Security through Obscurity works, just as camoflage works for soldiers. And relying just on Security through Obscurity works just as well as camoflaging your soldiers and then sending them out without weapons, ammo, food, water or training into a hostile environment.
Why am I not surprised that the first post to this thread is from someone who doesn't know where babies come from?
Cause now everyone knows what Positrons are, Asimov's positronic brain sounds dated.
There's this principle, as part of the RICO act, that says creating a lot of shell corporations, where money moves around between companies in a very complicated way and it's very hard to track it, is one of the signs of an organized crime operation. Parts of the RICO law are written to deal with this specific method. For ciriminals to use this method, they have to build enough shell corps to make tracking the money very hard - a few won't do it, twenty or 50 or 119 is better. The Idea is that the more levels of shells there are, the more time the organization has to delay a criminal investigation, as the investigators have to keep going back to a judge and getting more warrents for new records. If they don't find anything the first few times, the judge is likely to stop giving them more warrents, plus there's more time to move money into places such as offshore accounts, or for the top dogs to skip the country if they must.
There weren't a whole bunch of new PACs and such made by the Democrats in that election cycle, but because of the very nature of the Tea Party movement, we saw a lot of Tea party this and Tea Party that, over a hundred new non-profits for states, groups of states, and particular parts of the movement. In many cases, some of the Tea party organizers put their names on multiple applications in different positions, which is another sign of potential shell corporations. That's another possible red flag under RICO, seeing the same person's name for different positions in different corporations which are being formed in multiple states, as is seeing organizations incorporated in odd states (i.e.a company doing businesss only in Arkansas, but incorporating in Florida). (Delaware is somewhat of an exception to this, as their laws make it popular for many businesses to incorporate there, but I don't think there are any real advantages to incorporating in Delaware for non-profits).
The IRS has also long had a position that even if something is technically legal to do as the law is written, it can still be illlegal if the primary purpose of doing it appears to be not to achieve whatever goal the law endorses, but to evade taxes. That means they could have approached this as a case where some of these new organizations might not qualify as their particular type of non-profit, AND might have made a profit AND had the intent to avoid paying the taxes that would entail. Technically, if somebody screws up and didn't stay within the non-profit rules, the IRS next looks to see if they made money, and if they did, for the third step the IRS gets to assume that the mistake in claiming non-profit status isn't an innocent mistake, but a deliberate way to evade taxes on that money. If you think about it, this makes a certain amount of sense - as the plaintiff at that point is often arguing that they accidentally made a profit without trying to, and they just coincidentally filed as a non-profit by innocent mistake. The press has tended to treat this as though the new non-profits could be set up wrong quite innocently, and have made a profit under law, but not done anything really wrong unless the IRS could prove some sort of intent, but the law normally assumes people don't make profits accidentally, and don't just happen to get the paperwork wrong coincidentally.
Minor correction guy, here. That's a proportionally higher chance, not a high chance. Since the best estimates for being gay put it at less than 10% of the population, a high chance of their uncles from the mother's sides being gay as well would mean, for example, for all those mothers that have a male sibling, there's at least a 25-50% chance those siblings are gay too. Since having a brother is so common, that means that if 10% of the populace is gay, somehow, there's also a general 2.5-5% of the overall populace that needs to be added to that. As a more specific example, if it's 'the future' and everybody who is gay feels absolutely no stigma about it, reports honestly, and we come up with a number such as 8%, we should add about 25-50% to it and report that the gay percentage of the population is really 10-12% or so, even if there's no other reason in such a case to think those uncles are not being counted already.
That's not really something that makes sense in this example - we can't have a gene that is detectable by its effect on a major behavior and argue that being someone's maternal uncle stops that behavior but the gene is still present, for example, So let me give you an example where adjusting the incidence for what we know about genetics just might make better sense, for contrast.
The genetics of schizophrenia have the highest corollation known for a genetic illness (not that being gay should necessarily be counted as a genetic illness, let's just stick with it being an effect with a genetiic component - but I think it's safe to identify schizophrenia as a generally undesired and dehabilitating condition.). If a person is schizophrenic, and has an identical twin, that twin has about a 50% chance of also developing schizophrenia. That's the top of the charts high chance corollation. Since many schizophrenics do go undiagnosed for substantial time, and many families attempt to hide the incidence of related cases in the family tree, or are in broad denial, it makes good sense to ask patients if they have an identical twin, warn them of the high potential for the disease, and to figure that the real niumbers of people at high risk or as yet undetected, should include a factor adjusting for the presence of occasional identical twins in the population. The link between male homosexuality and maternal uncles also bing gay is a lot less statistically significant than that, even though being somone's maternal uncle is a lot more common than being someone's identical twin.
international
In this particular context, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I think I'm pretty far from an obsessive collector (well maybe I do sometimes fall in that category and am just not seeing it), but it's not that relevant whether people are or not.
