I think we're in general agreement (albeit seemingly... vociferous).

Okay, but the sordid reality is that simply because it's ridiculous doesn't preclude it. How excited was the Democratic base about Kerry 2004? Didn't turnout suffer? The lack of Republican voter enthusiasm was palpable this entire election cycle.

I'm uncertain that calculus works, unless you are asserting that Romney could have induced defection in conservative Democrats. There simply aren't that many "true independents": if a candidate loses a portion of their base that is greater than, say, 5% of the popular vote then there simply aren't enough true independents to make up for that loss.

Essentially, that scenario happens when there has been an Overton Window shift. If it persists over several elections it is likely to cause a party to fracture and a successor party to form that is carved out of the remnants + a portion of the other main party.

Thanks, I do understand how the electoral college system works in practice. The point I was making was that even in a very red state essentially no one was enthusiastic about Romney. Do you see how this might signal a serious problem for a campaign? If not even your broad base is excited about your candidacy, then how are you planning to capture the undecideds or keep your turnout high?

Depends on the libertarian, of course. I was making a generalization in order to illustrate that defection within a party's base demographics can affect an election, as was also illustrated in 2000 Florida with Nader/Greens.

The shorthand is that "typical" Libertarians caucus closer to Republicans, just like Greens caucus closer to Democrats. Yes, just like in Flordia in 2000, you can't just mentally assign those third party votes to a main party candidate because, again, given a lack of those third party candidates then some of their supporting voters might have voted for the other main party or (more likely) just stayed home... "no one at all".

Coming back around: I assert Johnson netted a substantial number of votes from upset Paul supporters. Romney could have probably kept a lot of them had he directed his campaign not to be dicks during nomination, and adopting some of the more innocuous aspects of Paul's platform (eg. audit the Fed). You are correct that these particular voters could probably have been replaced through larger gains in true independents... "somehow" (ie. Romney wasnt campaigning in a vaccum and I don't discount Obama's ability to recruit them).

What isn't as trivial is the perception Romney had among the wider base as being a Massachusetts Republican governor (RINO suspicion), the "disturbing" similarities between RomneyCare in MA and ObamaCare now (clearly hated among the Republican base), etc. Ryan was chosen to appeal to that broad demographic, because Romney was perceived/suspected to be to the left of that.

If they don't have sufficient appeal to their base, they run the risk of fracturing it through disaffection. To a certain degree your reasoning was correct: "who else were they going to vote for?", and the answer is clearly "not Obama". However, that's insufficient because the answer can also be "no one at all".

Let me put it this way. I live in a safely red state, and two weeks before the election I noticed a Romney/Ryan bumper sticker. What really struck me was that was the first one I had seen. Paul Ryan was a critical choice for the GOP in an attempt to keep their base engaged while their presidential candidate (the perceived moderate) went after the independents. I'm not exaggerating when I say there were more McCain/Palin and W bumper stickers on cars driving around here than Romney ones on the day of the election.

This election was the Republicans' to lose given unemployment, the economy, and the incumbent's name used as an epithet for the most controversial legislation passed in the last fifty years. When you look at all that, you asked how the Republicans could lose. When you looked at the candidates in the primary, you asked how the Republicans could win.

Also, many Ron Paul supporters defected for Libertarian party after the Romney campaign's machinations during the primaries and convention to disenfranchise the Paul delegates despite there never being any plausible threat to Romney's nomination. Why is this relevant? I'm guessing the 0.53% of the vote the Libertarian candidate won in FL, for example, looks rather appealing to the Republicans in retrospect—given they lost by 0.86% of the vote there.

It was untenable. When it comes down to it, effectively no one really liked or was enthusiastic about Romney. He got loads of anti-Obama votes but very few pro-Romney votes.

Depends on your definition of "correctly". Based on the rest of your comment then perhaps the Olds' experiments with rats would be ideal:

In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that a rat would press a bar to receive a brief impulse of electricity through an electrode implanted in certain areas of the brain. Although it was known that such stimulation in other areas of the brain could produce motivated behaviors of eating, drinking, sexual behavior, or aggression (and that lesions of the brain could produce the converse behaviors), it now appeared that psychologists had discovered a "brain reward" system. The ESB was serving as a reinforcer. Rats bar pressed at rapid rates for 15 to 20 hours until exhausted in order to receive the stimulation. During the process, they ignored food or water, and rat mothers ignored their pups.

