I would be fine with you not wearing a seat belt, as long as it does not affect me when you get into an accident, including:
- my health insurance premium does not go up because you pose a greater risk of requiring treatment (if your answer is: differentiate premiums between seat belt wearers and libertarians, how do you monitor that differentiating without an even greater breach of your Liberties?)
- my taxes don't go up because you are now a burden on the emergency medical care system
- the road is not closed off longer because the accident is now more serious, leading to more traffic jams.
- if an accident is my fault, my punishment does not go up because you are now dead/seriously injured instead of not/lightly injured
- the police and medical staff are still available to help me and not wasting their time on the greater time required to investigate/treat a serious or fatal accident compared to a fender bender. If your answer is: hire more police and medical staff, than realize that this will drive up the cost of said staff by more demand. If your answer is: train more staff to increase supply, this will cost taxpayer money since those institutions are generally subsidized, and/or take potential candidates from other fields where they would actually add value to society rather than scrape your libertarian remains off the tarmac.

In other words, your decision to not wear a seat belt places a claim on a number of scarce goods if you get into an accident, which affects more people than just you.

Positive rights such as public safety and national defense are different from the classical (negative) rights that the parent referred to. Classical rights (e.g. the negative rights listed in the US Bill of Rights such as freedom from censorship, cruel punishment, illegal search and seizure) do not need a government to enforce them, since without a government you wouldn't need those rights.

Of course, the negative rights that protect you from the government are worth an awful lot without a bunch of positive rights which indeed need a government to enforce them, such as the right to life and property. The thinking of the Bill of Rights is that the (U.S.) government would naturally provide for positive rights such as the right to property (by enforcing already existing common law) and the national security (since fighting the Brits was the raison d'etre of the U.S. government); but that the government would need to be forced to provide for the 'negative' rights.

Also, positive rights are generally political choices: how much healthcare, education, and public safety is reasonable and when is the cost (in dollars or liberty) too high? So, it can be wise to leave those to the political process, while the negative rights are best enshrined in the constitution and left to the judiciary; although it is easy to argue that by not updating the constitution to reflect such positive rights such as non-discrimination and privacy the US supreme court was forced to become more political than similar bodies in other states such as the German Bundesverfassungsgericht.

You are right in a sense, but I think you are seeing "rights" too narrowly. The distinction that is generally made is between classical, negative rights (the ones in your 'bill of rights') and the positive, modern, or social rights (such as in your "equal protection" clause and in many european constitutions and also in some articles of the universal and European declarations of human rights.

The right to free speech is a "classic" (human) right. It is something between you and the government, and it acts as a prohibition on the government. It is a 'negative right' in that the government isn't forced to *do* anything, they're forced to not do stuff, like putting you in prison if you say stuff. The bill of rights used the phrase "congress shall pass no law" for a reason. The right doesn't mean that the government has to pay publishing cost for your newspaper, and it also doesn't mean that other citizens are forced to listen to you or banned from telling you that you're a twit if you 'exercise' your basic right. These rights can be "absolute" in the sense that they allow no exceptions, although it often isn't (the classical example being yelling 'fire!' in a crowded cinema) and in principle they cannot clash, since every negative right bans the government from doing something. The right to the freedom of the press and the freedom of religion do not clash: if you exercise your press freedom to say that not all Catholics are holy, there is no clash of rights, since the freedom of religion never prohibited you from saying that, it simply prohibits the government from establishing, favoring, regulating, or banning any religion.

The right to healthcare (and education, housing, property non-discrimination, etc) are all "social" (human) rights. They are generally positive rights, where the government has to provide something for the citizen. These rights are never absolute, in the sense that it is obvious that no one can receive all the education, health care, etc that money can buy. Also, these rights can clash with each other and with the classical rights: my right to self-expression can clash with your right to non-discrimination.

Sometimes, a right can be both 'positive' and 'negative'. For example, the right to "life" in the universal and European declaration of human rights (and implied in your declaration of independence) is mainly negative, in prohibiting the government of killing you in most circumstances, but can (and is) also interpreted positively as a positive duty to prevent certain loss of life and/or to investigate suspicious death. Similarly, the right to own property (e.g. article 17 UDHR but see also the 3d-5th amendment in the US Bill of Rights) is a negative right in prohibiting the government from taking your stuff (except through taxes, eminent domain etc.). However, it also implies a duty for the government to protect your property by banning and investigating theft etc, although the US Bill of Rights is phrased to exclude those duties by listing prohibitions against search, seizure, and quartering by the government, and does no list a "right to property".

Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_obligations
- http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
- www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf

Very good!

Did you forget to press the login button?

In China and Iran, this is probably true.

In the USA, it is provably false: the entire process of a death sentence is more expensive than life imprisonment due to a more complicated process and more (mandatory?) appeals. The average time between sentencing and execution is now 15 years, so you are feeding, housing, and guarding them for probably around a third of their natural time left anyway.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/

I think it would be best to have a firing squad composed of the jury that found someone guilty and imposed the death penalty. If you have the guts to condemn someone to die, I think you should also have the guts to execute that penalty.

(and yes, I also think that every non-vegetarian should be willing to butcher an animal)

I'm an academic and just returned from a sabattical in Jerusalem. I can imagine a lot more reasons for a bright scientist to emigrate than just salary:

- Israel is still a very religious state, with e.g. no civil marriage (you marry before either the rabbi, the imam, the priest, etc, but no religion = no marriage and a mixed marriage means someone must convert). There is a minister of religious affairs and the state in waist-deep in a number of religious issues. Jewish religious schooling is mandatory in most schools. Citizenship is linked to religious/ethnic heritage.

- Israel is a segragationist state, with a large part of its citizens treated as second class (palestinians, bedouin) and there are extremist groups that physically attack people and institutions who strive for more integration and dialogue (see: price tag attacks).

- Israel is an occupying country, its army occupying a territory with over 4M people living in it. You cannot travel through Israel (much less live in it) without seeing the effects of this, in terms of checkpoints, barriers, and a general siege mentality in the population.

- Israel is surrounded by countries that are either hostile, in a civil war, or both. Jordan is an exception but if you go through Jordan you come to Iraq (hostile, civil war), Syira (hostile, civil war), or Saudi Arabia (just hostile). This contributes to the siege mentality in the population.

tl;dr: If you live in Israel, you live in country based on a tight coupling of church and state; you cannot go on holiday except by airplane; your children will face 2/3 years of military service with a good probability of serving in actual combat and occupation duties; whenever you drive over 100 miles you hit a wall (often quite literally); and almost half the people living in the area controlled by Israel are treated as second class at best. It is a bit like moving to 1950's South Carolina but with closed borders so the only way out is by flying through Europe. No, thanks.

This is nonsense. Parking, especially parallel parking, is a skill that has very little to do with normal driving. You don't need to know mechanics of the car very well, you don't need to know how it reacts to weather conditions; you don't need to understand traffic flow and rules and make quick and safe decisions, etc. Parking is about undestanding how the car moves at low speeds and especially in reverse and how to combine a number of moves to move the car sideways.

In the Dutch lesson system, parallel parking is a component that is always tested and that takes a chunk of time from the instruction package, which could otherwise have been spent learning more valuable things (the same way shifting is easier now than 50 years ago as noted by GP)

In the US I have no idea.

In the Netherlands driving tests are quite difficult, and there are certainly people who give up at some point. It is pretty normal to have 30 to 40 hours of instruction before attempting the first test, so it also gets expensive pretty quickly for young people.

Look at it this way: you can't really put the heat exchange out in the ocean without any protection, since you really don't want a trawler, submarine, or whale disrupting the cooling of your nuclear plant. So in effect you will be building a contained heat exchange in the ocean, which will have some sort of intake, which can be clogged.

Also, the water needs to flow to bring cold water to the heat exchange. While the convection will cause some flow, powered pumps can make a lot more flow. And pumps by necessity have intakes and outflows, and these can be clogged.

Of course, you can filter every intake in any way you want, and then the filters will get clogged. Which I'm sure is what happened here (I don't think the jellyfish made it to the actual heat exchange).

Whether it is cheaper/safer to shutdown the reactor to clean out the intakes once every decade or to use some sort of automatic cleaning system with redundant pipes is an engineering question (as in, a question that takes actual fucking power plant engineers to solve, not armchair /.ers....)

Get a different carrier.

If all else fails: get a different country.

