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Remind me again of the religion of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo, and Mussolini?

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

You are a fascist tool (and I mean that in all senses of the word tool)...

If civilian commercial aviation is becoming fair game

Dude, 350 million dead in the last century alone. Every one is a tragedy, but one airplane hardly compares.

But, but, they were poor people and Jews. People in aeroplanes might be anybody.

If civilian commercial aviation is becoming fair game

Dude, 350 million dead in the last century alone. Every one is a tragedy, but one airplane hardly compares.

In my opinion, religion by definition is immoral since it presupposes to know what an ultimate creator wants, and inevitably ends up meting out the most despicable cruelties on those who reject the religion. You can't argue with the word of the ultimate creator, after all.

Interesting that secular communist and socialist governments killed more of their own citizens by murder and gross mismanagement than people who died as a result of all religious wars, ever, in all of human history, yet you identify religion as a force of the most despicable cruelties.

Here are some basic stats to back up that claim: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil...

http://panko.shidler.hawaii.ed... there's academic work going back years "indicting" spreadsheets. Not that anyone pays attention... inside academic circles or outside.

Just found another very useful tool from UH SOEST:

http://oos.soest.hawaii.edu/pa...

Oligarchies have no incentive to listen. My question still is how do we take an Oligarchy and transform it into a Technocracy because this is exactly what would solve the problem. How is it possible without all hell breaking loose?

Go check out a fair this summer. Notice the lack of people stabbing each other in the neck to get to be first in line to some fried dough treats. Or if it's winter on your side of the world, head down to the skating rink (where a room full of people strap sharpened metal blades on their feet and move at high speeds on ice) and stand in the middle and try to coordinate everybody's actions. It's much too dangerous to let everybody work things out on their own.

If the assumption is that we need controls to keep people "in line" then we have to ask what the costs are of those controls. Oh, hai, it's 2014 and we're solving the coordination problem without relying on power and murder.

We could let other ISP's compete in the last mile and things would still be OK, despite the self-interested protestations of the Public Utilities Commission. Perhaps better. c.f. Google Fiber.

This hand has the pattern AAAAB where A and B are from distinct kinds. The number of such hands is (13-choose-1)(4-choose-4)(12-choose-1)(4-choose-1). The probability is 0.000240.

I'm stuck spending the night at an 8.3-meter with a bunch of people who're tinkering with something called "Visible Aperture Masking Polarimetric Interferometer for Resolving Exoplanetary Signatures” - VAMPIRES for short. Unfortunately, we're not lasering the moon, or doing spectroscopy of it during totality like we did last eclipse (you can measure elemental abundances and pollutants in Earth's atmosphere that way, nifty). But at least we're somewhere that it all happens 2 hours earlier in the evening than on the west coast. :)

Then we could have hundreds of little wars, like we had in the Middle Ages and Wars of Religion - think of the fun if Vermont and New Hampshire went to war, while California was busy conquering Oregon, And New York trying to annex Jersey.

Yes, just look at all the little wars going on all over Europe - why Switzerland is massing its forces on the border of Liechtenstein as we speak!

Seriously, though, the only reasons nations go to war are economic calamity or power-aspirations of the government. The more such governments drain their economies to build their arsenals, the more both odds increase. The reason Europe is at peace is prosperity and relatively unarmed governments.

The State is the cause of strife on Earth, not the solution.

pure carbon is not especially flammable (eg: diamonds)

Pure carbon is quite flammable. Try check out the MSDS for graphite. The problem with diamonds is their surface area is relatively low, but you can burn them slowly with a hot enough flame and high enough concentration of oxygen.

Wrong - Communism is a death cult that has kept millions of people in misery. http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/ , http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

I don't know what the current state of the art is, but once upon a time it was only possible to correct a for atmospheric variations over a very narrow field of view.

There are different goals at play. A lot of astronomical research - usually the kind of thing you'd be using adaptive optics for - can be done with a very narrow field of view - for example, studying specific distant galaxies, pulsars, quasars, transiting exoplanets, etc. Even the field of view required to image other planets in our own solar system is fairly small. So it's not at all uncommon to have instruments with fields of view less than one arcminute for observing single objects.