I'm libertarian, so I believe it would be your right to choose to pay to implant something like this if you were to make a fully informed, mentally competent decision to do so.

However, I wouldn't want this: every other addiction has some form of intrinsic rate-limiting effect; be it passing out/hangovers for alcohol, male refractory periods for sex, dopamine receptor changes for cocaine, etc, etc. The "correct" implementation of something like this would have no such impediment to instant, ultimate junkie status.

The electronics-based, "DRM" type approaches aren't optimal due to increased complexity. Installing something that requires a GPS lock, time-expiring auth code, etc, reduces the chances of the weapon positively functioning in combat. Furthermore, unless sophisticated Permissive Action Links are used, then any practical solution could potentially be defeated by third-party control/firmware. If they can't keep console hardware from being modchipped without resorting to judicial means, what do you think is going to happen when these diverted weapons end up in the hands of a group with state sponsorship?

Thus, I suggest that the problem be attacked via chemistry. Attempt to develop explosives and rocket propellant that will decompose over time. Yes, this is likely to make the weapons sensitive to storage conditions (thereby altering the "expiration date"). However, a device whose warhead would "expire" in 5 years at room temperature is likely to last at least 12 months in the desert. Other "poison pills" could be added, eg. a compound that would degrade the warhead if it were frozen in an attempt to prolong viability.

Yes, this approach might result in weapons that have to be swapped out frequently, but it would also prevent MANPADS given to erstwhile allies from coming back to haunt us in 15 years. If rogue actors can swap out the propellant and warhead while retaining the appropriate weights & distribution for flight characteristics, then they've probably got state sponsorship anyway (meaning they could get weapons regardless).

I lost respect for this fluff piece after reading this:

Gallium arsenide has been used for years in cutting edge semiconductor applications. I've heard it referred to as "the semiconductor of the future" in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, due to its high performance which comes at high cost. Essentially, what this implies is that technologies are often prototyped on GaAs but reworked to use silicon semiconductors instead before mass manufacturing.

Anyway, if they missed GaAs while doing a survey of "tech applications of elements", what else did they miss?

Actually, unless you have become totally inured to blocky, pixelated displays what you really want is for everything to be rendered larger.

Fortunately, many operating systems support resolution independence, which would allow you to keep your display at its high, native resolution and still draw your widgets, text, etc at a large size. This is done by changing the DPI hint in the OS so that it knows to render things larger (or smaller).

This approach would accomplish the overall effect you desire while avoiding the blocky scaling artifacts. As a bonus, changing the DPI typically gives you the ability to change the size of things at a much finer granularity than the handful of resolutions offered by a display, so you can often make things precisely the size you desire rather than having to settle (as it appears you have been forced to do with 720p vs 800x600).

I'm uncertain which GUI you're using, but if you Google for " change dpi" you may find that it's only a few clicks to tweak it.

Since you're obviously being a literalist, please allow me to return the favor. Annihilating Earth would require overcoming the gravitational binding energy of the planet. Here is one of several sites that discusses this in the context of the annihilation of Alderaan. The various sites agree that a lower bound on the energy required to blow up Earth would be on the order of 2.2*10^32 joules.

That's tantamount to a full week worth of energy output from the Sun.

Since you are a literalist, perhaps you remain unconvinced and still believe that it is theoretically feasible to construct a single fusion bomb that is equivalent to a week's worth of solar output.

Okay then, let's take the energy of D-T fusion, the bomb candidate reaction most favorable to your proposition. That's 17.6 MeV of energy per reaction. Roughly estimating the mass of the isotopes of hydrogen at 1 g/mol, with 1 atom of both the tritium isotope and deuterium isotope per 17.6 MeV reaction, and 6.022 * 10^23 atoms per mol, it becomes clear that 2.6 * 10^17 kg of nuclear fuel would be required, presuming the fusion device scaled perfectly and was deployed at the center of the earth.

Because ~1.3 * 10^17 kg of this would necessarily be tritium and tritium has to be bred from lithium, and global lithium reserves are estimated at 39 million tons. This presents an issue, because even if all the lithium on earth were somehow bred into tritium, that represents only 0.000004% of the tritium necessary for an earth-destroying bomb (not to mention the fact that tritium has a half life of 12.4 years).

