Slashdot Mirror

"authoritarian leaders"... Leaders are by definition authoritarian, else they'd just be committee members

No, leaders by definition wield authority. That does not make them authoritarians "authoritarians":

Authoritarianism, principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual freedom of thought and action. In government, authoritarianism denotes any political system that concentrates power in the hands of a leader or a small elite that is not constitutionally responsible to the body of the people. Authoritarian leaders often exercise power arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law, and they usually cannot be replaced by citizens choosing freely among various competitors in elections.

The key Trumpian personality traits that have people concerned are prejudice toward racial or ethnic minorities, fear of the outside world, aggressiveness, defensiveness, narcissism, and and an overly expansive view of what his powers as president would be.

Theft, in law, a general term covering a variety of specific types of stealing, including the crimes of larceny, robbery, and burglary. Theft is defined as the physical removal of an object that is capable of being stolen without the consent of the owner and with the intention of depriving the owner of it permanently.

theft | law | Britannica.com
https://www.britannica.com/top...

We have a word for copying something. "copying". We have a term for doing it without the legal permission to do so "copyright infringement". Theft is a very different crime which is in no way related to copyright infringement in any way.

As Paul Erdos said: "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems".
I wonder what would come out after drinking Coffiest...

You can't BUY knowledge...

This is not true: the Encyclopedia Britannica is only $29.95, and if that's not buying knowledge, I don't know what is.

If Money can buy Knowledge, how is it that Trump/Drumpf is so ignorant???

No one has packaged a gold-plated, diamond crusted encyclopedia yet. <--Free business plan! I require no royalties for use of this idea.

Most reasonable people could come up with a list of the types of content they feel should be banned; when governments get involved then it becomes censorship, even if we agree with what is banned.

You're wrong here. Censorship can also be carried out by private entities. References: ACLU, Oxford dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia.

I simply disagree that is censorship. Private organization's can chose what they want to say and how, simply because they chose not to speak is not censorship since it is a personal choice; I only consider it censorship if a governmental body prevents them from speaking.

Most reasonable people could come up with a list of the types of content they feel should be banned; when governments get involved then it becomes censorship, even if we agree with what is banned.

You're wrong here. Censorship can also be carried out by private entities. References: ACLU, Oxford dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia.

"Russian Revolution" is the collective term for a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the eventual rise of the Soviet Union. -- Russian Revolution

1917 Russian Revolution
Russian Revolution of 1917

http://www.britannica.com/plac...

It looks like the prevailing winds are from the Mediterranean towards the south (east and west). So, if they were to build mountains along their East or South, it might work, but would shadow parts of Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Theater Missile Defense

http://www.britannica.com/topi...

Your thing of the day.

Remember THAAD is your friend

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/...

If you would like bonus points, remember all the people who were taking a crap on president Reagan because they said this was pointless.

Can you find a link to corroborate this, and update the Wikipedia articles on Sievert and CT Scan? Because every link I find corroborates the lower numbers that people are posting in this thread.

6.8 mSv
3 - 20 mSv
2 - 16 mSv
30 mSv
1 - 100 mSv
That last article lists Head CT as 56 mSv, and Cardiac CT angiogram as 40 - 100 mSv.

You're right posted the wrong link there

http://www.britannica.com/scie...

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., http://www.britannica.com/topi...

Looks like I got the fat and protein numbers backwards - fat is 95%, protein 95-98%.

Feces are 70% water. Of the remaining solid matter, 30% is bacteria, or 9% of the total mass. Furthermore, the mass of feces is generally significantly less than the mass of food ingested. Lastly, fecal bacteria consume many chemicals which are indigestible to humans.

Can someone explain why the article cites Wilbur Atwater as a Department of Agriculture scientist? I think he did his research as a faculty member at Wesleyan University. http://www.britannica.com/biog... Maybe he had funding from the Department of Agriculture? Maybe the author is trying to be dismissive of the scientific results by implying that it was serving an agenda? It was primitive work in the late 1800s, but it did set the foundation for a lot of more precise work on human metabolism. No one is questioning the main conclusions of Atwater that human metabolism obeys the law of conservation of energy, and that it is important (and difficult) to quantify energy intake.

Thomas Edison would be pleased, except he didn't originate the incandescent light-bulb. That honor goes to Swan, who sued Edison and as part of the settlement the light-bulb was sold under the Ediswan moniker. ref ref

"Liberal" has evolved different meanings in different places. I see you are from Germany so you may not be aware that "In the United States liberalism is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of the Democratic administration of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt" - http://www.britannica.com/topi... . "Liberal", "left", and "Democrat" are all but synonymous. I would be interested to know whether your experience in Germany is that the irrational rejection of technology is predominantly associated with the left.