On the flip side, if you want to observe extended objects like nearby galaxies or nebulae, or do surveys looking for things like asteroids, trans-Neptunian objects or additional moons of the giant planets in our solar system, or do multi-object spectroscopy, a wide field of view can be very useful. So wide-field cameras and spectrographs, sometimes mounted at the prime focus, get used a lot for those purposes. Our current one at work has a field of view of about half a degree, and we're starting to commission one that'll do a degree and a half. The LSST will do, I think, 3 degrees.

The field of AO is still developing rapidly, with coronographs, multiconjugate AO, systems with multiple lasers to correct more of the field, and work on eliminating ground-layer distortion. And new instruments are being developed all the time to be deployed behind the latest AO systems.

Which leads to an interesting question.

Can they hear this screaming underwater?

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/loihi.html

"Of course - derived from the greek city states."

Not at all. Derived ultimately from the band societies that humans lived in for roughly a quarter of a million years *before* the beginnings of the city states.

"The convention of the 'nation state' is a powerful one, which appears to have served us well. "

It may appear that way because the state has many apologists who credit it with good it doesnt do, and sweep the damage it does under the rug whenever possible.

For example, between 1900 and 1999 states around the world murdered around 262,000,000 people in straight up situations of mass murder. (See http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM Statistics of Democide.)

The crap we all put up with from our leaders at times is a much better alternative to having all-out anarchy, and deep down even you understand this.

The people who feel really strongly about this tend to be the ones who haven't looked into it very deeply. Remember, the cost of having government is a human sacrifice rate of about 5% of the population. There's no strong ethnological case that societies without governments do worse than this. Then there are the economic costs.

There is considerable scholarship available on various proposals for running a society that are not based on a-priori threats of violence (that is, mechanisms for governance, not government). There are hundreds of hours of serious lectures on YouTube alone if you're open to such new ideas and shelves full of academic books on the subject.

I question anybody who thinks that society's evolutionary pinnacle is _right now_.

Actually, if you take a hell-hole and remove the government, its economy gets better. Governments have surely created some hellholes, and may be the most deadly invention humans have ever created, but when those people throw off their government and start to improve the hellhole, that's no time to cry, "see, lack of government creates a hellhole!" That's just poor logic.

If human sacrifice on the order of 1% of the planet's population per year is required to keep "the peace" then the definition of "peace" is very broken.

Meanwhile, the pro-government elites love to sit in their Starbucks showing everybody the big Apple on the back of their iPads, so it's good for a chuckle at least.

Only if you accept that the State represents order rather than being the primary source of chaos, preventing just regulatory mechanisms from replacing its role. Indeed, peaceful regulation of society would be revolutionary.

Wow, a 'just regulatory mechanism' replacing government would be awesome! We should get together and decide on rules that would benefit everyone. Of course, the problems are large enough in a country of 300 million that we may need a number of people working on them full time. So we should get together and choose some people to set up mechanisms for regulating our society. Maybe we could even vote for them. It's awesome what you can do without government....heh.

Rather, it was intended to eliminate those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution -- thus underscoring the important role that lawyers can play in society.

Yes, lawyers play an important part in perpetuating the State mechanism.

lawyers maintain order in society and in order to throw it into chaos they need to get rid of the lawyers.

Only if you accept that the State represents order rather than being the primary source of chaos, preventing just regulatory mechanisms from replacing its role. Indeed, peaceful regulation of society would be revolutionary.

They (PDF warning) dealt with the same invasion back in the '50s

some libertarian/Randian hellhole ... at least partly democratically accountable existing governments

The body count for those governments, for the 20th Century, is about 320 Million, for the last century. The proof of burden lies with those who conjecture that a system based on freedom and liberty would do worse. To be fair, the insane Objectivists are war-mongers, Rand included, so let's not group opposites together and treat them as a whole.

You appear to have missed "hydrates" - minerals with chemically bound water. See table 5 (p44) at http://www.higp.hawaii.edu/~escott/Scott%20Krot%20TOG2007.pdf Many of the minerals listed contain bound water, or OH components which can be driven off by heating.

There are no resource shortages, just resource allocation imbalances caused by market and government distortions

There are no water shortages, only water collection and distribution issues.

There are no energy shortages, only energy collection and distribution issues.

