held that a person does "not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in areas of the store where the public was invited to enter and to transact business." Maryland v. Macon, 472 U.S. 463, 470 (U.S. 1985).
However, a door stoop is not a store. A door stoop is a public place generally, but does one have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a conversation on a door stoop? This is what this case would turn on if it were under federal wiretap law. This could depend on how far the door stoop was from the street or sidewalk. If someone could have walked along the sidewalk and heard the conversation it is unlikely that the conversants on the stoop had a reasonable expectation of
AIDS is destroying Africa and devastating other countries as well. Even in the richest nations such as the United States AIDS is a huge public health problem.
Money spent on AIDS research is money well spent. AIDS drugs (from AIDS research) have done much to help people living with HIV continue to live normal or less-painful lives for many years. Drugs also have dramatically cut the transmission rate at birth (mother-child).
Africa in particular has been damaged in terms of economics, stability, and security by the AIDS epidemic. Here is a site with AIDS rates in the adult population in Africa. Notice that for 15-49 year olds the sub-Sahara infection rate is estimated at 8.4%! Some countries have infection rates of over 20% such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Life expectancy at birth in some countries has dropped below 40 years!
A major reason other countries do not now have such high infection rates is large, expensive national programs have been established to prevent the spread of AIDS. Here is some information about the Caribbean where some nations have managed to dramatically reduce HIV transmission rates by the use of new drugs. Cuba, which has a large public health apparatus, is notable in its success against HIV/AIDS.
A big reason no major companies like GE are thinking about mining asteroids is it does not make commercial sense right now, at all. The economics do not work.
It is very expensive to send stuff into low-earth-orbit. It is substantially more expensive to send stuff into geosynchronus higher orbits. Getting to an asteroid and then getting back is unbelievably expensive. It is not clear that there are any substances or elements in existence used on a large scale (large demand) that would be worth a trip to an asteroid and back with cargo. If an asteroid in the asteroid belt was made of pure platinum that might not even be worth it.
30 years from now with commercial space ventures steadily lowering the cost of space travel, companies may reexamine the economics of asteroid mining. Mining Mars would be cheaper (due in part to homegrown return fuel of methane) and would probably come before asteroids, but don't expect that any time soon either.
First, I am not a lawyer. (I'm a law student.)
As Jamie alludes to what we are probably dealing with is the NSA collecting pen-register information on everyone and everything it can get its hands on, apparently from Verison, ATT, and BellSouth. This is an enormous amount of information. Pen-register information is basically what number you are calling from and what number you are calling to, I believe. Prosecutors do not need a warrant generally or have any level of suspicion to collect a wide range of information including pen-register information, the address information on the envelope of all of your mail, bank, utility, credit card, and other spending records. This sounds a bit crazy (and I think it is), but the legal theory is that this is all information that a person has turned over to a third party (phone company, USPS, credit card company, bank etc) and because a person exposed this to a third party it is not protect by an expectation of privacy and thus the government does not need a warrrant and does not violate the 4th Amendment protection against searches and seizures by collection this non-private information.
In theory the NSA is just collecting information that prosecutors already can collect en mass. There may be some restrictions in federal statutes as to how much of this bulk collection the FBI or the NSA can do.
Assemblyman Peter J. Biondi, what are you thinking?! This law is unconstitutional! In fact, it is really blatantly unconstitutional. Other posters (orthogonal) have articulated well why this law is plainly unconstitutional. To put it simply anonymous speech is strongly protected by the 14th and 1st Amendments to the US Constitution. In 1960 is one Supreme Court case (Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960)) that made it abundantly clear.
For those who are unfamiliar with the US Federal system, a state such as New Jersey cannot have laws that conflict with federal (US) laws or the US Constitution. (See Marbury v. Madison in 1803.) When a state does pass a law that conflicts with the US Constitution or Federal laws that law must first be challenged by a regular person in court and then a court may rule the law is unconstitutional. I am skipping a ton of details here, but that is the general idea. This law if passed would not survive.
P.S. I am not a lawyer.