Some weren't and some were. A few considered themselves Deists and some called themselves Christians. As far as I know none were Muslim. Jefferson respected Christ's teachings but did not consider him a divine being. They were a complex group of individuals.
http://www.jameswatkins.com/ar...

Most were raised in Christian environments but later came to question much of what they were taught. Still almost all of them respected the Christian religions moral teachings.

http://www.britannica.com/topi...

So while they were not all Christians many were and I never claimed all were.

Making sure to make the tracer Isotopic for the double win, trigger a Geiger counter to convince them this is real and make it easier to track.

http://www.britannica.com/scie...

Our experience with seat belt laws proves the opposite.

No, it doesn't. It's just another indication that personal safety isn't that important to many people.

It quite literally does. Your own words: "If things were going to be so good in the first place, then you wouldn't need to force anyone to do anything."

Things ARE much better if people wear seat belts. Better for drivers/passengers, better for insurers, better fore health care providers, better for the economy as a whole. Yet people still weren't wearing seat belts, and they did, in fact, have to be forced to wear them.

You are such a denialist, you deny even your own recent words. It's like watching a logical train wreck.

There has never been a problem with the broader ozone layer aside from the occasional unfounded assertion that it may be thinner than it used to be.

There are plenty of direct observations of the thinning of the ozone layer outside of Antarctica, and they are on strong scientific footing:

"Measurements from satellites, aircraft, ground-based sensors, and other instruments indicate that total integrated column levels of ozone (that is, the number of ozone molecules occurring per square metre in sampled columns of air) decreased globally by roughly 5 percent between 1970 and the mid-1990s, with little change afterward."

Or someone actually supports their "standard of proof" with evidence collected over a longer time frame than a few decades.

So how long, in your expert opinion, is a suitable time frame for observing the phenomena? I suspect it's close to 4 billion years.

Hrm... I think your numbers may be a bit off. Do you have a source for that? Everywhere I've read mentions that in a suitable climate, each person only needs about 1/3 to 1/2 of an acre for subsistence needs. So, most families would need only two to five acres, assuming a good growing climate and nearby irrigation sources.

40 acres sounds a bit more like what you'd see for a typical cash-crop farm. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

I'm sorry you're so stubborn, ignorant, and nationalistic to believe that a mere 1% of the ash generated from burning coal couldn't possibly escape into the atmosphere in the Fatherland. Unless you've got alien-level technology, your German scrubbers are bound by the same physics as those in the US - ~99% efficient is the maximum you can get.

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/t... - 99% efficient

http://www.britannica.com/EBch... - 90% - 99% efficient

http://www.gdnash.com/rocktron... = 99% efficient

Table 3 in this document directly compares particulate matter emission regulations in the US and Germany - as you can see, the average PM emissions for German plants is 50 mg/Nm^3 as opposed to 18.3 mg/Nm^3 for all new large plants in the US as mentioned in this document.

This is not even wrong. Payne had the idea first, Russell thought it was wrong, Russell later changed his mind and gave Payne credit: http://blogs.britannica.com/20... His work cites hers.

This is how science is supposed to work, although there is always a factor of fame involved in credit-giving, and women have in general not been as forceful in claiming or defending credit as men.

Furthermore, how many people claiming to be "outraged" by this were even aware of who had been given credit for figuring out the composition of the sun in the first place? Who amongst us is "shocked, shocked" that Russell--whom they had been giving credit to all these years, citing in papers, talking up at cocktail parties--didn't actually make the discovery that is commonly and incorrectly attributed to him?

If you want to ask why Spain is so dry, same answer: deforested mainly during roman times.

Seriously? You were just demonstrated to be full of manure and typing up the content of the wrong orifice. Instead of running away in shame and changing your /. account to reduce the frequency of nightmares of this public planing set to haunt you for years to come, instead of seeking counseling or joining a monastery, you are right back here fighting some sort of rearguard action?

No, I don't want to ask, why Spain is dry — it is the topic of neither the TFA nor of our cute little conversation here.