Furthermore, the incidence of deuterium in ocean water is approximately 0.0156% of the hydrogen by mass. This implies that if all the deuterium of all the world's water were cracked and all the deuterium were extracted, then only 2.4 * 10^16 kg of deuterium would be available, which is only 19% of the required mass of deuterium.

Left as an exercise for the reader are the procedures for how to obtain far more nuclear bomb fuel than is present on earth, ensuring the bomb design scales linearly, ensuring that the nuclear material can be collected & used before it decays enough to poison the fusion reaction, ensuring a complete reaction of the nuclear material, and for deploying a 260 trillion metric ton bomb at the center of the earth.

In summary, no, it isn't possible to construct a nuclear weapon that would annihilate earth.

QFT. However, even as lame as this drift is, in a surgical context it's still simpler/better to add a procedural step to check the time on the appropriate devices before starting a procedure.

I mean, all the NTP advocates in this thread seem to miss the following facts:

1. These devices don't need to be synced to millisecond-level accuracy.
2. The infrastructure upgrades involved would cost millions of dollars (wired/wireless networking, upgrading devices to get network-enabled/NTP support).
3. IT security headaches. Yes, there can be a private, secured network but do you really want to *increase* your potential attack surface on surgical equipment that was previously dumb/air-gapped?
4. The surgical staff already goes through complex setup checklists and prepwork before a procedure. Having them check to ensure the time is within +/- 1 minute based on the wall clock would be quick and sufficient to address this issue.

Certainly, if a given device is already on a network and is NTP-capable, then by all means use NTP. Otherwise, just check the damn time on the device before starting the procedure and correct it once a week/whenever.

I wish they will use some sanity for this. Healthcare already costs too much without spending additional millions to avoid a five second pre-flight checklist item.

Don't get me wrong... I think it's obvious from my post that I consider the mandate to be retarded. Perhaps a key difference here is that in the US the actual "parent class" of sales tax is called use tax. It is up to the consumer to pay use tax on all purchases of goods put to use within the state. Sales tax just happens to be use tax collected & remitted by the merchant. If it's not collected, the law says the consumer has to report & remit the amount of the sales/use tax on their own. As you can imagine, this voluntary reporting happens "approximately never".

Thanks for the data point. Does your city not charge property tax at all then? I have to imagine that some entity is charging property tax. Here we have composite property tax, because a variety of entities are allowed to tack on additional percentages to fund themselves. For example, the city, the county, the school district, etc, all levy a percentage that is totaled up for the overall property tax bill for a given owner.

Haha, yes, I am aware there is more than one country over there—duh! There's like three countries in Europe, right? (haha).

As far as I know, VAT is common to all EU member states. I expected variance in how cities were funded based on the specific country, so I had hoped to cast a wide net in obtaining responses from across the European gamut.

Excellent point. However, in addition to the obvious & necessary firewall configuration to protect/prevent direct access to the server via direct IP, I would probably consider using site-local v6 addresses for those servers' services.

Since v6 site-local addresses are not expected to be publicly routable, it would provide yet another layer of sanity check against future edge-router misconfiguration by admins. I mean, why *not* have the server's Apache instance bind to just a single, site-local IP and configure the server's own firewall to only allow traffic on that IP from the LB and designated internal testing hosts? Yes, all of this is doable via end-to-end routable addresses, but I'm paranoid and prefer to enable the minimum accessibility configuration.

I perceive no downside to this approach, except the slightly increased possibility that network reconfigurations might render the server's services unreachable. However, I consider that to be a forcing device that ensures the reconfiguring admins will review/update the server's configuration (like they should have done regardless). Either way, all of this should come out during testing before go-live on a network topology migration ("you have tested this, right?" — haha).

v6 is cool, and I have no problem with its eventual adoption. I just wanted to ensure that I can keep my abstraction/indirection layer for scenarios like this. However, you've seen that many of these debates have taken on "holy war" status and it's hard to glean any useful information once both sides rapidly & inevitably resort to ad hominem.

Yes, granted, unless the v4 NAT were being performed by a load balancer (I was talking about a load balancer scenario). I just didn't want to get caught up in discussing the load balancing aspects vs. the... "network address translation" (*cough*) that is necessary for the LB to work in the first place.

Cool. My primary concern was the claim that "NAT is evil and endpoint-to-endpoint IP addressablility is the One True Way", when NAT is requisite for HA. The way some v6 zealots have been ranting about NAT and addressability, I thought perhaps there was some new approach to HA in v6 that didn't require NAT.