There is no doomsday like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth coming. People solve problems. The biggest problem humanity faces today is the increasing fascism of the 1st world governments by their theft of money through taxation and inflation. Governments create problems and they are larges mass murderers the world has ever known: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

We will get into space when is it "optimum" and the pieces all fall into place. I'm encouraged by SpaceX, Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries. Maybe we will have "The Man Who Sold the Moon" in my lifetime. I hope I live long enough to see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Wx230gYJw

Government is the largest mass murder in history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_murder#Mass_murder_by_a_state

World total 1900-1999 262 Million: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM

If coding was my primary job duty, sure, I could see this kind of art being pretty relevant. But even though I have an IT background, and some coding-related books sitting around, working at a large, modern telescope in a major observatory complex, my geekdom is more about space science, so the art on the walls (and my laptop's wallpaper) tends to be more along the lines of either stuff out in space, or stuff that looks at stuff out in space. For example, my current wallpaper.

If coding was my primary job duty, sure, I could see this kind of art being pretty relevant. But even though I have an IT background, and some coding-related books sitting around, working at a large, modern telescope in a major observatory complex, my geekdom is more about space science, so the art on the walls (and my laptop's wallpaper) tends to be more along the lines of either stuff out in space, or stuff that looks at stuff out in space. For example, my current wallpaper.

It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/

While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.

Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.

The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/

Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/

And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).

The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s

I am going to assume that was Mauna Kea and not Mauna Loa. There is a road to the summit of the former, paved part of the way, for the people who work at the observatories up there. There is a 4WD unpaved "road" part way up the slope of Mauna Loa but no vehicular access to the summit.

Rental car companies don't like having to come collect their vehicles from Mauna Kea after people have destroyed the brakes in them riding them all the way down the hill (or having negative interactions with invisible cows at lower elevations).

FWIW when I make trips to the summit I bring oxygen, and spend an hour or so at the Visitor Information Station at 9300 feet before heading up to the summit.

Working at altitude can be deceptively difficult -- an acquaintance who works at the summit describes a conversation he had which went something along the lines of "Well, I've cut it three times and it's still too short". Low PO2 isn't good for higher cognitive function.

I am going to assume that was Mauna Kea and not Mauna Loa. There is a road to the summit of the former, paved part of the way, for the people who work at the observatories up there. There is a 4WD unpaved "road" part way up the slope of Mauna Loa but no vehicular access to the summit.

Rental car companies don't like having to come collect their vehicles from Mauna Kea after people have destroyed the brakes in them riding them all the way down the hill (or having negative interactions with invisible cows at lower elevations).

FWIW when I make trips to the summit I bring oxygen, and spend an hour or so at the Visitor Information Station at 9300 feet before heading up to the summit.

Working at altitude can be deceptively difficult -- an acquaintance who works at the summit describes a conversation he had which went something along the lines of "Well, I've cut it three times and it's still too short". Low PO2 isn't good for higher cognitive function.

I am going to assume that was Mauna Kea and not Mauna Loa. There is a road to the summit of the former, paved part of the way, for the people who work at the observatories up there. There is a 4WD unpaved "road" part way up the slope of Mauna Loa but no vehicular access to the summit.

Rental car companies don't like having to come collect their vehicles from Mauna Kea after people have destroyed the brakes in them riding them all the way down the hill (or having negative interactions with invisible cows at lower elevations).

FWIW when I make trips to the summit I bring oxygen, and spend an hour or so at the Visitor Information Station at 9300 feet before heading up to the summit.

Working at altitude can be deceptively difficult -- an acquaintance who works at the summit describes a conversation he had which went something along the lines of "Well, I've cut it three times and it's still too short". Low PO2 isn't good for higher cognitive function.

Since you won't show back up? Here's your funeral (regarding C array access via POINTERS & indirection):

---

PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

"In C array access is always made through pointers and indirection operators. Whenever an expression such as X[k] appears in a program, the compiler interprets it to mean *(X + k). In other words, objects of an array are always accessed indirectly."

FROM -> http://www-ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~tep/EE160/Book/chap7/section2.1.3.html

---

* No small wonder you posted as AC since I know you 'trolls' that stalk me here & how you TRY to "think" & yes, act, using the term 'think' VERY loosely & sarcastically vs. "your kind" online, pure trash, in regards to YOU now!

(You're probably webmistressrachel, trolling STALKING online scumbag, extraordinaire, again -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3350243&cid=42444775 up to her USUAL scumbag troll tricks ):

Guess what?

YOU FAIL as always, vs. myself...

(Every single time you *try* to troll me by AC posts!)

I could definitely do pointers & loops thru the pointer to the string variable to do what I noted above, and yes, checks for nulls too (just like strlen does, & FASTER, because pointers work faster... less work to do, per the above, & FAR MORE "DIRECT").