The semi-humorous point I was making is that the Earth — already inhabited by Homo Sapiense — has undergone many changes — some of them with very dramatic effects. In addition to Sahara's changes, I can name

1. Ice-sheet around Kodiak islands melting, forever isolating Kodiak bears (who can not swim) and forcing them to fork their own branch, so to speak — 11700 years ago.
2. The seas rising enough to make Tasmania an island about 10000 years ago (roughly 25000 years after the first humans arrived there);
3. Village of Mulifanua drowned in the sea about 3000 years ago;
4. City of Heracleion in Northern Africa sinks in the Mediterranian 1200 years ago. Well, finally, something you can blame on those Roman loggers.

And, of course, the giant elephant, nay mammoth in every AGW-alarmist's room: the Ice Age... If such stupendous changes in climate, ice-sheets, and sea-levels happened for some reasons before the humans had the technology blamed by the (in)famous "hockey stick" for the changes of today, is it not reasonable to doubt, anything other than those same reasons are responsible for what little changes are observed today?

And is it really so wrong — trolling and flamebaiting — to mock those, who insist, without any proof, some other reasons must be at play?

It's more like a 419 scam. They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.

Hopefully that was a typo. It is called 419 because that is the section of Nigerian law that makes it illegal.

Why don't you try educating yourself instead of sticking shit in your body. Opium was banned around the world because of the devastating effects addiction was having on the various populations. It was also an issue in the US, but less so as it had a lot of stigma attached to it and was consumed under other names like laudanum.

http://www.historywiz.com/down...
http://asianhistory.about.com/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBch...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

The last time CO2 levels were this high we had a massive die off.

CO2 levels have not been this high in any time period we've been able to provide an estimate for. Look at the historical CO2 levels against temperature.

Yow! That graph is pretty frightening. CO2 basically goes off the chart in the present, way above anything in the past..

That's temperature in Antarctica, though.

-- that graph only goes back half a million years. As a previous poster noted, the last time the CO2 was this high was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum: carbon dioxide levels spiked, the Earth heated by about 5.6 C, and there was, indeed, a massive die-off. That was 56 million years ago.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic....

http://www.wunderground.com/climate/PETM.asp

The GMO crops are often immune to diseases that plague traditional crops. They thrive where others die. They produce more per acre. There is a reason farmers buy the GMO seeds and that is that it makes them money.

Right. So how did farmers did before god sent us Monsantos of the world? Oh right, there used to be publicly funded agriculture projects, developing various strains by cross pollination and plain old natural selection.

For farmers in Africa, crop yields have NOTHING to do with GMOs, or even droughts or other natural famines. They have everything to do with piss-poor farming techniques and government. Case and point is Zimbabwe.

http://www.britannica.com/EBch...

And that story is not unique.

Yes they have to go back to buy more seeds but I remember my Grandfather buying new seed in the sixties. He didn't keep seed over year to year either.

I remember my grandfather, back in the 1980s, keeping seeds (oats) to plant next year. Same thing with potatoes and corn for the vegetable garden (also radishes, cabbage, etc. even saved some carrots over winter and ended up with a load of seeds from that).

You could also buy seeds from elevator for seeding. You know, that's where your grandpa most likely got his seeds. But today elevators would get sued for selling "pirated seeds"!!

http://www.grain.org/article/e...

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

This post of mine contained keywords that could have helped you Google this. First instalment of breakup of your homework :

1. Read the link on faeces http://www.britannica.com/EBch...
2. For each component :
        2a. Find out how it is influenced by diet. Hint - many have direct relation.

Not all unburned calories. Find out about more exceptions here : http://www.britannica.com/EBch...

"Einstein replied that to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

http://www.britannica.com/EBch...

So, where is the skepticism of all the "3D printing" hype stories? Why just last year I was assured that buying a 3D printer pays for itself in a year! Anyone done it outside of the fever dreams and delusions of breathless early adopters?

What I loved aout Europe was there wasn't a need for a car - unlike here in the most of the States. Not having to worry about parking or getting booted or towed or feeding the meter or .....

People bitch about European taxes. Well, take you car payment, insurance, maintenance, gas, registration, emissions testing and eliminate them.

You now have how much left per month? $400 - $500 - more?

And let's mention the reduction of stress from having to deal with all the chores associated with that car. I have to make time to go and get my car checked for emissions - and it'll pass - but I have to do it for the "privalege" of driving - even though it IS a nessessity here in the States.

Back to taxes...

Add in a single payer medical system - not this Obamacare crap - and those high European taxes do not seem so bad.

They are not perfect, but they have solved some social problems a bit better than we have.

