Your name is apt. You must be smoking gunja. Taxation is simply dividend paid by the beneficiaries of government investment in infrastructure, education, peace and security. Some people make full use of it, they make a ton of money and they have to pay a hefty dividend. People who did/could not make use of it pay less. But no matter how poor one is, that person has the potential to create and nurture future American citizens. We must take care of them to get a healthy viable growing next generation.

All that tripe you hear from the right wingers arguing for lower taxes is just the winners of the current generation destroying the ladder they climbed.

Earth is emitting energy in the 300K temp range. Sun is emitting at 6000K range. Classical thermodynamics defines the maximum possible efficiency of conversion purely based on source and sink temperatures. With earth emitting at 300K which is nearly the ambient, where are we going to find a sink? The sun/earth ratio is 6000/300 = 20. To get the same efficiency as the present solar collectors, you need a sink at 15K.

For all this theoretical work, we could think of putting a huge thermocouple with one end in deep space pulled up by the space elevator. Hey! Let us build the space elevator using two different metals and the rungs using non conducting material. Dual project both space elevator and a space thermocouple! It is totally useless except may be it can sell one more issue of Popular Mechanics with cool graphics.

Both the libertarian ideal free markets and the general evolution of species are governed by the same dynamics. Optimize for short term versus long term, rigidly follow what worked before without trying anything new/seek novelty, hedgehog vs fox, etc. And both evolution and free markets do not foresee anything, they don't design for anything. They just keep creating variations and whatever survives survives. Neither evolution nor free market cares who wins or who loses.

That is how natural selection and evolution works, but we don't accept it as the natural thing and resign ourselves to the fate. We constantly use artificial selection. We domesticated plants and animals, we constantly create new cutlivars and breeds. Same way we need not accept the libertarian ideal completely unfettered free market. We can shape the fitness landscape. Government should not pick winners or losers, but Government should stop the race to the bottom. We could demand certain level of resilience, certain level of redundancy in the systems, certain standards. As long as these rules apply to all players, the playing field is level and the free markets and the competition would work.

This is nuanced defense for government regulations in the abstract, but I don't think I would be able to convince anyone. Takes too long, and too many people with vested interest disrupt the communication channels.

Babe Ruth said, "How can you think and hit at the same time?". But that was an intentional misdirection to throw his competitors and rivals off track. Slow motion analysis of ancient footage shows the slugger smuggled into the base a slide rule, a theodolite, an anemometer and a protractor all hidden in his jersey. You really don't believe some one could be that fat and be a star athlete didn't you? The truth is out, he was not fat, he was hiding these instruments in his jersey. He used them to calculate the trajectory of the pitch and the angle and speed at which he should hit the ball.

Well, enough posters have made the same point. But there is some interesting science hidden behind that stupid title and summary. Why does the fly respond to changes in airflow but not the airflow itself?. Flies have very low mass for the amount of surface area they expose to the air stream. Given all the little hairs and wing surface area, the air will feel to them as thick as oil feels to us. They will simply be carried by the air flow. It is not just that they can't fight it, they can't even feel it. It is like us sitting on the surface of the Earth which has a linear velocity of 1500 miles per hour at the equator, but we don't feel it. They can respond only to changes in airflow, which is turbulence. Quite interesting. Looks obvious once the result is known, but I would not have understood this purely based on theory. Of course there are fluid dynamicists who would have known this even before the experiment. Dale Anderson, Pletcher, Tannehill, Parpia .. may be they would have.

Let us say we get to break whatever you are doing and force you to watch this very interesting and enjoyable commercial, some three or four times a day, for about two weeks at a stretch at the end of every quarter. Would you still be so kind to them. Even the most interesting, entertaining, information packed commercial starts grating on your nerves after the sixth or tenth repeat.

A preposition is one thing a sentence should never end in.

Never in a million years, even if your life depended on it engage in exaggerations.

Don't be tautologically repetitive by repeating the same thing again and again.

Forswear grandiloquence.

Everyday I walk across a bridge built 120 years ago to carry horse and buggy traffic at 5 mph. Today it carries four lanes of traffic with city buses and 18 wheelers at some 40 mph. Would anyone even think of building something with this level of "over specification" or "over building"? Is it any wonder bridges hardly 40 years old designed to carry 18 wheelers at 65 mph are falling apart?

Sometime back some small solar wind even knocked out a satellite. Normally it would not even be a blip in the radar. But that satellite was the link to credit card processing in the pay-at-the pump gas stations. Almost all these gas stations have cut down their employee down to one guy who sells chips and soda. Almost all the bays are self service. When the pay at the pump payment system got knocked out, people had to fill the car and walk in to pay that lone guy. Lines started forming, then the lines stretched, and reached the exit ramps of highways, and the highway started getting blocked. But at the end, after the mess cleared, still there is no incentive to create alternate routing or redundancy in the system.

