Slashdot Mirror

we keep cutting funding to education and research.

Spending on education is up.
Non-defense R&D spending is up.

Companies don't innovate. There's not enough money on the table to make it worth while. Aside from the occasional bored aristocrat it's mostly been the government that financed innovation; usually through the public university system. But nobody wants to pay the taxes for that.

Corporations spend roughly twice as much money on R&D as the government.

Heck, we just borrowed $1.5 trillion over 10 years to finance massive tax cuts

The last major tax cut was 15 years ago. The drop in tax revenue in the last decade was due to the recession following the collapse of the housing bubble. Currently, tax revenue is back up to "normal" levels (if you define the highest it's ever been historically as "normal").

What's busting the budget is a refusal to cut spending to match revenue (notice the trendline for tax receipts is flat, while the trendline for spending is climbing). This is primarily driven by growth of entitlement programs. The CBO has been warning us about that since at least 1998 (when I started reading the CBO reports).

And before you claim we should balance the budget by paying more taxes, consider that the tax burden in the U.S. is already among the highest in the world. People claiming U.S. taxes are low usually only look at Federal taxes, and fail to account for state and local taxes. U.S. tax burden is the third highest of the 20 largest economies in the world (only France and Italy have a higher tax burden). That's right, Americans pay more taxes (as percent of GDP) than socialist countries like Canada, the UK, Germany.

Summary even states that the main reason the U.S. dropped was because of low percentage of STEM college graduates.

People who don't understand that a refrigerator sized satellite won't blow apart or make large changes to the orbit of a 527 billion kg asteroid.

Things look pretty easier when you convert that to only 527 million tons.

People who don't understand that a refrigerator sized satellite won't blow apart or make large changes to the orbit of a 527 billion kg asteroid.

Actually armed robbery is pretty rare and can lead to someone dieing.

According to the FBI there were 325,802 robberies in the US in 2014. A firearm was used in 40.3% of those. So 131,298 armed robberies that used a firearm. That works out to 359 per day on average. Which works out to just about one every four minutes. Sorry, my pulled out my ass number was off by a factor of 2. So there are only half as many as I was guessing. If you go back 20 years, one every two minutes is pretty close. Not all, or even the majority of these ended in murder.

According to Wikipedia there were 32,703 fatalities in vehicles in 2013. That's almost 90 deaths per day. Should the police be able to monitor everyone's car real time too?

Here's a list of terrorist killings on US soil that list all deaths going back to 1865 If you are so inclined, I'd be interested in the number of deaths due to terrorism, though not enough to actually tally it myself. But at first glance, it looks like there are probably half the number of deaths on this list than a single year of auto accidents.

You know what's really rare, except for a few outliers? Death by terrorists. That's what the Stingray is supposed to be used for. It's one thing to trample on peoples rights when you have reasonable suspicion of an attack that could kill dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. But to do so for crimes like this is inexcusable.

Why is terrorism seen as such a threat in the US? According to this, 2600 americans were injured by air fresheners in 1996. Here's a list of injuries and deaths due to terrorism. If 96 was a good indication, it looks like air fresheners are BY FAR the bigger threat.

Politicians, law enforcement, and media sell fear. That's the real reason why NZ is ramping up anti-terrorism.

I'd really like to see a law requiring citizens to take a low dose of anti-anxiety medication. Everyone over the age of 16. We'd colonize mars by 2030, cure cancer, solve climate change, prevent overpopulation, and end most violent crime if we would just stop wasting so much fucking time, energy, and tax dollars in stupid illogical fear.

And yes, I have seen "Serenity" and I'm willing to risk it.

Um. No, stockpiles are significantly higher than that:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nwhmt.html

1984, Ciudad Juarez: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1983MEX1.html

The brass plaques on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft show the location of the Earth using a map of nearby pulsars.

There are over 100 larger asteroids that either have moons or orbit each other as binaries or companions.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/astro/asteroidmoons.html

Look at the last thirty years, when you have a Democratic white house, abortions go down. When you have a Republican white house, they go up.

Except, of course, that they don't.

I understand why you repeated this lie, it makes it sound like your side is the reasonable one in the debate. Well, it's not and the figure is untrue.

Look here. The claim was fact checked and debunked years ago.

Look here. Abortions peaked under the Reagan administration. They fell almost continuously through the Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations. At the end of GWs presidency, abortions had fallen to their lowest level since 1974. This isn't politics, it's fact.

Let's forget that for approximately six years of Bush's presidency, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, and the White House, and didn't do a darn about abortion.

Except re-institute the Mexico City policy and implement policies that reduced abortion to 1970s levels. You forget the abortion was placed into legal limbo by the third branch of government, the SCOTUS never explicitly made abortion legal. The SCOTUS held that the right to privacy trumped the states' rights to legislate abortion during the first trimester. In order to eliminate Roe v. Wade, what would be needed is for the SCOTUS to revisit the case and rule differently or a constitutional amendment. Regardless of the fact that the Republicans controlled the Executive and Legislative branches of government, they didn't have a 2/3 majority needed to amend the Constitution.