P.P.S. I strongly doubt the governor of New Jersey would sign this bill in the unlikely event it makes it through the state legislature.
Nuclear power based on fission has long seemed like a very good idea and has been put to use in many power plants around the world. On paper it looks like a good alternative with just the substantial problem of nuclear waste.
The problem is the factor of Human Fallibility.
If people always ran nuclear plants in a non-negligant manner things would work out okay. Proponents of nuclear power (industry in particular) assume that nuclear plants will be run in a non-negligant manner. The problem is that is not how it works out in reality. In reality Homer Simpson is at the controls. Well, not Homer, but there is a lot of negligence. The results of negligence in nuclear power plants is very bad. It is not just Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, but more recent accidents in Japan. Experience shows us that nuclear power plants will not be running perfectly. There will be at least some negligence. What happens when there is negligence in a nuclear power plant? Well the danger can be extremely great and this is the problem. There is negligence and the danger resulting from that negligence is potentially enormous (Kaboom). That is why nuclear (fission) power is really a bad idea.
I attended a recent speech by Attorney General Gonzales on the NSA's domestic spying program. This speech was to outline the legal justification for the domestic spying by the Bush administration. The speech started and ended with fear mongering. Fear, 9/11, and the/inevitable/ next attach were major parts of the speech. In between all of this fear was an incredibly weak legal argument. The skimpy legal argument (had to make room for all of the fear) had two parts. First, the President is commander-in-chief and during wartime has limitless authority over war-matters and anything vaguely related to war is at his dictatorial discretion. Second the force authorizing resolution allowing the President to invade Afghanistan passed just after 9/11 gives the President maximum authority to do whatever he sees fit as long as he considers the US at war. I am not a lawyer, but these arguments totally fail on a simple reading of the Constitution. The Constitution provides for Congress to have equal if not greater power than the President and the Congress has legislative power (make laws on things like spying as it has done repeatedly) and discretion over war matters as well (start and end war and fund and mobilize troops).
Even though the Bush administration is on a PR offensive around the spying, Americans are not going to buy into it. The more people learn about domestic spying the less they are going to like it. Right now Americans are just beginning to learn.
Racism and sexism remain problems in hiring in IT as well as other fields in the US. I have personally observed racism and sexism in hiring both in the US and abroad. The dot-com era seemed to have particular discrimination as people with little experience who physically looked like an IT stereotype got the job (highly qualified candidates being generally lacking). This hurt women and some people of color.
Overall racism in hiring practices is substantially less of a problem in the US than most other countries in the world. In the US, it is commonly accepted that racism is bad. Period. Most people know that there are at least a few racists out there and condem their actions. People who do overtly racist things such as say they won't hire non-whites are looked down on. In much of Europe racism in hiring is very common and even fairly overt. This is a good article about racism in hiring in France in the Washington Post.
I don't know about some of this. I'm not sure that pre-humans were other animals dinner that often. It is important to recognize though that this pre-human of 2M years ago is basically an ape. Chimpanzees and Gorillas are probably better to compare this pre-human with than Neanderthals. Big cats probably posed some threat to the pre-humans, but Chimps and Gorillas don't face much by way of natural predators. These and other large apes are strong, social, and well organized. They can gang up on predators and coordinate defense effectively.
English has the largest vocabulary of any language hence it is the language to use in solving these puzzles. To solve the puzzle it would seem all one needs is a really large English dictionary file, a program to solve as a couple of posters have mentioned, and a good bit of computing power or a lot of time.
small number of offspring usually 5 is the limit before major health problems insure.
This is inaccurate. While human birth presents more danger to the mother than most species it is actually the first birth that is by far the most difficult on average. Having more babies because somewhat easier for women with successive births.
In terms of evolution and intelligence, expanding intelligence allowed people to work together and communicate in more complex ways. Smart animals such as dolphins, whales, and monkeys have some of the most complex social interactions. They also act in concert more creatively. An example of this is chimpanzees murderous hunting expeditions where they go out and kill enemy chimapzees.