It costs money to make things secure. To make things robust. But if some company does it the right way and it competes with another company that does not, it is not going to be competitive. Yes, in the long run, catastrophe will strike and the chickens will come home to roost and the corner cutters would find themselves getting the short end of the stick. But, the non-corner-cutter could have been driven out of business before the catastrophe strikes.

So it all depends on the frequency of the odd ball event. If the odd ball event is less frequent than once in a decade, there is no structural incentive for any manager to do the right thing. Most people change jobs once a decade and they will not be there to face the music. This is a systemic structural thing. The race to the bottom is the only race there is.

It might not be a solar storm, or a terrestrial storm. It could be some fiber optic cable being accidentally severed. Or sabotaged. Or an oil spill blocks rail traffic somewhere. So don't think it is mere fear mongering or rationalize it saying solar storms are rare. Systematically our infrastructure has become very vulnerable without redundancy without factors of safety.

I agree with you in the first part. If the products are clearly marked and there is no confusion we should encourage competition. But don't malign customs agents. They do a surprisingly good job for their low pay and constant belittling by everyone.

This is the sparkfun multimeter: https://www.sparkfun.com/produ... These are the look and feel of Fluke: https://www.google.com/search?... I am glad the customs caught and destroyed the Sparkfun's imitations. I might have a different perspective on this than most (native born) Americans. I grew up in India where the " look and feel " infringement is rampant, and there is absolutely no enforcement. The best quality steel cases are made by a company called Godrej. I have seen cheap knock-offs with barely perceptible difference in name "Golred" Godrel" "Gotrej" etc etc.You have to be very careful when you buy stuff. The electrical fittings made by a company called Bos is top of the line. They will pack cheap knock offs inside discarded packaging of Bos and try to sell it to you. You need to fight the retailer, wholesaler and the manufacturer to get the right product. Have you seen "Clogged" tooth paste? Funny as it is, it exists/existed in India sometime back.

But most Americans born here grew up with more honest set of retailers, more honest wholesalers, reasonably effective enforcement, they have not had this cheap imitation knock off problem. The worst you would see is the Walmart brand (Equate?) of nasal spray next to one made by J&J. If you had never gone home and opened a package of Cynthol bar soap and find inside a foul smelling skin abrading cake of caustic alkali with Sinthol stamped on it, you have not been affected by these knock-offs. So all the power to customs agents to spot the cheap knock-offs and take suo moto action to knock the imitations off the planet.

If he had tried to make the multimeter in the "rounded rectangle" shape, with a form factor that will fit in one's palm, with a readable display facing the user, Apple would have sued zim for $30000 per infringement.

It might sound a little bizarre, but there are some users who demand that "exact reproduction of results of a previous run from the previous version" as an acceptance test of the new version. Even if the vendor proves the old run was buggy, and the old "gold standard" results are bad, they want exact rerun including the bugs. Apparently these customers have written acceptance test documents, written scripts to do the comparison with "gold standard" old results, got it all approved and got it signed off by every one up and down the chain of command. Changing that process requires something akin to getting a constitutional amendment passed. So the vendor doesn't get to sell the next version unless we migrate all the bugs too to the new version.

So many project files will have "version strings". Unless the project is translated into the newer version and saved with a new version string, the code will repeat all old runs. This strange thing goes down the food chain. Some CAD companies would let you "choose" an API from the older version at run time.

Small price to pay. You stole all their land.

Most military image recognition software looks for the outline of a tank. If there is a tree breaking the outline, human beings would identify the tank in milliseconds. Most image recognition software fail. It is a classic problem in image recognition.

It is object behind a translucent screen. It does some AI based image sharpening. It is not the classic tank behind a tree. Nor reconstructing a face partially hidden by faces or hoodies etc.

The entire flight control system is based on trust, and it works out ok because it is in the best interest of the planes to tell the truth. Except for small planes in the narcotics corridor, I don't think there is much of audit of the flight plans and verification of planes and identities.

When control towers "hand over" the planes from one to the next, there is no serious authenticated transfer of stuff. It is completely on trust. Control tower A says, "handing over to the next tower" it basically says, "stop talking to me, call the other guy and get instructions". Pilot calls the next tower, self identifies and asks for directions. If they had filed a fake flight plan of a chartered flight from say Aceh, Indonesia to Tashkent, Tajikistan the plane can change identities and fly through air defense systems without rousing suspicion. So many flight plans get filed, the flight does not take off for some reason or the other, and they don't bother canceling it. But you are right, what you gonna do with a 777 on the tarmac with 260 passengers?