I'm from Minneapolis, and although I don't fly all that much, I believe our airport (MSP) is 100% millimeter-wave. I have never seen a backscatter x-ray machine there.
This article confirms it as of August 2012, although it could have changed since then:
I can't help but picture this CEO as a 6-year-old who's been prevented from stealing his younger sister's toy and is now throwing a tantrum.
I am a libertarian. It should be a no-brainer for Republicans to attract my support (over the Democrats at least). Instead they're giving me and everyone else the finger with their absurd rhetoric and childish political games. This goes for their politicians, their pundits, and quite a few of their supporters. Everything Obama supports is automatically bad, even if it's the same thing the Republicans earlier supported.
This insane prioritization of winning vs. losing and minor social issues instead of real governance is why I agree with the sentiment of this post. The Republicans are a menace and must be stopped.
That doesn't seem too plausible.
The moon is only about 1% of the mass of the earth, so let's start with a baseline estimate that it could change surface gravity by 1%. However, it's pretty far from earth's surface (around 100 times earth's radius), and gravity scales with the square of the distance, so now we're talking a 0.0001% change.
It gets worse, though: because we are in mutual orbit with the moon, we are actually in microgravity (freefall) relative to it. In other words, the moon pulls on you with roughly the same strength as it pulls on the earth, so the total 0.0001% change in gravity mostly cancels out! The only part of it that's left is from you being slightly closer to the moon than the earth is (when the moon is above you) or slightly farther (when it's on the other side of the earth). This difference is what causes the tides, but it's incredibly small relative to the gravitational pull of the earth.
Not to mention that the moon was probably not around when the earth was fully molten, or that the earth *does* have heavier elements (iron) predominantly in the center, or any number of other reasons why this idea doesn't seem likely...
You seem legitimately interested in hearing a perspective different from your own, so I'll oblige. Note that libertarianism is diverse, like any political affiliation, so not everyone who identifies with that label would agree with my responses.
Insurance is a common libertarian answer in this situation, and one that makes sense to me.
i guess he could take an insurance policy in theory, but even if an insurer were willing to cover this, the premium if correctly computed would probably be more than he could afford
Then he can't do it. If the fair premium is higher than the benefit of the project, that tells you that the total benefits of the project are lower than the total costs, so the project should not be undertaken. If he thinks the premium is unfairly high, or if nobody will cover it due to the size and uncertainly, he could work to build up significant evidence of the safety of the proposed activity (which is exactly what most people would probably want to see before he started anyway, libertarian or not).
so he would just go ahead and do it anyway.
This seems like an argument that applies to any crime under any political system... but if he did that in a libertarian society, then anyone who was potentially going to be affected would be eligible to defend themselves by preventing him from doing it. Note that people could delegate their self-defense, so even someone who lives far away and/or has a busy life already could still exercise their right of self-defense without undue inconvenience.
what would happen in the real world is, of course, that private interests would have this guy arrested and maybe worse. but that's initiation of force
I don't know of many people who consider self-defense to be initiation of force. Of course people would only be justified in using as much force as reasonable to stop him... initiating an experiment like this would not be carte blanche for dialing up the assassins. (This just follows from current common-law precedent for justifying self-defense.)
libertarians would have to admit that private prisons would still exist in their paradise
Yep. The main problem I personally have with prisons is not their existence but the high number of people locked up for acts of non-aggression (e.g. marijuana possession). Also note that, in the hierarchy of monopoly government institutions that libertarians want to get rid of, the justice system is typically near the end of the list because of the problems inherent in having two people with opposing interests (plaintiff and defendant) jointly select from multiple competing private court/prison systems.
you could say that the entrepreneur is "initiating force" by doing something very risky, but that's a definition which would admit many of the government regulations we have today.
"Regulations" are not necessarily against libertarian principles. After all, most libertarians want to live in stable modern society too, and are against direct aggression such as theft as well as indirect and/or probabilistic aggression like pollution of other people's property or reckless endangerment (e.g. driving drunk or attempting large-scale unproven geo-engineering experiments affecting other people's property). Remember not to confuse us with anarcho-capitalists!
I appreciated your reasonable tone when referring to libertarian principles so I was actually willing to respond, unlike in most slashdot flamefests. Hope you found the perspective interesting at least.
Self-defense is a widely-accepted exception.