Thanks for the reply. However, what you described appears to be effectively identical to basic NAT inasmuch as it provides address translation/rewriting behind a router and serves as an abstraction layer between external & internal IPs.

Have I merely misunderstood the semantics in the v6 NAT debate?

I have one use case that I haven't seen addressed yet (ha, ha): reverse proxy for high availability.

Okay, let's say I have two internal servers that I want to expose externally via a single IP in order to facilitate reachability in a scenario where one server goes down. I am aware of round-robin DNS for load balancing, but that doesn't address the scenario wherein a client has a previously-established end-to-end connection and the server they are explicitly addressing goes offline. For simplicity's sake, we can assume we are discussing a stateless app server, but the concept applies the same in application clusters that share session state among the cluster.

With v4, I can have the NAT device handle failover so that subsequent requests from the client are seamlessly rerouted to the other server at the network layer—all behind the abstraction layer that NAT provides.

I've read a little about RFC 6296 (NPT), but it's not entirely clear to me that this would solve my use case. As far as I know, the simplest/best solution is to insinuate a proxy between the public IP and the private IP, because interface bonding doesn't fix the scenario where the app server has gone down but the server host is still up. In an interface-bonding configuration traffic can still be sent to the host with the downed app server (FAIL).

I have read that some people are attempting to hack NAT on top of IPv6, but I have seen many posts over the past few years claiming that "NAT is never the solution/breaks the internet/causes cancer/etc"; therefore, I am wondering what the best practice actual solution is in this case.

I definitely agree with what you are saying. However, things are simpler in Europe with your VAT.

In the US, we have a patchwork of sales taxes that are are state, locality and even "occupation" based. Furthermore, at least in my state, it's illegal for a vendor to advertise prices including tax, unless the vendor is selling goods/services from a very short, explicitly-defined list (examples include gasoline and cinema tickets). I guess the idea is so that consumers will know they paid the sales tax, because it is required to be a separate line item on the receipt.

By way of example, here's what the breakdown on the charges for prepared food in my locality: $X menu price * 1.025% "restaurant occupation tax" * (1 + (.055 state sales tax + 0.015 "local option" sales tax)). Note that as a consequence of this formula, the restaurant tax ends up being taxed in itself... yes, sometimes we have to pay taxes on our taxes.

The reason the situation evolved this way is that each state is allowed to decide how much sales tax to charge (or whether to charge any at all!). It's not a nationally-set thing. Then, each state can decide whether to allow cities to tack on additional sales tax. For example, in my state, the state law allows cities to tack on 0%, 0.5%, 1.0%, or 1.5% based on what the city populace/government decide (yes, it has to be one of those four options). So, even within the same state, sales tax varies from 5.5% to 7.0%. It's strange, because driving just a mile out of town can drop the sales tax rate by 1.5%.

The "occupation tax" for specific industries (eg. hotels, telephony service, restaurants, etc in my city) is a backdoor/loophole that my city uses to transcend the state limits on local sales tax options. An "occupation tax" is not the same as a "sales tax", even though the effect on purchase price is almost exactly the same—except occupation tax gets meta-taxed as I described above.

Fun, eh? Municipalities want to raise revenue, and if they can't use sales tax then often their only choice is to jack up property tax rates. Not every state allows cities to charge income tax. So, as insane as this all is, it's not like we are doing it for the lulz.

How do European cities raise revenue? Do they have to lobby for VAT-turnback (ie. "y% of VAT raised in your municipal area will be given to your city budget")? Or is it all property tax-based? Or are you assessed city-based income tax in some cases?

Why is it unfortunate that nature stores hydrogen as hydrocarbons?

Hydrocarbons are far superior energy storage than any battery or capacitor technology on the horizon. As a bonus, they are the very definition of stable storage (especially when compared to caps or batts).

People need to stop conflating the source of energy with the energy storage medium. Oil can be carbon neutral if it is made via reverse combustion. Link this solar reactor's water-cracking H2 production with a similar reactor cracking CO2 into CO (similar reactants involved in a solar reactor), send it through the Fischer Tropsch Process, and get carbon-neutral hydrocarbons as output. As a bonus, you can reuse all the existing petroleum distribution infrastructure.

Furthermore, if you equip a vehicle with a next-gen solid metal oxide fuel cell then you can exceed Carnot efficiency in energy extraction from the hydrocarbons.