Dictionary of white listed words 6th grade reading level (to be displayed at max speed, the rest at a settable sub-speed)
Long words broken up by syllable
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Yeah, but comparing it to tariffs against other _countries_ isn't accurate. It would be a tariff against a _company_. So would it accelerate into some sort of trade war? I'm not enough of an economist to say for sure, but it's not like Apple could start taxing American products in retaliation...

It is true that companies will demand things of the government, and threaten to leave if they don't get them. And it seems like governments are routinely screwed in this fashion.

Governments need to respond with import duties on the products of companies like this.

A trade war with another country is destructive and expensive, and quickly tangles up uninvolved parties. But a set of punitive taxes on the output of a company is targeted. Government needs a stick to hold over the head of multinational corporations.

"On the issue of using the "controversial device" to track the criminal in this case, I'm not so ready to jump on the "police broke the law" bandwagon."

So I don't know about actually using the device, I see your logic here. But isn't there a requirement that evidence be disclosed to the accused? I think that's the issue here.

Let us strive to be correct in our outrage...

so the punishment for being a perv is that you get to be a voyeur as well?

Why would the middle part burn up? Asteroids and satellites burn up because they have large velocities relative to earth surface and atmosphere. The space elevator specifically does not. It could fall at terminal velocity, but lots of things do that without catching fire. There's that dude that sky-dove from near orbit, right? He even had thin atmosphere to go through to get going good and fast, but no flames.

In reality, you'd want an outward force a full order of magnitude higher than the cargo capacity.

The number of people talking about the issue of balancing the elevator makes me think perhaps I have misunderstood. I figure I'd probably put a counterweight mass on a climber above geostationary. Geostationary is where things balance, right? The mass above geostationary (at angular velocity of 360 deg / day) wants to fly away, and it holds up the ribbon. Want to put a heavy load on the ribbon bottom? Send a signal to have the counterweight climb further up (which, past geostationary, feels like down to it, right?), increasing the amount it pulls up. Perhaps the distance necessary to apply this effect is substantial, but heck we're already going to geostationary, right?

And from a message further up:
The base could easily be placed on a barge in the middle of the ocean. In fact, that's just about ideal; it can move around relatively easily...

Well, you've basically got a pendulum that is 35,000+ Km long. That's going to be a pretty long period to make it do anything, I bet. Maybe easier would be to just detach it from your barge and roll it up into the sky at the balance point if you need to get out of the way of some terrestrial event.

" ...and some incompetent idiot who didn't bother checking."

Not far into the comments and I've already seen this kind of language applied to whoever committed the original error. And not to bum on you -- it's natural to be irritated at the source of a problem. This kind of attitude, however, is what makes it difficult to retract a mistake. The agent may be good, competent, smart, but errors still happen.

Error handling is the issue here, not error commission.

"... so if I need to change an environment variable it's a week wait for a helpdesk maggot to show up."

(Local) helpdesk response time might improve if you don't think of them as maggots. Your attitude will show, even if you aren't actively trying to be rude.

I'm with you, bub!

"So what? You don't need a degree in evolutionary biology to understand how evolution works. Any high school student who pays attention in their biology class should understand it. He's a skilled public speaker and understands the scientific process, and those are really the only credentials he needs to deal with somebody like Ken Ham."

Don't underestimate the effort that the ID / creation guys will go to for a "gotcha". The kind of objections I've seen from ID / creationist types are pseudoscience stuff dug up from dark crevices. It doesn't take much more than a high school student to get the gist of evolution, true. But that one detail that sounds kind of weird that he's pulling out... is he just making that up? Or is that old news, depreciated by later work? Or is it just out of context? They'll look through the entirety of the literature for stuff to blindside Mr. Nye with, just on the off chance that they can get him to look stumped, then claim victory. The successful debater will need wide ranging functional knowledge in evolutionary biology. Details and technicalities. I hope Mr. Nye is prepped.

Yes. I think a written form debate would perhaps allow an orderly response to a set of arguments designed to confuse.

No, I have a computer in the living room plugged into the TV and stereo.

And now with Raspberry Pi's and those little Android HDMI plugs wandering around setting up a living room computer is even cheaper.

I wouldn't get a Smart TV.

In this case, the person attempted to get naked images of a real little girl. The fact that these contacting individuals were wrong about the status of the realness of the girl doesn't change what was attempted.

That is why my examples are relevant. A real crime was really attempted by a real person. That is sufficient. The target (real and naive? real and bait? not even real?) doesn't matter.

To quote: "Should it be a crime to "sexually abuse" software, even if you don't know it was software?"

The crime is attempting to abuse a real child. That's what the contacting individual was attempting.

???

Attempted crimes are prosecuted routinely. Google "Attempted Murder" or "Attempted Robbery" and you'll see some.

Which isn't to say that there aren't other issues with this "sting operation".