It seems in this particular case that Wikipedia editors wanted something they could cite. This strikes me as rather reasonable. If I read the statement "according to the author, the book was inspired by an unhappy event in the life of his late friend Melvin Tumin," with no citation, how could I possibly verify that? If the citation was "the author sent Wikipedia private correspondence, trust me," is that any better? For all you criticizing this decision, is that what you want the encyclopedia to look like?
Asking the author to put a previously unknown fact into a citeable public record before reflecting it in the Wikipedia article is a process that I am personally in favor of, since it now allows me to follow up and see exactly where that information came from and why it's in the article.
Wikipedia does have its problems with overzealous and protective editors, but this particular case doesn't seem to be one. Perhaps there is some additional detail that I've missed in this case but reading TFA actually makes me more confident in the information in Wikipedia.
Came for crash blossom post. Leaving satisfied. Mod parent up.
If you look at the actual breakdown of the charges Ravi was convicted of, you'll notice that he was acquitted of all the bias intimidation sub-charges that he knowingly intimidated Clementi.
According to your own link, this is completely false.
From the source, with my emphasis:
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 3rd Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 19)
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"3rd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 4th Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21)
* Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 3rd Degree Attempted Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21)
* Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
Let's say I'm a factory owner. I make widgets. My factory dumps poison into the sky and into the water. After all, it's my air and water, too, right? And it's next to my factory. If you stop me from dumping the waste, you are imposing on my property rights; you are decreasing the value of my factory. If I change this, I will have to cut back payment of my workers, thus impacting their property rights.
This is a ridiculous strawman mockery of the position held by most small-government advocates. If you seriously believe that anyone other than perhaps the unscrupulous factory owner himself would make that argument with a straight face, you are the problem with modern political discourse. That sort of complete unwillingness to attempt to understand the positions of those you disagree with is what creates hostile, unproductive standoffs at all ranges of the political hierarchy, from your water cooler at work all the way up to congress.
There is a class of high-end non-SLR cameras called "ultrazoom." They don't have removable lenses, but the built-in lens is versatile (with long optical zoom as well as macro capability) and they are smaller and lighter than SLRs or probably MILCs. It's a good compromise if you don't think you'll appreciate the SLR or if you're on a budget.
I've has a Sony DSC-HX1 for a few years and have been very happy with it. Looks like you can get one new for $350 on Amazon. It has a 20x optical zoom, gyroscopic stabilization so you can actually take reasonable pictures at those zoom levels without a tripod, and of course a host of software features including a pretty smart "intelligent auto" mode. The quality of photos is excellent: I've framed some 18"x12" prints as gifts, and people have been surprised when I tell them I took the photo myself.
Review sites often have a separate category for these ultrazooms, e.g.: http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/Extended-Zoom.htm. Good luck in your search.
And when they get busted, you can just blame them and say "Hey, we didn't know anything about it".
What? That's the exact opposite of what Google is doing. I've heard of not reading the article, but did you even read the summary's title?
What makes you think it's honest, or that it's mourning for Kim Jong-Il?
In the absurdist documentary The Red Chapel, the director speculates that when their North Korean guide starts crying at the monument to Kim Il-Sung, she is actually crying for her relatives who died under his policies.
Looks like you stumbled across a textbook example of Simpson's Paradox. Like with the Monty Hall Problem, gaining a thorough understanding of it will dramatically improve your intuitive understanding of probability and statistics. (At least it did for me!)
CarrierIQ bandwidth is not counted against your cap. At least it's not supposed to be, although we know how good the telcos are at billing you properly.
Hollywood makes plenty of great movies. The problem is they aren't marketed as much, because of the Big Mac effect you mentioned. However, just becuse there are lots of McDonald's doesn't mean there aren't awesome restaurants around too. You just need to search them out yourself instead of relying on advertising (or complaining about it
You don't even need to go outside the U.S., although it does help if you're feeling tired of the "same old formula," since other countries' fimmakers are going to follow different storytelling norms. Anyway, here's the IMDb list of top movies from 2000-2009 to get you started: http://www.imdb.com/chart/2000s. I've seen most of them, and they definitely deserve to be on that list... just look for one that suits your taste in genre and enjoy.
Another way to find good movies is to follow directors who don't compromise creative integrity. I recommend Christopher Nolan (Memento), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream), and David Fincher (Se7en). Those movies are all masterpieces in one way or another, and all came out of Hollywood within the last 20 years. Find one you like and start watching other movies by the same director.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