You do realize that the vast majority of Europe is MUCH more densely populated than the US, and most US cities, which makes it more economical to create a public transportation system that can get you just about anywhere efficiently. The closest analogy in the US would be NYC or LA.

Europe population density: http://kids.britannica.com/com...

US Population Density: http://image.lang-8.com/w0_h0/...

San Francisco Population Density: http://geography.wr.usgs.gov/s...

Normally, feces are made up of 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. About 30 percent of the solid matter consists of dead bacteria; about 30 percent consists of indigestible food matter such as cellulose; 10 to 20 percent is cholesterol and other fats; 10 to 20 percent is inorganic substances such as calcium phosphate and iron phosphate; and 2 to 3 percent is protein.

Source.

So you're wrong. But thank you for your trolling, it made me learn something new today.

http://www.britannica.com/EBch...

"The action depends upon the influence of gravity (not, as sometimes thought, on the difference in atmospheric pressure; a siphon will work in a vacuum) and upon the cohesive forces that prevent the columns of liquid in the legs of the siphon from breaking under their own weight."

Not only is it morally reprehensible, it is not even effective.

And yes, it is torture.

The Senate report's findings are not some surprisingly new or unforeseeable result. This was well established and repeatedly pointed out to the Bush administration.

And No, the greatest US generation did not do this.

Only in a deeply warped society would some weasel lawyers construct the kind of twisted logic that you are espousing. Your definition is so far outside the mainstream, it doesn't even qualify as a joke. So yes, it is irrelevant.

And while I am happy that you are not happy about this state of affairs, it doesn't make a yota of difference. Your rational is irrational and the method profoundly wrong.

As to being able to catch terrorists without torture, you didn't pay attention to what I earlier wrote. We got all the RAF bad guys and one of the worst terrorists before Bin Laden was caught the old fashioned way, with solid intelligence and diplomacy.

Terrorism was always a reality in most Western countries (but North America) and we dealt with it without misplacing our values.

If you never even heard of Hitchens it's a pretty save bet that you never heard about any of this foreign history, and live on a Faux News diet.

Maybe you should try to travel the world a bit.

The hydrogen bomb IS a fusion bomb. Its been around since 1952.

The match you use to light a fusion bomb is a small atomic (fission) bomb.

Isn't that what parent said?:

The so-called "hydrogen bomb" has been in existence for decades. This is a fusion bomb.

The hydrogen bomb IS a fusion bomb. Its been around since 1952.

The match you use to light a fusion bomb is a small atomic (fission) bomb.

They could refuse to allow Amazon's trademark in their country.

Keep in mind most of them probably call the river Amazonas and not Amazon: http://global.britannica.com/E...

The .amazon and similar tlds are silly and look to me like money grabs by ICANN.

p.s. I proposed to the ICANN and the IETF to reserve ".here" for free local use by everyone similar to how the RFC1918 IP ranges are reserved. That would be the sort of thing I consider useful for a new TLD. We don't need "yet another dot com".

I was pretty clear on all accounts, try to reread it again.

You may believe you were, but you were not. Simply suggesting I "reread it again" when you could instead answer some of my simple direct questions is being disingenuous.

you believe Wiki is a source of truth for Logic

Don't tell me what I believe (you shouldn't state as anything as fact without evidence). I used Wikipedia because it was a handy source for a reasonably decent defintion or r.a.a. that I thought anyone reading this discussion could understand without too much trouble. I've understood and used r.a.a. as a logical tool since about five years before Wikipedia came into existence. I could also point you at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's page on r.a.a., or The Free Dictionary's.

Or here's a good one - Encyclopedia Britannica:

reductio ad absurdum, (Latin: “reduction to absurdity”), in logic, a form of refutation showing contradictory or absurd consequences following upon premises as a matter of logical necessity.

In common speech the term reductio ad absurdum refers to anything pushed to absurd extremes.

There's your definition at the end. In common speech. Not formal logic; common speech. It's like when people misuse "begging the question." It has nothing do with logic. This is exactly the sense in which you used it. It can't be anything else because I wasn't making any kind of logical conclusion when you used it. You thought I'd said something absurd and you grasped for a clever-sounding latin phrase that you - wrongly - thought was appropriate.

I can't find anything to support your view of r.a.a as a logical fallacy. Can you provide anything?

As stated, read a text book on Logic (my text books are well over 500 pages each) and actually attempt to "learn" the subjects. Or don't and continue believing that an opinionated summary makes you intelligent.