You should read The Case For Mars. There is a ton that can be done on a longer time period Mars manned mission. Real exploration of a planet more like Lewis and Clark or a polar explorer. If you are just going to stay on the planet a week, then a robot can do many of the same things. Going to Mars would only cost about $30B with the Mars Direct plan. We should do that instead of going to the moon.
The prediction of 20+ years to go to Mars is inaccurate and misleading. We have the technology to go to Mars in place and it would only take 8-10 years of work for a total cost of under $30B. Recent European Space Agency Estimates of the cost to go to Mars using Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan ran about $27B. For more about the Mars Direct plan see the Mars Society.
Though simply put this is very true. We (US gov't, any other gov't, humanity in general) should not be spending billions to land more robotic rovers on Mars unless they lead directly to a human mission to Mars in the near future. See Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars. A human mission to Mars would cost about $20B as Zubrin demonstrates. The amount of scientific research achieved by humans on Mars is exponentially greater than what can be accomplished through robots. The cost is a fraction of what the USA spends on nonfuctional ballistic missile defense and roughly could be fit into NASA's currect budget.
This is quite true and very important. Most other countries in the world would already be facing economic ruin in they had the relative debt that the US has. The rest of the world trusts us to continue to be able to pay out interest. In particular Japan and China with which the US is running huge trade deficits, is buying into the trust in the US ability to pay interest. This is accomplished by purchasing US Treasury bonds.
"If the debt reaches a level where the US cannot make an interest payment, there will be serious repercussions in the world economy. A depression worse than any previous is a likely outcome of that situation."
That's the case and that is the road that the US is headed on right now with massive amounts of new deficit spending under Bush.
>Wow, that starting salary must be appreciated by all 5 graduates who were able to find jobs.
This is dead-on. For the few people graduating from college in 2001 2002 2003 who found jobs in their tech field and weren't quickly laid-off they probably did okay. From what I heard from my fellow Columbia U graduates of recent years most were not finding jobs in their field. I doubt a CS major working as a substitute teacher counts on this salary survey, but that is what I did for a while.
This is highly inaccurate. Many teachers unions are fighting for higher wages for starting teachers in particular. This is the case in NYC where starting teachers earned about $31,500 two years ago and now get around $38,000. Management of schools (often Board of Ed) try to keep starting teacher wages in particular down so when they need a few more teachers they can hire new teachers on the cheap or when they need to cut costs they offer senior teachers buyout packages and replace them with cheap new teachers. Further unions want more members and want to raise starting wages to bring in more teachers. NYC was unable to attract enough ceritified teachers because the wages were so low (for NYC cost of living in particular). This meant less union members, which the union doesn't want and larger class sizes, which the union doesn't want.
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It is probaably wise of India to reject spending $100,000,000 of their own money on laptops for children. India really doesn't have that kind of money and has many more pressing social needs, particularly in the field of health care.
India also varies in income from some of the poorest areas on earth to quite modern and industrialized areas filled with software engineers. One laptop per child probably wouldn't make sense for either the richest Indians or the poorest.
What might make sense for India is a far more limited program of purchasing laptops and training on how to use them for teachers in poor rural areas. This could give the teachers greater access to information and materials for the students.
There are other countries in which the laptop program might make more sense. Developing countries with some amount of money and some degree of public services might be the most appropriate. Vacinations and antibiotics are more important to a child's well-being than laptops and if a country is too poor to afford the most basic medicine for children than spending $100 per laptop is not the best use of money. Chile, Thailand, and Morocco are some potential countries that come to mind.
Folks this is coming from Fox News' science department. I wasn't aware Fox News had a science department and after reading the story I am still unaware of any reporting on science by Fox News.
Snakes being a major force in the evolution of mammals including humans? I want to see some pretty strong evidence first.
Reading the other comments I don't think posters have a good understanding of the failings of public education in the US.
I went to the public school in a smaller college town and I have taught in an inner-city public school.
As a policy matter the US politically treats the failings of public education in isolation without addressing root causes. This is very foolish and has not worked well for at least two decades of reform of public education efforts.