I have some significant films and books that have been released in various censored editions. For example, I have the paperback Del Rey Gold Seal version of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which is both vetted by the author and has an afterword detailing some of the many bowderizings of that book (of all stories) and in what ways some other Bradbury stories were censored in various other editions. It's a rather nasty set of examples.
I seem to recall there was a story covered here on Slashdot a few years ago about Blockbuster demanding changes to the copies of a gereat many videos they distributed from the theatre releases. In my classical music collection, I have a version of Copland's Lincoln Portrait that.was translated for a South American audience, and on the night It was first performed, the people leaving the auditorium went straight to the streets to conduct a revolution. It might be a good thing if the exact performance that served as a trigger was on physical media (and from some people's POV, it might be a very bad thing - quick, burn the tape!).
It may be just "obsessive" fans who want to compare different releases of Star Trek TOS or Star Wars and argue over trivia, but when the changes involve more controversial works, THATS a real "pretty big reason to still prefer physical media". (And I'm not sure but what that applies to ST:TOS as well - that "First interracial kiss footage might still count as controversial in some circles - are their copies of what was actually broadcast in different southern US markets?). So, to your "you have some chance of actually keeping it", I'll add ", even if it makes the powers that be uncomfortable." Physical media let us see who is revising, amending, or deleting whose thoughts, and sometimes even make a pretty good guess why.
Actually finding a new zero day exploit and figuring out how to exploit it, with maximum yield to chance of getting caught ratio, is very time consuming and involves a high level of luck, not just skill. David is shown as a bit more than just a script kiddie, but a lot of what he does in the movie has become simplifed to where script kiddees can easily get tools they don't understand to do the same things these days, so perhaps the movie doesn't feel the same from a modern perspective. It helps to remember that back in the era, seemingly simple things such as Wardialers weren't off the shelf items yet, and people who used them had to at least know a little about some Hayes AT commands and such beyond what was in the user manuals. David was hacking at a time when even getting advice about using social engineering meant going to a person who also had pure tech skills, and not from someone who only knew the social engineering side of it all. His use of social engineering to realize "Joshua" is a potentially likely backdoor in that particular case is actually the more skilled response, in that it takes a certain amount of analytical intelligence to look for something like it, but also more generalized intelligence to realize that doing it has a high chance of shortcutting trial and error methods that might take years in an era of 1200 baud modems, and that there was very little risk during the discovery phase. I would posit that the most skilled hackers working for the NSA, for example, are deliberately trained not to ignore biography shortcuts and such in favor of more seemingly LEET attacks. The people with nothing to prove most probably use social attacks, reverse engineering and insider information at the drop of a hat if it gets them results faster or safer.
I was just picturing jets spraying out heavy metals and nanochips and radioactive compounds, and then the HAARP broadcasts frying all those nanochips, and so on, and thinking "That's the stupidest conspiracy evah!"
Well, If someone can't admit there's a trend at all, they certainly can't admit it's accellerating, even at a very conservative rate that only leads to converting 11 cm. to 20 cm. in a hundred years. There's actually nothing likely about such a slow exponential growth. Positive feedback processes that tend to such low growth rates are usually inhibited by some transient factor, which eventually stops restraining them:
Mandatory Car Analogy: For example, a company trying to ramp up production of new cars sees a low growth rate when they have to make a design change during the model year, but they learn to stop making design changes too often. If positive feedback loops are larger than such negatives, longer term predictions are always underpredictions, that is, they assume the existing feedbacks won't change much, but a better prediction would take into account we have reasons to think some things will change. In this analogy, human ability means that the process controllers will very likely learn to not make changes during a model year, because it slows desired increases in production. Fixing one such problem counts as applying positive feedback and if the car maker's production people keep learning more about how to make more cars faster, this counts as a positive feedback loop for as long as it lasts. Here, the positive feedback loop is still limited by total demand for cars - there's no point in being able to make more cars than you can sell.