APK

P.S.=> Yes, as I suspected here & you ADMITTED to webmistressrachel you trolling stalking scumbag -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3350243&cid=42438977

That's NO FIRST outta you... so, I must ask:

Are you mentally DERANGED, or what? There are LAWS against stalking online you know... & I certainly do NOT need a 'secret admirer' like YOU, trashbag

... apk

If you want to argue that the freedom to have guns as a hobby, or for the illusionary purpose of self defence, is worth this many deads, feel free to argue as such. But don't hide from the facts.

Guns make killing a hell of a lot easier. And if you make it easier to get guns, you end up with more killing.

The surest and most proven way to have millions and millions (and millions ... ) of killings is to ban guns. Just ask the survivors of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Uruguay, Turkey, Germany, Guatemala where disarmament lead directly to mass murder. II

The ability to resist a tyrannical government is the reason for the second amendment - not hunting, target shooting, or home-defense (though they are inherent uses of the right). Domicide was a leading cause of death in the 20th Century.

You'll also have to confront academic research (a good starting point would be Dr. Milton Diamond's review) which shows liberalization of porn laws and increased availability of porn correlates with decreased sexual violence, and that this also holds true (in the limited cases where it's been tried: Denmark, Japan, and the Czech Republic) for legalization of CP and reduction in child sexual abuse/molestation.

3) Everything we know empirically about the relationship of porn and crime says your policy is increasing child sex abuse.

I note you don't address this at all.

If you can't or won't face the science, and the "known workable solution" that worked in all three cases it's been tried, I see no point to continue this conversation.

I was speaking on the subject in a general manner, not on this particular article.

The reason I brought up molestation and murder is that I believe that many of the things which civil libertarians push would result in more of this sort of crime happening. For instance, if true internet "freedom" was achieved, then the guy next door who might otherwise have been busted for downloading child pornography, will not to be found out to be a dangerous pedophile until after he gets *caught* molesting a child.

Except the guys who get busted for simple possession of CP (not distribution or production) mostly AREN'T "dangerous pedophiles". Often, they're the worst stereotype of basement-dwelling loners who are too asocial to get out where kids actually are.* The professional producers behind most of the content take ridiculously serious measures to avoid being caught, and as a result almost never get caught under possession laws, but only by infiltration efforts.

Since YOU'RE supporting criminalization of a victimless possession offense on the grounds that some portion of those offenders would, if not stopped, eventually commit a real crime against an innocent child, I think the burden of proof is on YOU to show that the futurecrime stopped is more than the portion of actual, ongoing CP production that could be stopped if consumers didn't have to hide from the law (which would make tracking and infiltrating the producers much easier). This point could go either way, but without evidence, the default is "no ban".

You'll also have to confront academic research (a good starting point would be Dr. Milton Diamond's review) which shows liberalization of porn laws and increased availability of porn correlates with decreased sexual violence, and that this also holds true (in the limited cases where it's been tried: Denmark, Japan, and the Czech Republic) for legalization of CP and reduction in child sexual abuse/molestation.

To recap:
1) The people your policy stops and the people you say you want to stop are largely, though not entirely, disjoint sets.
2) Your policy interferes with police work, possibly costing you more potentially stopped crimes than the intersection of sets in 1).
3) Everything we know empirically about the relationship of porn and crime says your policy is increasing child sex abuse.
So how's that "make things safer for my family"? Let me guess, you know intuitively that porn begets rape, and intuition trumps empiricism? Sorry, I'm going with science on this.

* Note that these people clearly do need help, and I'd not be unsympathetic to the idea of prohibiting CP to "catch" them, except that they don't get meaningful psychological help, and they do get a few years rubbing elbows with violent criminals (and possibly anal rape), which seems likely to increase their odds of committing an actual child-harming crime after they get out.

By making child pornography a "victim-less" offense (arguments for this have appear countless times on slashdot), you remove the opportunity to catch a pedophile *before* he ruins a child's life. The fact that he would have to break the law to satisfy his sexual proclivities sets up a character test - it shows that he values the gratification of his sexual desires over conforming to the law. It's a test.

There are many people out there who do not like a particular law, yet because they are a member of society, they obey it nonetheless. This fact alone says that there is something different about someone who is not able to resist temptation despite the risk to his life and liberty. They have already shown that, unlike a normal person, they are willing to break the law for their own purposes.