Am I supposed to be impressed that you have big text books? It's not "subjects"; it's a single term under discussion. I don't need to read a dozen books to understand what reductio ad absurdum is, because I've understood it perfectly since I was taught how it could be used to prove that the square root or 2 is irrational nearly 20 years ago. How can the application of a logical fallacy prove a mathematical truth?

You didn't get your version from The Big Bang Theory, did you? They appear to have made the same mistake.

Very common today that people believe that simply looking at a Wiki or Google result gives them knowledge, and it does anything but present "knowledge".

As opposed to reading an interview with someone who worked on a quantum computer, and extrapolating from what at this point I can only categorise as an anecdote (an anecdote of an anecdote, in fact) that "we can change quantum events by thinking about them" and stating the same as a fact, despite having no evidence in support of that view?

Not quite as bad as diving into a discussion on the holographic principle and declaring it to be poppycock without even taking the time to find out what the holographic principle is, but still...

As a summary and FYI, our shit is 50% bacteria (mostly e. coli.) by mass

BZZT! Thank you for playing.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/203293/feces

Normally, feces are made up of 75 percent water and 25 percent solid matter. About 30 percent of the solid matter consists of dead bacteria [...]

I'm not going to help edit, because I have little or no use for what common consensus is. I'm interested in fact and truth, not public opinion.

Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?

Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.

What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?

How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.

I'd also really like to se

I think it's fair to say that Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie have not been under-publicized. But it's time to hear more about the mathematician Sophie Germain.

Such a statement could only be made by one unfamiliar with history. As I recall the greek city-states had a habit of NOT attacking the populace during their conflicts, among other examples.

"Peloponnesian War, (431–404 bc), war fought between the two leading city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta. .... The years of fighting that followed can be divided into two periods, separated by a truce of six years. The first period lasted 10 years and began with the Spartans, under Archidamus, leading an army into Attica, the region around Athens. Pericles declined to engage the superior allied forces and instead urged the Athenians to keep to their city and make full use of their naval superiority by harassing their enemies’ coasts and shipping. Within a few months, however, Pericles fell victim to a terrible plague that raged through the crowded city, killing a large part of its army as well as many civilians." -- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/449362/Peloponnesian-War

In short, what you say may be true but it's misleading. My point still stands, although I'd probably want to amend it with the point that even trying not to fight a war or otherwise prevent attacking civilians outright still turns into a war of attrition (that'd be my major point about the use of civilian resources to fight) which leaves the civilians crowded and vulnerable to pestilence and plaque. Or their basic system of sanitation is destroyed or contaminated and under threat of war, regardless of how benevolent they believe their opponent is, civilians won't engage in the general grand public works to resolve such issues precisely because those things are "dual use" and liable as a target and civilians to be collateral damage. The same holds true today, as electricity powers lights for everyone, gasoline is used by everyone, etc. It's magic thinking to believe there aren't consequences upon the general population when you start dropping bombs, physical or cyber, upon the government.

I was born knowing every keyboard shortcut ever in use, so I can rationalize being a snarky dick about this.

So keyboard shortcuts are a synthetic a-priori category?

I was wrong in that it was allowed by prescription for 10 years, but then outlawed completely. Controlled substances act was 1970, 50 years after Heroin was banned, so there was clearly no medicinal use at that time.

Yes it was sold as a sedative for kids, and for colic, for for any reason Bayer could think of - those ads have been circulating online for at least a decade. I should remind you that advertising and availability don't mean there is a legitimate medicinal use, and certainly don't apply after the product has been banned. The controlled substances act says "currently accepted medical use", and at that time there was not one.

I meant to post more on marijuana since that is a far more interesting read. The testimony of Anslinger is well documented, should you seek it.

The American Medical Association, which would likely have argued the medicinal benefits of marijuana, was notified only two days prior to the hearing. Their representative, Dr. William Woodward, denounced the hearings as being rooted in tabloid sensationalism, and demanded an explanation for the secrecy involved. Anslinger ignored Woodward's vociferous objections -- when before the vote he was asked by Congress if the AMA agreed that the bill should be passed, a member of Anslinger's committee replied, "Yes, they are in complete agreement."

http://www.reefermadness.org/propaganda/essay2.html

You know what food contains half the iodine you need in a day. A potato.

From what I googled a potato and a boiled egg are enough. And you have to eat the potato's skin, since that's where all the iodine (and most of the vitamins and minerals besides iodine) come from (which is why I never skin my potatos, even when french frying them). But yeah, you can get plenty of iodine by eating the right foods (like that glass of milk or a bowl of strawberries).