More direct example: For AGW, plant growth from increased CO2 is a negative feedback loop that tends to restrain CO2 buildup by sequestering it in living plants, but the increase in O2 levels that also goes with plant growth increases forest fire risk and damage, and puts a cap on how much forests can grow, so the negative feedback loop may be eventually overwhelmed by a positive feedback that in theory can dwarf its effects. The total area for plants to live, world wide, also puts a cap on the growth of the negative feedback process, as does the total available (for each) of free Nitrogen, Phosporus, and other materials needed for plant growth. Notice we should treat space available as an area and not a volume - plants grow only in the top 100 meters or so of the sea and on land surfaces, and get their energy by the surface area they present to the sun, and so people tend to mislead themselves if they think of the oceans as a volume that can absorb Carbon by this method instead, or that trees can just grow taller or denser without limits. When the ocean as a whole volume directly absorbs Carbon, that's called becoming seltzer water, which has its own limits, and wouldn't be goof for us if it did happen - it's hardly a fix for our problems.,
From what I've seen, just about all the proposed positive and negative feedbacks on CO2 levels are such that the negative ones have relatively low caps, by which I mean they will either only work for a historically short time or just so long as the world remains below certain concentrations of CO2. The only negative loops anybody, seems to think are real*, that endure, are the mechanisms nature now uses, such as sequestering carbon in plant matter, or in calcium carbonate made by diatoms, and similar, and these all have limits, and to make things worse, are all being negatively impacted by human action. The new Cosmos video series, for example, shows just how much calcium carbonate sequestration would have to grow to keep up with human trends, and just how unlikely that is. At this point, you either need to have the opinion that the whole thing is a fake, or admit that 20 cm. is a very optimistic lowball estimate. Climatologists are probably trying to avoid appearing sensationalistic.
* To be fair, some people actually think God will just step in and work a miracle somehow, every time it's needed, which certainly counts as a negative feedback loop large and enduring enough to fix the problem. But if they aren't relying on that, what's their excuse?
Spruce Greenland, Hunter Greenland, Hooker's Greenland, Asparagusland (if it browns a bit as well), Army Greenland (once we're past Asparagus), Brunswick Greenland, #013220land...
There's nothing wrong with asking why something happens.
So, If we were in a thread about new medical procedures that affect HIV transmission, and somebody asked why the simpler, common sense, Cabbage Patch theory of Child Origins was being ignored in favor of the S.E.X thory those silly scientists propose, there would be no reason to be dismissive? If I thought somebody asking that sort of question actually meant it, I'd try to give them an honest answer*, but why shouldn't I assume they are not really honestly confused, but tossing in a deliberately spurious question, in an attempt to throw the argument off track, politicise it, ot just plain troll? Sometimes, you read a question, and think, "What are the odds the person really doesn't know THAT and is really honestly asking to become more informed?"
There's some "simple, common sense" reasons to doubt that sea levels will or should rise uniformly, and most of us learned the first one of them about 3rd grade (in the US system).
1. The oceans aren't starting from static equilibrium - if they were, there would be no currents, as all the water would have already gotten to where it was going. So the question assumes something we already know is false, that the oceans can swiftly get to a static equilibriums state. Knowing that there are currents is enough to make a reasonable person doubt the question, Water keeps rushing from place to place all over the oceans, it never stops flowing as a whole, and it has from times well before the contemporary (AGW related) era, so why does it seem reasonable to assume that NOW it should all swiftly get to the lowest spot possible and stay there? How how old were you when you first heard about ocean currents?
2. Oceans are very large. Why does it seem like common sense to some that changes happen near instantaniously in such big objects? Wouldn't it be more common sense to find out something about the time scales for other changes in the oceans? How old were you when you learned there were tides, and did you learn that high tides are higher in some places than others, and at some times of the year than others? That's probably something people who live well away from seacoasts start getting exposed to by 6th grade or so, but if they missed it then, there's typically this course in junior high school, usually called something like Ecology or Earth Science. It's the course people who want an easy pass on their required science credits take, if Introductory Chemistry or Physics seems daunting. (all this assumes the child lives in a state with at least some science requirements for secondary education, but despite the problems of the US educational system, the vast majority of states do have science requirements)
3. The Earth is a flattened sphere with some odd buldges, not either a true sphere or an egg shape. We're not just talking mountains and valleys here, but larger scale differences, caused in part by the Earth's rotation, and by the continents themselves. Many people don't pick that fact up until high school or even college, but it was probably offered too in those same Earth Science type classes. Is that enough to explain why everywhere doesn't see the exact same sea level rise? If I didn't know one way or the other, I would at least consider the possibility. Maybe the Earth's rotation means that sea levels will rise more near the equator, and less at the poles, or something like that, or maybe water piles up a bit towards the leading edges of the continents (leading being in the direction the Earth rotates). Without knowing why the Marshall islands levels are rising faster than some other places (what other places), wouldn't it make sense to find out what other places they are being compared with? (In fact, both those effects happen and have an impact on how much sea level rise some places see - there's an actual answer that applies to the Marshalls).
