As on pedant to another, I believe the technical term in "Starship Troopers" was "mobile infantry", which is accurate but a little too general--I've never encountered infantry that weren't mobile, except maybe after a regimental drunk. Or I guess in Europe between 1914 and 1918.

"Starship infantry" would have been better, although given the book's purpose as pro-military propaganda it lacks that romantic haze required to blur away the pointless death and destruction such troops have always created when deployed outside their own borders.

So you've laid out a number of hypothetical fantasy scenarios. It seems you think you're constructing an argument, but it isn't clear what that argument is.

The central criticism of this violation of due process is that it is precisely leaving out the important step of determining if anything similar to your hypothetical fantasy scenarios pertains in cases where the person in question is not an "imminent threat" to anyone.

If you wanted to remove yourself from the argument you really couldn't have done a better job of it. Do please come back when you have something relevant to say about the quite clear criticisms that have been leveled at this policy of extra-judicial killing by those of us who support the rule of law.

The OP is engaging in the "binary idiot" fallacy, which is the belief that there are only two categories of things: GOOD and BAD, admitting of no degrees. They then find something they claim is much worse than the topic under discussion, assert it, and walk away believing they have somehow demonstrated that what is in their view the lesser evil has now been promoted to the "GOOD" category.

Like so many rhetorical moves when discussing politics, this is nothing but a declaration that, "I can't answer your point so I'm going to try to change the subject to something completely unrelated and hope by obfuscating the issue I'll be able to claim I won." Lefties used to do this all the time to deflect criticism of the Soviet Union.

This is definitely a thing. The average manager is far more interested in having workers they can feel power over and bully than they are in anything else, and it's difficult to intimidate an older, more experienced worker. There is also the ageist perception that older workers are less mentally adept than their younger, less experienced, more naive counterparts.

Several people have suggested teaching, but that is a poorly paid job with very high time demands, unless you're wiling to do a really crappy job.

The more hardware-oriented end of network IT is the most plausible option given your experience, and it won't be impossible to make the jump, but be prepared to overcome a lot of prejudice, and think of your job search as "looking for the right person to work for" rather than "looking for someone who will hire you". I can't emphasize enough how poor most managers are, and the ones who reject you are likely ones you don't want to work for. The ones who recognize the value an older worker can bring to the company are the good ones.

It says nothing of the kind, because that is a claim that would require the individuals who are making the decisions about who to kill to be all-knowing and infallible, which they are manifestly not. The memo explicitly states that it is for people whom an "informed high level official of the US government" thinks for some reason is a "high level ranking al-Qa'ida leader located outside of the US".

Anyone with more than a grade three education will be aware that the set of "people categorized as X by some person based on imperfect intelligence and torture carried out by questionable foreign intelligence services" and "people who would be categorized as X by a due process of law" have at best limited overlap.

The whole point of due process is to protect citizens from the inevitable errors and corruption that human beings are subject to.

It is appalling that anyone who is capable of posting on /. is incapable of understanding the basic role of due process in protecting citizens from individuals in government who may want to do them harm, or who are simply subject to innocent error.

From the summary: "His solution is elegant ...his measure would create a required minimum 'Return on Investment' scale that corporations need to follow to be viable, and these types of metrics are very industry specific. Another issue is that many large corporations stay in business because they don't take unnecessary risk..."

Which is to say, the proposal requires layers upon layers of kludgy patch-ups to make it even remotely plausible, which will make it highly gamable in ways that mere technologists will never figure out, but the sociopaths who run companies will be all over.

There are some fairly well-known, well-tested ways of dealing with this, Glass-Stegal being the most obvious one. People who are attempting to create new, untested solutions are missing the point.

Correct. I've been pointing this out for years, and the responses have been pretty much what we've seen to this article:

1) Everything is "incremental" if you equivocate on the meaning of "incremental", somethings implying "builds on past inventions" and sometimes implying "only adds slightly to pre-existing capabilities"

2) Cell phones and the Internets!

Network technology has certainly been a socially important feature of the past 50 years, but my grandmother was born in 1886 and by the time she was 50 (1936) the following things that had been impossible when she was born were commonplace:

* heavier-than-air powered flight...
* ...for commercial travel
* ...and warfare

* moving pictures...
* ...with sound
* ...and in colour

* antibiotics

* electric appliances for the home
* radio communication
* mass produced automobiles for the common person

And so on.

In the first 50 years of my life the inventions that have changed the face of the world comparably are:

* Cell phones
* the Internet

Not small things, but there are only two of them. Three if you count "ubiquitous computing" as separate from the 'Net.

By a simple count alone the pace of major, socially-changing innovation is a factor of three lower than it was a hundred years ago.

It has been my experience that posts where the poster annouces their "suspicions" are almost alway gibberish, displaying a profound ignorance of the most basic elements of the subject they have suspicions about. It really is a useful litmus test, to the extent that I think /code should be modified to automatically down-mod any post that contains phrases like "I suspect that" and "my suspicion".