I break the speed limit sometimes, which shows that I value the gratification of my desires (significantly less strong than sexual de

China is the most dangerous country in the world today. And the information about how horrible the Chinese, despite them getting MUCH worse given the economic situation, the information flow has been nearly shut down since 2007 timeframe. There were big 60 minutes type exposes in 2007 but since then the Police State has seen that information regarding our forced consumption of Chinese Walmart Plastic with Federal Reserve Notes remains in place.

China tires bad:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118278927863547228.html

The organizing committee of Beijingâ(TM)s Olympic games has promised to investigate charges that official merchandise is being manufactured using child labor.

The PRC Chinese poison dog food:
http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20070523/chinese_protein_export_scandal-id-104033.html

The PRC Chinese poison toothpaste:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02toothpaste.html?ex=1181620800&en=d26dab8b2bd85303&ei=5070

The PRC Chinese poison Children's Toys:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070614/thomas_recall_070614/20070614?hub=CTVNewsAt11
http://blogs.eastbayexpress.com/92510/2007/06/thomas_why_hath_thou_forsaken.php

Chinese Seafood Detained for Safety
http://www.topix.com/forum/food/TFSGN6836LFM2QFV7

Melamine put into milk formula, dog food, etc.
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/got-melamine-53000-chinese-children-did-in-their-milk.html

- Cow milk so inundated with antibiotics you can not make Yogurt from it.

- Pigs force-fed waste water.

- Lard made from separating fats from sewage.

Made in China: tainted food, fake drugs and dodgy paint
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2118920,00.html

China Jails 2 Protestant Church Leaders
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/china-jails-two-protestant-leaders/58150/

The PRC Chinese government has murdered countless people:
"DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER"
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF

Given modern industrial process and productivity, I don't even see how using Chinese slave labor saves that much in the face of having to crate up and ship the goods from china to consuming markets.

The bean counters saved maybe 10% at best making product, and now with the price of shipping goods going up due to petrol, they are probably paying more to have it made in China.

The only real reason it may never come back to the US is a host of states (NY, CA) and The Fedzilla / US government that have a long list of anti-business laws making a return to the US difficult.

You want Made in the USA? Tell state and federal congress to stop doing everything to drive up the cost of business compared to China and India (the only two competitors that matter); stop buying Chinese crap where possible.

Slave Labor rented at a PREMIUM with low quality results is still apparently cheaper than coming back her

China is the most dangerous country in the world today. And the information about how horrible the Chinese, despite them getting MUCH worse given the economic situation, the information flow has been nearly shut down since 2007 timeframe. There were big 60 minutes type exposes in 2007 but since then the Police State has seen that information regarding our forced consumption of Chinese Walmart Plastic with Federal Reserve Notes remains in place.

China tires bad:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118278927863547228.html

The organizing committee of Beijingâ(TM)s Olympic games has promised to investigate charges that official merchandise is being manufactured using child labor.

The PRC Chinese poison dog food:
http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20070523/chinese_protein_export_scandal-id-104033.html

The PRC Chinese poison toothpaste:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02toothpaste.html?ex=1181620800&en=d26dab8b2bd85303&ei=5070

The PRC Chinese poison Children's Toys:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070614/thomas_recall_070614/20070614?hub=CTVNewsAt11
http://blogs.eastbayexpress.com/92510/2007/06/thomas_why_hath_thou_forsaken.php

Chinese Seafood Detained for Safety
http://www.topix.com/forum/food/TFSGN6836LFM2QFV7

Melamine put into milk formula, dog food, etc.
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/got-melamine-53000-chinese-children-did-in-their-milk.html

- Cow milk so inundated with antibiotics you can not make Yogurt from it.

- Pigs force-fed waste water.

- Lard made from separating fats from sewage.

Made in China: tainted food, fake drugs and dodgy paint
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2118920,00.html

China Jails 2 Protestant Church Leaders
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/china-jails-two-protestant-leaders/58150/

The PRC Chinese government has murdered countless people:
"DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER"
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF

Given modern industrial process and productivity, I don't even see how using Chinese slave labor saves that much in the face of having to crate up and ship the goods from china to consuming markets.

The bean counters saved maybe 10% at best making product, and now with the price of shipping goods going up due to petrol, they are probably paying more to have it made in China.