LK

Calculations and map

Not sure how valid this is, I haven't checked any of the sources outside of the surface area of the earth covered in water, etc. Also, of course there would be other serious changes to the climate, it's not just a matter of water level and amount of land available, etc.

Still it is interesting if this is true that the upper limit is around 60-75 meters. It definitely puts to rest any fears of a 'Waterworld' scenario and seems to suggest overall landmass would remain about the same.

As far as I know Japan wasn't the only country hit by nukes. Several countries did nuclear tests above ground. The US and USSR for example were both hit by nukes two hundred times, Japan only twice: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/atest00.html

Do well-informed people make up bullshit statistics?

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisraelsum.html

"You wonder if our technology is developing faster than our enlightenment? We already have enough weapons to kill everybody on the planet 100 times over, and our top priority is watching "Jersey Shore"... does that answer your question?"

Slightly off topic, but according to this article your "100 times over" assertion is incorrect: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html

Statistically, rape is a minority case, so in the vast majority of cases, they are correct. I mean, whether or not the behavior was moral of course can be debated, but the point is it was still the parents' conscious willing decisions.

If you explode a nuke outside the Van Allens, the fallout is swept away by solar wind. We've done it before. http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/hane.html However, a conventional nuke might only decimate an incoming Big Rock, leaving 90% behind. I'd rather see a pusher plate mated to the Big Rock, then detonate specially designed nukes against the plate, like in the Project Orion ship in FOOTFALL. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/OrionProj.html http://books.google.com/books?id=4S2KocYp8AkC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq="pusher+plate"+Orion&source=bl&ots=yRM2KRDRst&sig=NWZvu3gbjAAwyKva2-Jl_jlduhM&hl=en&ei=qnucSs-xCJSwsgPxwNCaDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=%22pusher%20plate%22%20Orion&f=false

Ah, sorry, no.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html

"Actual percentage of U.S. abortions in "hard cases" are estimated as follows: in cases of rape or incest, 0.3%; in cases of risk to maternal health or life, 1%; and in cases of fetal abnormality, 0.5%. About 98% of abortions in the United States are elective, including socio-economic reasons or for birth control. This includes perhaps 30% for primarily economic reasons."

In addition, in many cases the actual medical procedure, even if it is performed in a properly sterile environment(rare) with proper follow-up (rarer), causes scarring that makes it difficult or impossible to get pregnant again.

Excuse me, Sir? With all due respect, you're full of crap. Not a single point in your post is correct. Conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to aresolise nuclear materials, conventional explosives are NOT sufficient to disperse the materials over a wide area, Uranium is NOT highly radioactive, some forms of Plutonium ARE reasonably radioactive but primarily degrade as Alpha radiation (effectively harmless since aresolising Pu-238 is difficult and ineffective), being near Uranium or Plutonium does NOT pose a significant health hazard, millions of people will not die, and you sir have become a pawn of terrorism. Just as the media has. There is no real-world basis for the claims you are making about dirty bombs.

If you want to save lives from radiation dispersion, stop coal plants from dispersing radioactive materials in their smoke. Stop people from smoking cigarettes. Stop the use of oil and natural gas. Stop foreign nations from performing nuclear tests. (The US and Russia already contaminated the world back in the 50s and 60s.) Because those are the REAL sources of contamination. Coal burning alone outweighs the effects of a dirty bomb by several orders of magnitude.

So with all due respect, please educate yourself before propagating misinformation.

Abortion as a means of birth control is not done by "stock" OB-Gyn's. It's done in abortion clinics. And, for what it's worth, the statistics I've been able to find place abortions due to "fetal health" as little as 1% of abortions, while abortions due to "personal choice" (i.e. abortion as a means of birth control) weigh in at between 78-98%.

• http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html#9
• http://www.eadshome.com/AbortionStories/AbortionStatistics.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States

Simply put, as usual, the "pro-choice" crowd wants to make policy on the basis the marginal cases. You want to focus on fetal health, when all statistics show that to represent on only a vanishingly small fraction of the abortions done. Others want to focus on rape & incest, which represent and even smaller fraction. The fact is, no matter where you look, over 90% of abortions are done as a form of birth control.

As for the fetus being a parasite... if you truly believe that, I can only say that that is sick and disgusting. I would also observe that people could (and have!) say much the same thing about a girl infant, for whom the father would be obligated to come up with a dowry. I propose a simple principle: parents have a choice whether or not conceive a child. If they choose to conceive a child, either by intent or by negligence, then they bear responsibility for that child from the moment of their choice until that child reaches it's majority.

Another reason the "fetus as parasite" notion is philosophically absurd... Let's suppose a man impregnates a woman. As the law currently stands, he has absolutely no rights or responsibility with regard to said fetus until it is born. Then, suddenly, he is held legally responsible for 50% of that childs support for the next 18 years. How can a man be responsible for his sperm, then NOT be responsible for the fetus, then be responsible for the infant that results? This is simply absurd, because it breaks continuity.

I remember some years ago seeing a made-for-tv movie about the original host of "Romper Room", who had a Thalidomide Baby and a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion. The abortion apparently became something of a cause celebre, and a doctor on the ethics board o the hospital where the abortion was to be performed made a comment (in the movie) that I will always remember: "What kind of moral cause is abortion!?"