For instance potatoes, one of natures perfect food, has a bad reputation so we only eat french fried.

You eat french fries with your steak?? You don't have hash browns with your breakfast? However, you're right about the "bad reputation". Potatos are only bad if you're a fatass. Salt also has a bad reputation, even though it's fine unless you have high blood pressure. My ex-wife used to have fainting spells from low blood pressure, her doctor's prescription was for her to eat more salt.

We all try to pretend to be rich so we eat a lot of meat,

That's just silly. We eat meat because animals are tasty and we're omnivores. We evolved to eat meat or it would taste bad to us,

...which has no fiber or vitamins or minerals.

Bullshit. You should stop listening to whatever ignoramus is feeding you that stupidity.

Meat contains a number of essential vitamins and minerals. It is an excellent source of many of the B vitamins, including thiamine, choline, B6, niacin, and folic acid. Some types of meat, especially liver, also contain vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Meat is an excellent source of the minerals iron, zinc, and phosphorus. It also contains a number of essential trace minerals, including copper, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, chromium, and fluorine. The Table provides a comparison of the vitamin and mineral content of different types of meat.

There's a hilarious punk rock song that fits this comment, I wish I could think of who did it (Antiflag maybe?) titled "Stupid Fucking Vegans". Homo sapiens is an omnivorous species. We NEED meat, even though most westerners probably eat more than is necessary.

Can you provide an example of something that the Soviets did that the United States has not done?

Slaughtering 20 million of their own citizens, and that's just under Stalin.

While you're formulating your answer, consider that the United States is the only country to nuke another country.

That's true, it ended WW2 with several million fewer casualties than an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have allowed.

We used our own prisoners and citizens as guinnea pigs to conduct experiments in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.

Common practice at the time, as reprehensible as we now view it. We also treated our prisoners significantly better than the Soviets powers did. Also bear in mind that things like the nasty side affects from radiation simply were not known at that time.

We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators.

This doesn't even count as a pimple on the ass that is known as the Gulag's. Tens of millions of people were sentenced and countless millions were killed for political dissidence.

I'm not sure your claim that the USSR and the USA were significantly different in their propaganda campaigns

They were, and to be frank the US really sucks at propaganda and the Soviets were masters at it.

The weak link of the chain is you. And they have very convincing methods to get what they want, especially if you have the habit of hiding your data in a suspicious way.

Quote from the show:

ALAN WILLIAMS: The swords were far better than any other swords made, before or since, in Europe. And these must have been extraordinarily valuable to their contemporaries, because of their properties.

Except for the Damascus sword, which was fabricated in several places in the Muslim empire, including, famously, in Toledo, Spain, where to this date there is a blade making industry.

Not only that, but the Viking sword was merely an attempt to duplicate the quality of the Saracen sword.

Not that it matters, but just to set the record straight, "damascus" steel, just like the "Arabic" numeral system, was neither invented in Damascus nor in Arabia nor in Spain. Both the numeral system and the steel was invented in India. It should be more accurately called Wootz steel. This steel making technique technique was mastered and perfected by ironsmiths in South India around 300BC. The original technique also died with the ironsmiths over time, and has was only recently replicated with success some years ago.

References:
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9809/verhoeven-9809.html
http://archaeology.about.com/od/wterms/g/wootz.htm
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/647868/wootz-steel

The first article is the most informative and comprehensive of all.

To quote from the articles linked above,
"Wootz is the name given to an exceptional grade of iron ore steel first made in southern and south central India and Sri Lanka perhaps as early as 300 BC. Wootz is formed using a crucible to melt, burn away impurities and add important ingredients, and it contains a high carbon content (nearly 1.5%).

Although iron making was part of Indian culture by as early as 1100 BC (at sites such as Hallur), the earliest evidence for the processing of iron in a crucible has been identified at the site of Kodumanal in Tamil Nadu province, and possibly also at Andhra Pradesh. The term 'wootz' appears in English in the late 18th century, and is probably derived from ukku, the word for crucible steel in the Indian language Kannada, and possibly from 'ekku' in old Tamil.

Wootz steel is the primary component of Damascan steel. Syrian blacksmiths used wootz ingots to produce extraordinary steel weaponry throughout the middle ages. "

For the record, I'm not a steel expert by any stretch, but I do love Japanese cooking knives, especially AS sandwitched core ones, and was really disappointed to learn that my first flashy "Damascus" pattern knife was only chemically etched and not a true damascus pattern.