The only real reason it may never come back to the US is a host of states (NY, CA) and The Fedzilla / US government that have a long list of anti-business laws making a return to the US difficult.

You want Made in the USA? Tell state and federal congress to stop doing everything to drive up the cost of business compared to China and India (the only two competitors that matter); stop buying Chinese crap where possible.

Slave Labor rented at a PREMIUM with low quality results is still apparently cheaper than coming back her

China is the most dangerous country in the world today. And the information about how horrible the Chinese, despite them getting MUCH worse given the economic situation, the information flow has been nearly shut down since 2007 timeframe. There were big 60 minutes type exposes in 2007 but since then the Police State has seen that information regarding our forced consumption of Chinese Walmart Plastic with Federal Reserve Notes remains in place.

China tires bad:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118278927863547228.html

The organizing committee of Beijingâ(TM)s Olympic games has promised to investigate charges that official merchandise is being manufactured using child labor.

The PRC Chinese poison dog food:
http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20070523/chinese_protein_export_scandal-id-104033.html

The PRC Chinese poison toothpaste:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02toothpaste.html?ex=1181620800&en=d26dab8b2bd85303&ei=5070

The PRC Chinese poison Children's Toys:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070614/thomas_recall_070614/20070614?hub=CTVNewsAt11
http://blogs.eastbayexpress.com/92510/2007/06/thomas_why_hath_thou_forsaken.php

Chinese Seafood Detained for Safety
http://www.topix.com/forum/food/TFSGN6836LFM2QFV7

Melamine put into milk formula, dog food, etc.
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/got-melamine-53000-chinese-children-did-in-their-milk.html

- Cow milk so inundated with antibiotics you can not make Yogurt from it.

- Pigs force-fed waste water.

- Lard made from separating fats from sewage.

Made in China: tainted food, fake drugs and dodgy paint
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2118920,00.html

China Jails 2 Protestant Church Leaders
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/china-jails-two-protestant-leaders/58150/

The PRC Chinese government has murdered countless people:
"DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER"
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF

Given modern industrial process and productivity, I don't even see how using Chinese slave labor saves that much in the face of having to crate up and ship the goods from china to consuming markets.

The bean counters saved maybe 10% at best making product, and now with the price of shipping goods going up due to petrol, they are probably paying more to have it made in China.

The only real reason it may never come back to the US is a host of states (NY, CA) and The Fedzilla / US government that have a long list of anti-business laws making a return to the US difficult.

You want Made in the USA? Tell state and federal congress to stop doing everything to drive up the cost of business compared to China and India (the only two competitors that matter); stop buying Chinese crap where possible.

Slave Labor rented at a PREMIUM with low quality results is still apparently cheaper than coming back her

I'm having trouble finding a chart that shows 0 (or very low) pressure, but using wolframalpha at 0Pa or at 1 trillionth of an atmosphere (source) the phase is returned as solid at 175 degrees K.
The lack of botherance does seem to be the most likely cause of the other issue. Pity; a lot of people could have learned a new word today.

What about Hawaii's "old" NELHA 220 kW Ocean Thermal Energy conversion plant off the Kona coast ?

OTEC solutions are apparently still alive in Hawaii, as a project and funding for building another more powerful OTEC plant off Maui's coast was awarded in 2010 to Lockheed Martin, and NELHA is aiming to build a second plant by 2014.

Translation: I can't be assed to read it, or any of the references, because it might challenge my preconceptions, or I might be forced to offer counter-evidence. Since they disagree with me, I will simply hand-wave away the only concrete facts that have been presented to me.

That sounds like a straw man since I only asked a few questions. I'm sure anyone could fire off links to exceedingly long studies for either side, but where is the commonly-accepted, real-world evidence?

Actually, given the finding that prolonged exposure to pornography promotes insensitivity to victims of sexual assault, and given the fundamentally shocking insensitivity of the claim that someone SHOULD be allowed to display a video in which someone is being sexually assaulted, I'd say your arguments about how you're "totally fine!" after prolonged and early exposure to porn lack a certain credibility.

Wait... lack credibility? Are you attempting to use an ad hominem attack to discredit my previous arguments? Even if I was affected by pornography, that does not alter the validity of any of my arguments (especially since they're mere opinions). You seem to be saying that anyone with certain views has been brainwashed by pornography, and their opinions on the matters are therefore invalid. I think that's illogical nonsense.