The biggest problem in US public education is poverty of the parents and students because poverty causes other problems such as lack of health care and instability in children's lives.
Children really, really need stability in their lives to develop well. Children also need a lot of steady stable individual attention from caring adults. If parents are moving frequently (lack of affordable housing), getting divorced, losing their jobs, working three jobs, or going to jail the impact on their children is horrible.
Poor people in the US lose their jobs frequently, and have to move due to lack of affordable housing frequently. Poor people also are more likely to get convicted and go to jail for their crimes (steal a pizza go to jail, embezzle $20,000 from the company get probation if ever prosecuted at all). Poor people also often have all of the adult family members working sometimes multiple jobs leaving little time for child care/attention.
Children also need health care. Lack of health care is still a huge problem for many lower income families. It is not atypical for a poor kid to stay home from school for a week because s/he has pink eye and the parents cannot afford prescription eye drops. Also, the general level of health care and healthiness of a family is important. Nagging health problems anywhere in the family are very disruptive to children's lives.
The problem of children moving frequently is particularly pronounced in poor urban areas. In rural and some suburban areas there is more lower class homeownership and housing is much less expensive. One of the worst possible things for a child's education is to move the kid during the school year. Children need stable environments and it is hard to describe the dire psychological toll that leaving in the middle of the school year has on kids. Even moving a child from school to school every few years is very bad.
The American criminal justice system does not help education at all. The goal of the system is to lock people up and hence the US has about the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. Locking people up, especially for minor offenses such as drug possession, breaks up families. (It also creates a pool in which more serious criminals teach minor criminals how to be worse.) Taking a parent away and sending them to jail is generally horrible for children. Over a million children presently have an incarcerated parent in the US, I believe.
The violence in public schools is often a reflection of the violence in children's lives. It does not happen in isolation. There are a lot of sources of violence in children's lives from the society. Domestic violence is a big one. Drug crime is another factor. The mass media's (RIAA, MPAA) use of violence instead of substance in their content is probably a factor, although not as big as say domestic violence.
The present US solution to failing schools is testing. Lots of testing will measure things and then we'll really know the children are doing poorly and maybe we can hold some more of them back and fiddle with the curriculum. Obviously testing does not address any root causes of the difficulties that children have.
THE SOLUTION IS TO ADDRESS THE ROOT CAUSES OF CHILDREN'S PROBLEMS. Universal health care would substantially improve public education in the US. It wouldn't have much impact on private education though as almost all of those who can afford private education can afford health care. Increasing wages for low income workers an
Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.
Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.
I think your understanding of the usage of intercept is incorrect. Intercept does not imply a third party in this context.
Here is the definitions section of the statute in question.
III. "Intercept" means the aural or other acquisition of, or the recording of, the contents of any telecommunication or oral communication through the use of any electronic, mechanical, or other device.
The statute in question.
First, I am not a lawyer. I am a law student and this analysis may not be correct and should not be relied on for anything whatsoever!
There are at least two interesting legal questions here. First, is this arrest based on the facts available a proper application of the statute? Second, is this application of the statute Constitutional?
The part of the statute that I think the police were attempting to use is...
I. A person is guilty of a class B felony if, except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter or without the consent of all parties to the communication, the person:
(a) Wilfully intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any telecommunication or oral communication;
This translates roughly to you are guilty if without everyone's permission you record telecommunication or oral communication. For the purpose of a guy recording something the video is not a problem here, but the audio could be.
I would speculate that the police are accusing the NH man of recording audio (oral communication) of a police officer without the officer's consent. The NH man asserts that he made the police officer aware of the recording. The police don't necessarily agree with that. This is a question of fact that the courts get to sort out. If the officer was aware of the recording and continued to converse he would have assented to the recording. See State v. Lott, 152 N.H. 436. If the officer assented to the recording there is no violation of the law.
Without addressing the constitutional issues, there is a law here against audio recording of persons without consent of all parties and the police are theoretically attempting to enforce that law on the premise that the officer who was recorded did not consent.
