swansont

Hey, Bush visited India in 2006. http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/mar/01bush25.htm http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=63504 I guess he had a big entourage, too. And it wasn't just that one one hotel. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4766670.stm Whaddaya say — remotely close?

NPR does compete, though it's with other nonprofits (American Public Media, Public Radio International and Public Radio Exchange) and with locally produced content. I don't see why another nonprofit could not be created to compete with NPR. But that doesn't seem to be the author's intent — doesn't just want to provide content, he wants to make a buck at it, above and beyond a salary he'd draw, and I do have a problem with that. It says that all speech that is broadcast has to be commercial. It says "if what you say can't draw a large enough paying audience, screw you. You have to pay if you want the first amendment." What do you tell the students at your local college radio station, when the school decides that tuition and fees are already too high, and a commercial broadcast license isn't in the cards? "You aren't worthy of the right to free speech. It's only for the rich, or at least people with jobs." Once speech is a commercial commodity, what then? This ties directly into net neutrality, too. If you can pay, your message gets out there faster. If you can't, slower or perhaps not at all. He didn't call for them to stop, and he did call for the cessation of money to NPR. Why is this surprising to you? He doesn't want government money subsidizing broadcasting, period. While we're at it let's make radio astronomers pay for their spectrum, too, or auction it off if they can't ante up.

As I indicated earlier, I'd like to see a defense of earlier trips by other presidents. Why is this one being singled out? Because it's 10 days long? Is it more efficient to fly to Asia once or more than once? Should he break the trip down into separate trips to India/Indonesia and South Korea/Japan? By all means, investigate the itineraries and expenses and compare. Here are the trips http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_trips_made_by_the_President_of_the_United_States In his first two years, Obama looks like he will have made 16 international trips. GW Bush made 11. Clinton made 8. GHW Bush made 15.

I understand the metaphor, and I was not asking for substantiation. The problem I was attempting to point out is that the more I have to decipher what someone else says, the harder it is to communicate. If I have to assume that you meant something other than you wrote, then all bets are off. Case in point — your response indicates you did not understand the point I intended to make in my post. Whose fault is that? Obama is not literally in bed with unions.

The logical flaw is the continuing mistake of equating NPR with public broadcasting. The author says he is targeting NPR ("These are questions for Congress to explore when it looks into whether to continue funding for NPR.") NPR is one source of programming, which takes no direct government money, and is being singled out by people who don't like the speech that comes from it. This is made clear in the first couple of paragraphs of the article. The only way to stop money going to NPR is to put restrictions on it. So whether or not Newscorp gets indirect government money is relevant, owing to government censorship issues. "Censor them but not me" is hypocrisy. The author also sins by omission, because he later expands his argument to all public broadcasting; if the stations that broadcast NPR were to suddenly take advertising dollars and be in direct competition with commercial media, commercial media would suffer. Advertising budgets would not magically expand; the same pie would likely be just cut into smaller pieces and all commercial broadcast companies would see their profits go down. The perceived inability for that programming to compete in the 1960's has melted away in the era of cable TV. It's really not a stretch to think that they could be one more competitor, taking that much money away from Fox, et al., if their funding got cut off.

NPR is non-profit, so that's kind of a tautology. If Newscorp did not make a profit the shareholders would be unhappy, but they would not cease to exist. They simply wouldn't have any money left over after paying their expenses. Same as NPR. If either Fox or NPR does not bring in as much as they spend, they would eventually cease to be. AFAIK the idea behind public broadcasting is that for-profit enterprises will not broadcast material that will not bring in a profit, but these programs still have value to the public. So the government provides for it. Public broadcasting is bigger than NPR. The author is a hypocrite if he wants to suspend funding for speech he doesn't like, and yet have that right to speak, and also take federal money while doing so. (at the very least, libraries that get federal money subscribe to the WSJ)

But "Obama is literally in bed with the Unions" is?