Or are you just trying to backpedal furiously, hoping I'll get distracted?

You're the one who brought the issue up.

No doubt your attitudes towards exposing children to pornography have been changed by exposure to hard facts and scientific data showing that there are harmful effects!

It's great to see that you agree with my opinion that pornography isn't harmful in most cases.

The Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea (home of the world's top multi-band complex of large observatories) is planning to have a bunch of stuff going on for transit day - see their page.

Sadly, I'll be in DC. :(

I have advocated for years in support of scientific research and my comments consistently show that position. Are you aware of what the research paper contains? If this was a stock issue research report there never would have been controversy to begin with. Research into dangerous things has been done for decades and it is necessary. The controversy in this case was whether or not it was appropriate to publish to the public at large. The issue was serious enough the government accepted that this needed a high level review to see whether or not someone could weaponize the bird flu with the results of this study.

While I certainly have an axe to grind against communism, the only thing it has to do with my comment was to try to give people a grasp for the sheer scale of the number of people previously killed by the flu. Communism is the only thing short of natural causes that I can think of that has somewhere in large enough numbers to offer any comparison at all. Hell even all of our wars combined from the last century don't come close.

Here's a source for you to start looking at:

In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars.

BS
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html

My town is home to the base facilities for eight of the Mauna Kea Observatories, and we're looking at the Thirty Meter Telescope in the near future as well. Needless to say, there are pretty much always job openings for engineers, technicians, and PhDs. The catch? We're on an island, and some people get tired of that.

So Science Education/Public Outreach (SE/PO) is a part of life here. Pushing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) as good ways to make a better-than-average living is a part of life here. The scientists take over the local mall one day every spring. In late January, we take over the University for a "science day" in honor of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka, for kids in grades 3-8, and NASA sends an astronaut each year. And around late February or early March, there's Journey Through The Universe.

I'm actually about to head to a nearby school to spend an hour talking about science careers to a classroom of 7th-graders, so I'm getting a real kick out of this article showing up right now. The other 9 classes I'm visiting over next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are a bit younger - grades 1-3. The idea, though, is that from Kindergarten on, kids here are meeting real live people who work in science at observatories or other "famous science places" every year and are being encouraged to stay in school, take classes about STEM, look at college majors in STEM, and become qualified for those good jobs, so that we can hire people who are from here and would love to stay here.

Last year, I was told about one of the first success stories - a guy who was in 7th grade when they started visiting classes, and as a result of what he heard over the years, had picked a STEM major at the local university, and was now going to accompany a scientist to classes as a "community ambassador" sort of person.

Buckyballs have been discovered in nature before. When this first happened it was somewhat surprising because they seemed difficult to synthesize. But they've since been discovered in a variety of natural contexts. One really neat example is how they've been found in craters from meteorites, apparently produced during the formation of the craters as well as by forest fires in some limited circumstances- http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb01/permianImpact.html. One neat thing about this is that since buckyballs are large and hollow, they can when they form actually trap small atoms, generally atoms that are noble gasses (especially helium and argon). So, looking at what these buckyballs have can give us information about the atmospheres and conditions where the buckyballs formed. This is overall part of a large trend in the last twenty years where we've learned how many alternate carbon structures there are. Chemists used to think that while carbon had great versatility when combined with other elements (hence the large variety of chemicals used in life) that the chemistry of pure carbon was fairly prosaic. Since then, the discovery of buckyballs, nanotubes, and other structures have shown that carbon has complicated and interesting chemistry even in its pure form.

The work being done here is part of the general work done by the infrared Spitzer telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescopewhich has been as a whole really amazing for all sorts of astronomy. There are some really neat and entertaining videos explaining the work they've done, like this one with Felicia Day http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtxN4. Unfortunately, Spitzer ran out of coolant in 2009, which substantially reduces which instruments can be used and how precise observations it can make. One major good thing about Spitzer is that it isn't in Eart orbit but is rather in orbit around the sun, so we don't need to worry about it becoming a space debris problem, or need to worry about bringing it down early before it dies (to prevent orbital bombardment), so we can keep getting good data from it until the very last instrument croaks.

Where to start. First, go out at night - all those little dots in the sky ? They're called stars, and are all outside our solar system. (This has been known, depending on your point of view, for at least 400 years, and probably for 2 or more millennia.)