Now is this application of the law constitutional?
I will assume that this interaction between the family members and the police took place on the door stoop, and not inside the home.
For purposes of seeing things and hearing things one's door stoop is normally a public, not private, place.
People have a First Amendment right to witness and record by videotape police activity in public. Does this particular application of the First Amendment extend to audiotape of a conversation with a police officer in public (door stoop)?
However, there is also a question of a reasonable expectation of privacy that a person has in his or her conversation. This comes up more frequently in cases involving the federal wiretapping statute that is similar to New Hampshire's, but perhaps not quite as broad. 18 USCS 2510.
The Ninth Circuit (out west and not controlling in NH) has dealt with these situations some. One case involved the videotaping of a police chief speaking over police radio in a park. Johnson v. Hawe, 388 F.3d 676 The state court ultimately found that the police chief was not covered by Washington State's Privacy Act.
Some cases have held that remarks made in a store and captured on videotape do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. See Commonwealth v. Rivera, 445 Mass. 119, 129 (Mass. 2005). The US Supreme Court held that a person does "not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in areas of the store where the public was invited to enter and to transact business." Maryland v. Macon, 472 U.S. 463, 470 (U.S. 1985).
However, a door stoop is not a store. A door stoop is a public place generally, but does one have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a conversation on a door stoop? This is what this case would turn on if it were under federal wiretap law. This could depend on how far the door stoop was from the street or sidewalk. If someone could have walked along the sidewalk and heard the conversation it is unlikely that the conversants on the stoop had a reasonable expectation of
I too am a law student and not a lawyer. I could be mistaken, but I am pretty sure your analysis of "Person" is incorrect.
to paraphrase... "Person" means any employee of the state, and any individual or corporation or trust or etc.
Individual would be a natural person meaning anybody. It is not tied to corporation.
AIDS is destroying Africa and devastating other countries as well. Even in the richest nations such as the United States AIDS is a huge public health problem.
Money spent on AIDS research is money well spent. AIDS drugs (from AIDS research) have done much to help people living with HIV continue to live normal or less-painful lives for many years. Drugs also have dramatically cut the transmission rate at birth (mother-child).
Africa in particular has been damaged in terms of economics, stability, and security by the AIDS epidemic. Here is a site with AIDS rates in the adult population in Africa. Notice that for 15-49 year olds the sub-Sahara infection rate is estimated at 8.4%! Some countries have infection rates of over 20% such as Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Life expectancy at birth in some countries has dropped below 40 years!
A major reason other countries do not now have such high infection rates is large, expensive national programs have been established to prevent the spread of AIDS. Here is some information about the Caribbean where some nations have managed to dramatically reduce HIV transmission rates by the use of new drugs. Cuba, which has a large public health apparatus, is notable in its success against HIV/AIDS.
A big reason no major companies like GE are thinking about mining asteroids is it does not make commercial sense right now, at all. The economics do not work.
It is very expensive to send stuff into low-earth-orbit. It is substantially more expensive to send stuff into geosynchronus higher orbits. Getting to an asteroid and then getting back is unbelievably expensive. It is not clear that there are any substances or elements in existence used on a large scale (large demand) that would be worth a trip to an asteroid and back with cargo. If an asteroid in the asteroid belt was made of pure platinum that might not even be worth it.
30 years from now with commercial space ventures steadily lowering the cost of space travel, companies may reexamine the economics of asteroid mining. Mining Mars would be cheaper (due in part to homegrown return fuel of methane) and would probably come before asteroids, but don't expect that any time soon either.
First, I am not a lawyer. (I'm a law student.)
As Jamie alludes to what we are probably dealing with is the NSA collecting pen-register information on everyone and everything it can get its hands on, apparently from Verison, ATT, and BellSouth. This is an enormous amount of information. Pen-register information is basically what number you are calling from and what number you are calling to, I believe. Prosecutors do not need a warrant generally or have any level of suspicion to collect a wide range of information including pen-register information, the address information on the envelope of all of your mail, bank, utility, credit card, and other spending records. This sounds a bit crazy (and I think it is), but the legal theory is that this is all information that a person has turned over to a third party (phone company, USPS, credit card company, bank etc) and because a person exposed this to a third party it is not protect by an expectation of privacy and thus the government does not need a warrrant and does not violate the 4th Amendment protection against searches and seizures by collection this non-private information.
