You mean the same Germans that are building more coal fired power plants?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Yeah Solar supplements natural gas peaking power. It does not compete with Coal...
Yeah you have just proved my point.

Then it is not a slippery slope.

Agreed but trying to prove you have a valid point by calling it a slippery slope is a terrible choice.
The law may be too broad but I have come to the conclusion that laws are a lot like wishes in DnD. If you do not close every loophole something terrible will happen.
If you make the law too broad then it can restrict perfectly safe and reasonable actions which is bad.
If you make the law too narrow and then it does provide the protection that is needed.

This law is designed to prevent film crews setting up a shoot in the middle of a national forest.
What you do not want is to prevent visitors from getting a snap of the wife and kids at Old Faithful.
You also have a middle ground of say a bunch of high school kids shooting a youtube video with sets and props.
Or a small independant film.

Unlike the EU that closes Nuclear plants when the science clearly shows they actually save lives.

3g HSPA+ is actually more than fast enough for most smartphone tasks for something like a box an a semi that tracks the location it is more than fast enough. For a device in a car that allows you to stream pandora and do remote function it is also more than good enough.
The key thing will be the cost of service.

The rest is but a websearch away.

I hate this shitty mentality, but apparently it's worldwide. No, I'm not going to go searching to dig up evidence for whatever wild claims you choose to make, you need to present it then and there.

Somebody forwarded me an article the other day about how we should all switch to dairy from grass fed cows. Now many of the points in the piece I happen to agree with, but one of the claims was that grass-fed dairy has fewer "toxins". Whenever I see "toxins" used without further specification as to what exactly the "toxin" is, that's a signal that someone's trying to sell something expensive but useless -- which turned out to be the case. The piece was hawking stuff you were supposed to mix into your grass-fed milk, which is a good way to expose yourself to toxins given how weakly regulated supplements are.

People use ideas like "law and order" in just the same way as marketers use "toxins". It's all well and good to say you're going to stop people from breaking the law on the Internet, but what specifically are you proposing to do? Set up an anti-fraud unit? I'll cheer you on. Monitor everyone's email? That cure's worse than the disease.

But I also have to say that the word "freedom" is just as subject to misuse -- or in this case "anarchy". Now there are many things about anarchy I like. There are others I don't. I don't like having to remove malware off my wife's computer. I don't like having to be vigilant that my older relatives aren't taken in by Internet scammers. I don't like having to deal with attacks on my websites. Even government agencies poking around in your Internet data -- that could be seen as a case of the agency exploiting a specific lack of Internet regulation.

I'm all for reducing my exposure to toxins, but I'm not going to get colon irrigated. I'm for cracking down on Internet crime, but not at the expense of the government doing things that *ought* to be criminalized. I'm for freedom, but not the freedom to interfere with other people's freedom. It's really not that complicated. Find out the specifics of what people are proposing to do, even when their stated goal sounds reasonable.

So.... any links to back this stuff up?

Not to interfere with your nascent flame-war or anything but "self-funding" is not inconsistent with "getting more taxpayer money". First, they may get larger appropriations while at the same time running side businesses. Second, even if their appropriation were cut to zero, any money they make on the side becomes "taxpayer money."

One of the most fundamental principles of our form of government is that no executive branch agency can spend money without Congressional approval, no matter where that money came from. The reasons for this go back to the English Civil War. Charles I attempted to rule without calling Parliament, but since the Magna Carta English kings did not have the power of taxation; the House of Commons did. So Charles attempted an end-run by exploiting a fee that had been traditionally levied on coastal towns to pay for maritime protection in time of war. Charles's attempt to use "Ship Money" as a revenue source independent of Parliament was one of the key events leading to the Civil War, and was familiar history to the framers of the US Constitution.

Or... he could just toss that ball bearing out the airlock.

When an aircraft intercepts another aircraft, it's closing velocity is limited to between the difference of the aircraft's top airspeed (if one is overtaking another) to the sum of their top airspeeds (if they are closing head on). That's because both aircraft "want", in the absence of energy expended, to match velocities to the air they're moving through.