Second, it is pretty common for meteorites contain little inclusions of interstellar matter - organic matter, silica, and even (really tiny) diamonds. And, while we are at it, a certain fraction of the micro-meteors observed with radar (to get their orbits) turn out to be interstellar as well. (The fraction of interstellar micro-meteors suggests that there may be a few kg-sized interstellar meteorites waiting to be picked up out of the thousands in the Antarctic meteorite fields, which would be something.)

So, this is nice research, but it is only the first in its area, and it was silly of them to say "for the very first time."

Where to start. First, go out at night - all those little dots in the sky ? They're called stars, and are all outside our solar system. (This has been known, depending on your point of view, for at least 400 years, and probably for 2 or more millennia.)

Second, it is pretty common for meteorites contain little inclusions of interstellar matter - organic matter, silica, and even (really tiny) diamonds. And, while we are at it, a certain fraction of the micro-meteors observed with radar (to get their orbits) turn out to be interstellar as well. (The fraction of interstellar micro-meteors suggests that there may be a few kg-sized interstellar meteorites waiting to be picked up out of the thousands in the Antarctic meteorite fields, which would be something.)

So, this is nice research, but it is only the first in its area, and it was silly of them to say "for the very first time."

On 1 November 1755 (All Saints' Day!) a magnitude 8.6 earthquake at Gorringe Bank destroyed much of Lisbon. Minutes after the earthquake, the tsunami arrived. At least three great waves about ten meters high entered the city. The waves also raked the nearby coasts of Spain and North Africa, and did extensive damage in the Azores, Madiera, and Canary Islands. Minor damage occurred as far north as Ireland and as far west as the West Indies. Gorringe Bank remains a severe tsunami threat for Portugal, and the Portuguese are now installing seafloor pressure gauges there to get advance warning. Tsunamis in the Atlantic Ocean

Minor damage in Ireland can easily be major damage in the low countries; Your confusing being lucky so far with "The Low Countries don't get tsunami's." An seismic event in Iceland or a slip-splash on a mid-atlantic island could easily send send a tsunami into the low countries.

Bundler and CMVS, which are command-line tools that in combination can be used to generate 3D models from a set of ordinary camera photos (i.e. photogrammetry). Several people have taken that code and modified it into collections of tools (e.g., this one) that streamline the process and use GPU code to speed it up. You can then load up the output into Meshlab, a great tool for rendering and editing the resulting point clouds before bringing them into something like Blender 3D (which is well-known).

Even more technical is GPlates, a comprehensive, research-grade tool for doing plate tectonic reconstruction. It's like a combination of conventional GIS system and Google Earth, but you can position anything back in geological time with it. You can load up your own data and published plate motion models from the literature. You really have to understand how plate motion is represented in a technical sense to use it properly (i.e. Euler poles), but even if you don't, you can still use the reconstruction poles, plate outlines, etc. in the supplied data files, plus read the tutorial (a necessity), and then generate a map to your liking. Even better, the program can output a series of image frames that you can then turn into a movie. You can also output a series of projected data files that are easily used in GMT -- Generic Mapping Tools, another wonderful and adaptable open source tool for mapping that has been around for years. Although it is entirely command-line and has a very steep learning curve, if you're used to typical UNIX command-line tools, then GMT is not that bad, it integrates nicely with the UNIX tools you know, and it is very powerful. There are some GUI-based derivatives of it, but I haven't used them.

Those are pretty specialized and would only interest people interested in those subjects, but just today I found PDFtk, a command-line tool to manipulate PDF files (split, merge, rotate pages, etc.). It's exactly what I've been looking for to automate PDF document generation from multiple sources.

(The one up on the hill.)

Early data on stuff from Keck, Gemini or Subaru is rare, yeah, unless you have a bunch of Target-of-Opportunity time or can persuade people to take a few shots for you during their programs. But even on Mauna Kea, there are lesser (but still "huge" to most people) scopes where time's easier to get, so when your survey pipeline (from KAIT or PTF or QUEST or whatever you want) throws you a new target, you don't have to wait more than a couple nights before going after it.

We have somewhere around 40% of the time on the 2.2-meter on Mauna Kea, which is our usual tool for going after SNe, although of course some of the bigger names in the collaboration (Perlmutter, Aldering) get time on Keck as well.

If there hadn't been a lightning strike at the 2.2-m during last weekend's snow-and-lightning storm, I would be observing the M51 supernova this evening (and not for the first time). Pesky lightning! :(