In theory the NSA is just collecting information that prosecutors already can collect en mass. There may be some restrictions in federal statutes as to how much of this bulk collection the FBI or the NSA can do.
Assemblyman Peter J. Biondi, what are you thinking?! This law is unconstitutional! In fact, it is really blatantly unconstitutional. Other posters (orthogonal) have articulated well why this law is plainly unconstitutional. To put it simply anonymous speech is strongly protected by the 14th and 1st Amendments to the US Constitution. In 1960 is one Supreme Court case (Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960)) that made it abundantly clear.
For those who are unfamiliar with the US Federal system, a state such as New Jersey cannot have laws that conflict with federal (US) laws or the US Constitution. (See Marbury v. Madison in 1803.) When a state does pass a law that conflicts with the US Constitution or Federal laws that law must first be challenged by a regular person in court and then a court may rule the law is unconstitutional. I am skipping a ton of details here, but that is the general idea. This law if passed would not survive.
P.S. I am not a lawyer.
P.P.S. I strongly doubt the governor of New Jersey would sign this bill in the unlikely event it makes it through the state legislature.
Nuclear power based on fission has long seemed like a very good idea and has been put to use in many power plants around the world. On paper it looks like a good alternative with just the substantial problem of nuclear waste.
The problem is the factor of Human Fallibility.
If people always ran nuclear plants in a non-negligant manner things would work out okay. Proponents of nuclear power (industry in particular) assume that nuclear plants will be run in a non-negligant manner. The problem is that is not how it works out in reality. In reality Homer Simpson is at the controls. Well, not Homer, but there is a lot of negligence. The results of negligence in nuclear power plants is very bad. It is not just Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, but more recent accidents in Japan. Experience shows us that nuclear power plants will not be running perfectly. There will be at least some negligence. What happens when there is negligence in a nuclear power plant? Well the danger can be extremely great and this is the problem. There is negligence and the danger resulting from that negligence is potentially enormous (Kaboom). That is why nuclear (fission) power is really a bad idea.
LOL. Mod the above up!
I attended a recent speech by Attorney General Gonzales on the NSA's domestic spying program. This speech was to outline the legal justification for the domestic spying by the Bush administration. The speech started and ended with fear mongering. Fear, 9/11, and the /inevitable/ next attach were major parts of the speech. In between all of this fear was an incredibly weak legal argument. The skimpy legal argument (had to make room for all of the fear) had two parts. First, the President is commander-in-chief and during wartime has limitless authority over war-matters and anything vaguely related to war is at his dictatorial discretion. Second the force authorizing resolution allowing the President to invade Afghanistan passed just after 9/11 gives the President maximum authority to do whatever he sees fit as long as he considers the US at war. I am not a lawyer, but these arguments totally fail on a simple reading of the Constitution. The Constitution provides for Congress to have equal if not greater power than the President and the Congress has legislative power (make laws on things like spying as it has done repeatedly) and discretion over war matters as well (start and end war and fund and mobilize troops).
Even though the Bush administration is on a PR offensive around the spying, Americans are not going to buy into it. The more people learn about domestic spying the less they are going to like it. Right now Americans are just beginning to learn.
Racism and sexism remain problems in hiring in IT as well as other fields in the US. I have personally observed racism and sexism in hiring both in the US and abroad. The dot-com era seemed to have particular discrimination as people with little experience who physically looked like an IT stereotype got the job (highly qualified candidates being generally lacking). This hurt women and some people of color.
Overall racism in hiring practices is substantially less of a problem in the US than most other countries in the world. In the US, it is commonly accepted that racism is bad. Period. Most people know that there are at least a few racists out there and condem their actions. People who do overtly racist things such as say they won't hire non-whites are looked down on. In much of Europe racism in hiring is very common and even fairly overt. This is a good article about racism in hiring in France in the Washington Post.