So you prefer not to talk in rhetoric, and your one example is rhetoric. That must be the biggest bed in the world. Is it located in Washington DC? I might go see it. lit·er·al·ly actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy

(emphasis added) What? http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/107451-obama-says-hell-submit-trade-agreements-to-congress-as-soon-as-possible

I asked about the WSJ, not Fox. Again, NPR doesn't broadcast anything, and gets only a little of its money from the government, and all of that is indirect. What you would need to do is de-fund CPB, as I mentioned above. It's the radio stations that buy content from NPR, but they get content elsewhere, too. And putting restrictions on where they get content sounds like government censorship to me. Do you really think that conservative programming is competing for viewers or listeners among people listening to NPR programs?

You do see it about every year, though. 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/opinion/31RANG.html 2005 http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/138944/index.php 2006 http://www.house.gov/list/press/ny15_rangel/CBRStatementonDraft02142006.html 2007 http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/01/democratic_cong.html 2009 http://sweetness-light.com/archive/rangel-d-to-re-introduce-draft-bill

Does anyone care to defend all of the trips made by previous presidents?

So the premise is that there's a civilization that is so advanced it can time travel, but their communication technology looks like some of our present day devices? Even though our own technology has morphed in appearance over time? They couldn't even invent anything that looked like a bluetooth headset?

As far as I can tell, yes (i.e. the video doesn't look faked). Combustion can ionize some of the gases, and then the microwaves interact with the charged particles.

I'm not sure how to answer the question. In the coffee cup example, it will lose mass as it cools because energy is being lost from it — you have a system, and a boundary. With the universe, there is no boundary. The energy is still there. However, the description of the universe uses General Relativity, and the cooling of the universe is due to its expansion, so you have to be very careful how you account for energy, because energy conservation is only applicable within a reference frame. The situations aren't analogous to each other.

Murdoch doesn't pay for a license, the company he runs does. They each don't pay for a license. NPR doesn't have a license, AFAIK, because they don't broadcast anything. The stations that subscribe to its content do. What does this have to do with whether or not the WSJ has gotten federal money (and so would be hypocrites for whining about NPR getting some)?

Near the earth's surface, the slowing of time is given by gh/c^2, while the change in energy is mgh. How do you equate the two?

By "reduced to material" which of the above two uses do you mean?

The last time you claimed conflict of interest you at least admitted it wasn't an absolute. http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/13165-clintons-elder-statesman-role/ I'll just say this, so we don't have to go over the same ground: "There is a conflict of interest" is not the same as "there could be a conflict of interest," and it is also different than "there doesn't have to be a conflict of interest" If you still insist that it's a conflict of interest, you should tell the Fed, because they do it, and unlike some other government defined-benefits programs, the Fed's did not suffer from underfunding issues. Employees don't even have to contribute out-of-pocket. (emphasis added) http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/testimony/1999/19990225.htm

That's part of the equivocation Sisyphus was pointing out. "Memory/information storage is materialistic" and "memory/information storage is made of a material" are two very different statements. I don't see where anyone has claimed the latter, so denying that it's true misses the point.

! Moderator Note Xinwei Huang, I will reiterate my call for the presentation of a careful analysis in support of your claim, and invite you to (re)read the speculation forum rules, linked near the top of the page.

YES

But the system already exists for some of us. Where is the conflict of interest in the Thrift Savings Program?

Because objects absorb light of different colors, depending on their chemical composition and structure. The light that is reflected into your eye — what you see — is missing these colors. You see what's left over. Chlorophyll, for example, absorbs red and blue light strongly. The green is reflected, so plants look green. http://www.tutorvista.com/content/biology/biology-iv/photosynthesis/photosynthetic-pigments.php

Yes. Fox certainly has exclusive use of parts of the spectrum for their broadcasts. (NPR, as far as I understand, only provides content to radio stations, so it doesn't.) It occurs to me that a call to cut funding to NPR (such as Rep Lamborn's) might be unconstitutional. You would have to tell corporate entities how to spend their money. But since corporations have been recognized to have a right to free speech, and money is speech, wouldn't those restrictions be a violation of the first amendment? The only way to do this would be to de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which, in essence, means Lamborn wants to kill Big Bird. We can send him a Strangle-Me Elmo doll.