4. 'i kan reed (749298)' has given a fair explanation for part of this question in the same thread. I just want to point out that many people learn at an early age that the Panama canal uses locks to raise and lower ships passing through, and that these are absolutely necessary because the sea levels on the two ends are different. Again, that's the kind of thing that might make the questioner realize that the whole real world isn't staying in line with the base assumptions of the question - it's not just since AGW hit the news, but all sorts of "ocean facts" that seem to say there's something the questioner doesn't understand, but has assumed they already do. Now that bit about the Panama canal is a bit esoteric. If a reader lives in Europe or Asia, they might well have completed a good education and never run across it, and they may well have heard much more about the Suez canal, which seems to work differently re. sea levels. I'm also sure many US schools rush through Panama Canal - Teddy Roosevelt - Yellow Fever - there we're done with that decade. But how do I know if that's an informative example or the poster will come back with some B.S. question about what relevance does a man made canal have to do with natural phenomina?
*The temptation to say I'd try to give them a straight answer finally overwhelmed me. Bite me pun haters!
When methods that have been well tested, and which have well known effects are not chosen, despite all sorts of problems with other methods, then it's only logical to think the people doing the choosing don't like some of those effects. I don't just think it's those people on the site you visited a week ago. I'm really starting to think at least some of the people trying out these exotic drug cocktails to execute felons have deliberately picked methods that are designed to maximize pain and duration of suffering. And there's not a one of them who didn't swear an oath on the federal or their own state's constitution, all of which have a clause against cruel and unusual punishment in some form or other.
Removal doesn't, by itself imply punishment, at least not punishment appropriate to a particular crime. We could remove criminals from society permanently by hanging them all, even the ones who merely wrote bad checks. We could make all sentences life without possibility of parole, or punish with massive but brief periods of torture where the criminal was not kept from society for more than a few days or so, or various methods that would have no real connection between what crime was committed and the severity of the punishment.
But once we start trying to make punishment fit the crime, we have real problems with removal being a consideration. We let criminals have access to lawyers, send and recieve mail, have visitors, and so on. We limit access to the rest of society, but except in cases such as solitary confinement and supermax lock downs, we don't take those limits to the extreme. We just put enough restrictions of the criminals we can control them. We have to put control restrictions on them whether the goal is to punish, to deter, or to rehabilitate. As, for example, putting them out on parole where they rejoin the general society, but restricting them associating with other former criminals. Sure, those restrictions may feel like punishments to the individual, but the individual criminal has to be controlled to achieve any of the possible goals, justice, deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, whatever. A criminal who thinks society has no right to punish him may think of the same restrictions as abuses, bullying, or the consequences of class struggle, and not consider it as 'punishment' at all. .
If removal from society is a legitimate motive, then what happens (to take a real world case of which I have personal knowledge) when a criminal is a large, muscular male who has a history of unarmed assaults on citizens, specific to bar fights, and he gets shanked in the pen and ends up a parapelegic with limited movement of the upper body and a regular need for dialysis? Should this result in automatic release? All this guy ever did was get drunk and then get into fights, and he doesn't sound like he poses much risk of that now, so do we still need to remove him from society? I can see a parole board taking the protection of society issue into account here, but I can see them taking a lot of other things into account as well, such as whether he may get better medical care on the outside.
And what about rapists? Should their sentences take into account whether their testosterone levels are still similar to when they went in or not? Should we free the teacher who molested her student because she has passed through menopause and so may (or arguably, may not).have much less interest in reoffending? (I may be stretching that last point a bit - we don't usually seem to sentence female teachers to all that much time for sex with their students, we don't know how much menopause will affect a given woman's sex drive, etc.).
I'm not saying you are wrong to factor in removal, just that a. we can't always count it as a factor at all, and b. we don't often know how to evaluate what society needs and what the criminal needs, even if we want to factor in removal.
There's a great book by the artist Wayne D. Barlowe, called "Expedition". it shows the life forms of a fictional planet called Darwin 4 . With dense atmosphere and low gravity, Everything evolves big, and almost nothing has anything like eyes (sonar is both popular and often very advanced). Without giving too much away for those who still haven't run across this, there are several common body plans that tend to run through whole phyla, and which don't occur on Earth, but make really good sense on Darwin 4. The underlying science is generally sound - I base this on the way various people who have read it point to this or that creature as less probable than the others, but seem to pick out different ones. This book has become my standard for SF aliens.
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