There's no limit (other than relativity) on the closing velocities of spacecraft, so when one craft intercepts another in the minimum time.possible, it's closing speed can be, in fact likely would be on the order of tens of km/s, an order of magnitude faster the autocannon rounds fired by modern fighter jets. If an intercepting spacecraft wants to have a classic sci-fi space dogfight, it has to expend considerable time and energy not only matching position with the target spacecraft, but matching velocity as well.

I use this this conflict between matching position in the minimum time and matching velocities in my own stories, although from what I can see that's not a common practice.

I think you overstate the case -- for the present.

Thought experiment: Imagine you could magically transport several humans to Mars along with all the shelter and supplies they needed. Naturally, you could also use your magic transporter to transport a robotic vehicle. Which would be more valuable?

At present, the humans would be a better choice due to their greater behavioral flexibility and autonomy. But over the next fifty years or so we can expect the gap in flexibility between humans and machines to narrow. In 2064 we might prefer to send robots through our transporter, simply because of the logistics of maintaining a pressurized environment. We're already finding applications on Earth where we prefer to fly drones rather than manned aircraft, and not necessarily because of safety.

Yet at present we still find it more convenient to do some things in low Earth orbit with people rather than robots. The cost and complexity of maintaining human life 200 miles away is plenty high, but it's still worth doing. In a hundred years, maybe not.

Here's what I think the lesson of the thought experiment is: the choice between a future manned expedition and a robotic expedition, reduced to purely practical concerns (i.e. excluding things like glory and adventure) will come down to the rate of marginal advances in robotics vs. marginal advances in space transport technology.

At present the state of space transport technology favors sending robots to Mars exclusively. But how do we advance space transport technology to make the manned trip desirable? Well, there's some engineering research needed of course, but the best way to gain practical experience in the short term is to send more robots. If we do *no* robotic space exploration, the advantage will shift even more towards robotic exploration, because space technology will stagnate while robotics continues to advance. If we want to see manned exploration of Mars in our lifetime (for those non-practical reasons above), our best chance starts with an intensive program of high-risk robotic missions.

My first exposure to HHTG was around 1980. It was available on this thing we had back then called "radio", which was kind of like wireless multicast audio streaming, only with a very limited selection of content streams.

Here's the thing: a film is never going to compete with whatever you imagined reading the book or listening to the "radio" plays. At best it can show you what you've already imagined. And when you see what you've imagined it's getting a pleasant hit of external validation. Why else would a Harry Potter fan go to see a Harry Potter movie? They don't go for a *different* experience than they imagined. And Harry Potter and HHTG are written in two very different narrative styles. I think most people who read Harry Potter picture more or less the same thing, but everyone who reads HHTG picture very different things. So the movie was bound to be a disappointment if you went to it expecting to see what you've pictured in your mind up on the screen.

On top of that the "radio" play is 13 hours long, and the books have even more material. The movie runs less than two. That means a lot of your favorite bits inevitably got left out.

Yes, you can sink all your money into Bitcoin and hope that a currency which doesn't respond at all to the size of the economy works out and saves the world.

Or you could become more involved in the political process and try to get people elected who will appoint more independent Fed governors and financial regulators and pass better laws for them to work under.

Choose your long shot.

If your bike was made of solid gold, then a conventional bike lock would be useless. Also your bike would be very heavy.

The point is that your analogy has some flawed interpretations. What you're saying is that the use value of riding your bike anywhere outweighs the expected cost of its being stolen. That's completely valid. Likewise the marginal cost of a more sophisticated lock may not be worth the marginal reduction in expected theft-cost.

But information has a wider range of uses and values than a bike does; you can't just say, "well HTTPS may not be perfect, but it's what we've got and it's good enough." Some information is literally priceless. Other information may not be priceless, but maybe it's not really needed on a system so you can protect it by moving it to a less exposed system. HTTPS is just one of many tools you have to work with when addressing security. Naturally you want to use it as skillfully as possible to reduce your vulnerabilities, but part of the process in many cases is imagining what would happen when something you're relying upon fails, then planning to deal with that.

TELNET. Of course "flawless" means "meeting its design goals," it doesn't mean "suitable for any application."