[in the Netherlands, carriers advertise with their subsidized plans, but most carriers have 'sim only' plans and there are also competing secondary carriers which don't have infra but resell the primary's bandwidth. Note that the (unsubsidized) phones in the shop display are priced way too high, so doing the calculation against the 'unsubsidized' phones in the shop will actually convince you to get the contract. Look on the Internet before you buy :-)]

I can second this. I used to program delphi, java, and c#, and was addicted to IDE's for all of them. Now I write python almost exclusively, and do it purely in a text editor and console. I miss some IDE features, especially being able to click on a module/function name and opening that function are useful to navigate in a codebase and especially to inspect third party modules I am calling. However, the IDE's I;ve looked at (eclipse+pydev, pycharm, and the emacs extension (epy?)). They were all to clunky to my taste and got in the way of my development rather than supported it.

In python, if I know the project you are working in and the libraries you use well I find that I don't really need code completion to work productively. And in a piece of the project that I am not really familiar I guess I don't want to get a false sense of familiarity and would rather work with the documentation and/or source code nearby.

Python seems to have around 750kloc (approximately 50/50 c and python code), while the linux kernel has 17mloc. That is more than 20 times as much code.

This does not mean Linus is doing a better job managing than Van Rossum, but it certainly says something about the respective complexity of the projects.

You should actually be very happy with this situation (except maybe the grading part - I'm an assistant prof. myself and I detest group-based grades, but for budgetary/policy reasons cannot always avoid them).

The absolutely best way to learn about a topic is to instruct people. By teaching your teammates the subject matter you are engaging with it in a much more intensive way than if you just learn and practice yourself. Explaining something requires a deeper and more complete understanding and responding to questions, even questions that seem stupid to you, forces you to express (and hence explicate) thoughts and connections that you understood already, but probably mainly implicitly. Add the nearby professor for the cases where you can't explain it and you are receiving an excellent education. As a professor, getting the top-tier students to explain the material to the rest is a job very well done.

(That said, I sympathize with your frustration at other students not putting enough effort into it, and I don't want to say that it is a good thing, just that it will also have good effects...)

This type of systems exists, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Management_System. AFAIK, the problems are (1) legacy systems on most national railroads that are slowly being phased out, if at all, and (2) technical difficulties like losing the controlling GPS signal in tunnels or urban areas, causing trains to do an emergency stop in the middle of a tunnel, which makes nobody happy.

I guess the real problem is that the One System to rule them all is trying to do lots of stuff (maximum speed, red lights, section control), making it complicated and expensive. The existing legacy systems usually only do red lights and/or maximum speed, which they can do a lot cheaper and less error-prone so the railroad companies are not too happy to switch over...

That might be part of the reason but it is certainly not the whole reason.

Case in point: trains in the Netherlands are pretty comfortable, even if most train rides are less than an hour, and two hours in a train is a long ride.

Trains can afford to be more comfortable because the extra operating costs of comfort are a lot less, since the whole thing doesn't need to be airborne. Surprisingly, the capacity and mass of a modern train (e.g. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbeldeks_interregiomaterieel) and a boeing 747 are about equal. The train is 350 metric tons for about 570 passengers; the boeing is 347 metric tons for 524 passengers. However, for the boeing fully half of that is fuel. Moreover, the train is more than twice as long as the airplane and has two decks over the whole length. A lot of comfort (leg room, room to walk around) doesn't cost mass or money, but makes the vehicle longer. Since trains rest on the ground and are guided by rail, while airplanes need to stay intact by their own integrity under gravity, trains can be quite a bit longer than planes.

There used to be 'third class' carriages as well aimed at the labouring class, but these went out of fashion. Apparently, people are willing to pay a bit to get a more comfortable ride. Theoretically, there is an equilibrium comfort where the marginal gains and costs of adding extra comfort are in balance; the point at which this is reached depends both on the willingness to pay for comfort and on the cost of adding comfort, so it stands to reason that trains are more comfortable.

(of course, as pointed out above, we don't really know since in most countries (even the US!) passenger rail is handled by a monopoly company, so we can't choose between Ryan Air and Emirates. Europe is starting to see a bit of competition on the tracks, but it is technically very difficult to allow multiple trains on the same route on the same infrastructure. So, it could be that we are paying too much to get too much comfort, and would rather have a cheaper service where they cram more chairs in each carriage...

(that said, most of the 'frills' that all the airlines used to have (free meals, free drinks, a waiter coming to your chair to get orders) aren't available in most commuter rail lines that I know of, so the whole thing is mainly about leg room and chair comfort)