It's not that there's anything wrong with expressing doubts. It's that this specific way of putting it seems to be used almost exclusively by people who don't know the first thing about what they are talking about.

With regard to the question: the structure function of the proton, which describes its charge distribution, is precisely what these experiments are all about. The "radius" of the proton is in fact a parameter of the structure function, and the curious aspect of these results is that the discrepancy cannot be "easily" explained by naive adjustments to it.

It's worth noting, however, that the structure function has more-or-less exponential tails in most models, and the muon orbitals have much smaller characterisitc radii than the electron orbitals, so they are much more sensitive to the precise manner in which the structure function falls off with radius.

For comparison: consider low Earth orbit satellites. If the Earth's atmosphere falls off just a little bit more slowly than expected, it will affect the orbits of such satellites much more than ones even a few hundred kilometers higher up.

It is very likely that there is some extremely subtle effect that is being neglected or approximated inaccurately in our calculations of the structure function that is the root cause of the discrepancy seen here, but whatever it is, you can be sure that the explanation isn't "easy", regardless of what suspicions you may have.

This is the critical thing, in much the same way that decoupling wealth and power from land ownership during the Industrial Revolution was incompatible with a culture that valued landed estates on a moral basis, and associated them with a person's identity (at least for the gentry, who were after all the only people who counted as "people", back in the day.)

It took something closer to centuries than decades for a relatively small and educated class to come to terms with that (my Scotish friends tell me England is still struggling with it.)

Today, we have a system of distribution of benefits from social producitivity [*] that depends on "work", while automation is rapidly eliminating jobs while maintaining productivity (and therefore profits for owners.)

It is of course completely indeterminate how this is going to end, but we can be pretty sure that a hundred years from now the status quo of the past century in which paid corporate employment has been the common basis for the distribution of wealth, won't be the norm, and more than the leasehold farming and villiage life that was the norm in England in 1750 much resembled the average English life in 1850 (Male Employment in Agriculture/Industry = 1760: 52.8%/23.8%; 1840: 28.6%/47.3%).

[*] if you don't think social goods like the rule of law in general and the Companies Act in particular are absolutely necessary, though admittedly not sufficient, for "private" corporations to exist, much less thrive, you might be a libertarian lunatic

Then why does every single story on new work in this area appear beneath a headline announcing how badly previous work underestimated the effects?

The answer, of course, is that the public debate about AGW has nothing to do with the science of AGW.

The sole policy prescription the pro-AGW side have is, "Reduce CO2 emissions by any means necessary except investment in nuclear power, even if a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it is infeasible to the point of causing hundreds of millions of premature deaths."

The anti-AGW side say, "Yew kin take ma coal when yew pry it outta ma cold dead hands." As near as I can tell, they have a deep emotional connection to soot.

Neither side is interested in rational policy responses to the problem (Not quite true: there are a few lonely voices on the pro-AGW side that have attempted to have a science-based policy debate, but they are marginalized by the mainstream IPCC process and the sensationalist, anti-scientific press. Just ask Christopher Landsea.)

I believe the correct terminology in the current version of NewSpeak is "job consumer".

The data suggest lower IQ males are more likely to start smoking pot: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3077857&cid=41148355 (and kudos to the guy who responded to that comment by suggesting pot smoking turns women into men!)

I'd love to see these sorts of study first released with the blind terminology, so the claim would be, "X causes Y". Blind the demographic variables too. Let the reviewer evaluate THAT and see how much of the actual review is based on the quality of the data and the analysis rather than the bias of the reviewers.

This study was obviously pretty questionable, even on a cursory look. As I said at the time of the original article (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3077857&threshold=3&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=41148355):

"A randomized controlled trial is by far the best means of proving causality, but a strong dose-response curve is a good secondary indicator. In this case, the data don't seem to support the contention of the abstract very well....

There are a couple of striking things: the percentage of males jumps markedly as the regularity of cannabis use goes up, and the initial IQ drops. So this study shows that young men with slighlty lower than average IQ are more likely to engage in regular cannabis use, and this may or may not result in a further decrease in their IQ over time."

This was apparent after about five minutes of looking at the paper (admittedly, I'm reasonably experienced at this, but you'd expect the people who reviewed the paper to be as well.) That it got passed by reviewers and published in PNAS is a travesty.

The difference in developer productivity is at least a factor of two between cubes and offices. It may be as high as a factor of ten in some cases. So you waste a lot of money on salary--which is the dominant expense in development shops by a very large factor--by having cubes rather than offices.

So the answer is clearly anything but money. If it was just about money (the least money for a given work product) small teams of developers in good conditions would be strongly favoured.

Businesses are not run to maximize productivity, they are run to maximize manager's feelings of power and control.

No.

They first have to select specific wavelengths and then--it sounds like--frequency-shift them.

To call this "heat" is a deliberately misleading statement designed to elicit precisely the question you are asking, as that will attract much more of our most limited resource--attention--to this otherwise interesting but essentially esoteric work.

"Heat" in ordinary parlance is constituted by vibrational modes that obey the principle of equipartition, which this "heat" manifestly does not.