I don't know about some of this. I'm not sure that pre-humans were other animals dinner that often. It is important to recognize though that this pre-human of 2M years ago is basically an ape. Chimpanzees and Gorillas are probably better to compare this pre-human with than Neanderthals. Big cats probably posed some threat to the pre-humans, but Chimps and Gorillas don't face much by way of natural predators. These and other large apes are strong, social, and well organized. They can gang up on predators and coordinate defense effectively.
English has the largest vocabulary of any language hence it is the language to use in solving these puzzles. To solve the puzzle it would seem all one needs is a really large English dictionary file, a program to solve as a couple of posters have mentioned, and a good bit of computing power or a lot of time.
small number of offspring usually 5 is the limit before major health problems insure.
This is inaccurate. While human birth presents more danger to the mother than most species it is actually the first birth that is by far the most difficult on average. Having more babies because somewhat easier for women with successive births.
In terms of evolution and intelligence, expanding intelligence allowed people to work together and communicate in more complex ways. Smart animals such as dolphins, whales, and monkeys have some of the most complex social interactions. They also act in concert more creatively. An example of this is chimpanzees murderous hunting expeditions where they go out and kill enemy chimapzees.
#5 Rocky the Flying Squirrel
You should read The Case For Mars. There is a ton that can be done on a longer time period Mars manned mission. Real exploration of a planet more like Lewis and Clark or a polar explorer. If you are just going to stay on the planet a week, then a robot can do many of the same things. Going to Mars would only cost about $30B with the Mars Direct plan. We should do that instead of going to the moon.
The prediction of 20+ years to go to Mars is inaccurate and misleading. We have the technology to go to Mars in place and it would only take 8-10 years of work for a total cost of under $30B. Recent European Space Agency Estimates of the cost to go to Mars using Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan ran about $27B. For more about the Mars Direct plan see the Mars Society.
Though simply put this is very true. We (US gov't, any other gov't, humanity in general) should not be spending billions to land more robotic rovers on Mars unless they lead directly to a human mission to Mars in the near future. See Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars. A human mission to Mars would cost about $20B as Zubrin demonstrates. The amount of scientific research achieved by humans on Mars is exponentially greater than what can be accomplished through robots. The cost is a fraction of what the USA spends on nonfuctional ballistic missile defense and roughly could be fit into NASA's currect budget.
This is quite true and very important. Most other countries in the world would already be facing economic ruin in they had the relative debt that the US has. The rest of the world trusts us to continue to be able to pay out interest. In particular Japan and China with which the US is running huge trade deficits, is buying into the trust in the US ability to pay interest. This is accomplished by purchasing US Treasury bonds.
"If the debt reaches a level where the US cannot make an interest payment, there will be serious repercussions in the world economy. A depression worse than any previous is a likely outcome of that situation."
That's the case and that is the road that the US is headed on right now with massive amounts of new deficit spending under Bush.
>Wow, that starting salary must be appreciated by all 5 graduates who were able to find jobs.
This is dead-on. For the few people graduating from college in 2001 2002 2003 who found jobs in their tech field and weren't quickly laid-off they probably did okay. From what I heard from my fellow Columbia U graduates of recent years most were not finding jobs in their field. I doubt a CS major working as a substitute teacher counts on this salary survey, but that is what I did for a while.
This is highly inaccurate. Many teachers unions are fighting for higher wages for starting teachers in particular. This is the case in NYC where starting teachers earned about $31,500 two years ago and now get around $38,000. Management of schools (often Board of Ed) try to keep starting teacher wages in particular down so when they need a few more teachers they can hire new teachers on the cheap or when they need to cut costs they offer senior teachers buyout packages and replace them with cheap new teachers. Further unions want more members and want to raise starting wages to bring in more teachers. NYC was unable to attract enough ceritified teachers because the wages were so low (for NYC cost of living in particular). This meant less union members, which the union doesn't want and larger class sizes, which the union doesn't want.