I ask you this same question... what kind of moral cause is a "choice" that ends a human life? In a world where desperate people are chasing all over the world to find babies to adopt, what sort of moral crusade is it to ensure the right to kill America's so that a careless woman will be saved from the fairly minor consequences of her own negligence? Are 3-7 months of pregnancy for the mother really worth less than a human life?

Man, I still can't get over that parasite line. Dude, you disgust me.

Such persons can recite facts, same as anyone else.

How deliciously ironic. Earlier in the thread, I was accused thus: "Now, the interesting thing about your post is that it's technically correct on nearly every point, and yet the overall thrust is entirely misleading." Obviously "reciting facts" isn't the key, but the "overall thrust" - as long as your thrust toes the local political line. ;-) That's sad, too, but also human nature. But to your two mistaken points.

There are a hundred reasons why an abortion ought to be an option, and very few of them are convenient for anyone.

Well... no. At least we can "recite facts" here with confidence. Well-researched statistics show the following distribution of reasons for having an abortion in the USA:

• Rape or incest: 1%
• Mother's health: 3%
• Fetal defects: 3%
• Convenience: 90%
• Other: 3%

"Convenience" includes unready to have a child, can't afford it, parents or father want the abortion, baby would change my life, etc.

The reasons raised in a discussion first usually indicates the debater's position. The "abortion at any stage of development for any reason" folks like yourself, about 20% of the US population, always seem to jump to the single-digit reasons like rape or mother's health. Those like myself who support some limits on abortion (such as opposing late-term abortions), about 60% of the US population, tend to focus on entire spectrum. Those who oppose abortions in all cases (about 12%) usually focus on the convenience issues only.

In that respect, at least, you didn't disappoint.

You know very well no one has advocated the killing off of babies.

I wish that were true. My early much stronger pro-life values were very affected when, as a teenager in the 1970's, I read an article by or about a doctor who had performed a late-term abortion that resulted in a live birth. He lay the screaming baby on a table, ordered the nurse not to tend to him, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. After about 15 minutes the nurse reported that the baby had died, and his response was "Good". (It was definitely intended as a pro-abortion tome, but was at least honest in its assessment of the downsides of legal abortion. Ah, the good old days. :-)

That this continues to be an issue even today is evident by Obama's well-reported vote against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in the Illinois senate (which was intended to prohibit allowing a living baby resulting from a late term abortion to be killed by neglect). He did vote for identical legislation in the US Senate (yes, it's identical - go get the text of both bills for yourself), which is why I mentioned that his position may have changed, or his earlier vote may have been due to other considerations (legislating is such a fascinating avocation). The bill has now become law, thankfully.

But the outlying cases of rape / health / defect and late term / partial birth / live birth is exactly why the majority of Americans take a more nuanced view of abortion than you. Compromise would be a good thing. Unfortunately, the current polarized environment makes that unlikely - more's the pity.

Antarctica (having about 70% of the worlds ice) is actually growing in terms of volume and area of ice (Though very slowly, nearly steady state).

There is also arguments that a world without ice would have more useful land. For example Iceland and Greenland would have vastly more habitable land and Antartica would be livable too.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png

Average sea levels are raising but at a much much slower raise than several thousand years. The challenge is to prove that the rate of change is different than would be expected at this point in the freeze/thaw cycle and that it is caused by man and not just slight variations "this time around".

Your claim that we have "10 times more nukes than required to wipe out life on Earth" is ridiculous. Worldwide megatonnage is roughly something less than 10,000 MT. The estimated energy of the K-T event is 100,000,000 MT, and it did not come close to "wiping out life on Earth". Sucked for the dinosaurs.

Nuclear Stockpiles: World Summary
When Comets and Asteroids Strike Earth

They abort more fetuses than virtually any other country on earth.

If that's what it takes to get the number in the US marginally lower I'm not sure it's worth it.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/index.html#ST

"Which gives them a lower infant mortality rate"

No, what gives them a lower infant mortality rate is, at least partially, their extremely high abortion rate.

Cubas per capita abortion rates are nearly 3 times those of the US. In fact, once you examine the figures you realize the number of countries that perform fewer abortions than Cuba is vanishingly small.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html

United States= 19.7 abortions per 1000 (2004)

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-cuba.html

Cuba = 57.0 per thousand. (2004)

I imagine the US numbers would come down too if we started aborting that many fetuses.

Here's another (slightly less current) list. It says the same thing.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2504499.html

Regardless of your stance on abortion, crowing about low infant mortality while you're aborting that many fetuses seems a little ridiculous.

"Which gives them a lower infant mortality rate"

No, what gives them a lower infant mortality rate is, at least partially, their extremely high abortion rate.

Cubas per capita abortion rates are nearly 3 times those of the US. In fact, once you examine the figures you realize the number of countries that perform fewer abortions than Cuba is vanishingly small.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html

United States= 19.7 abortions per 1000 (2004)

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-cuba.html

Cuba = 57.0 per thousand. (2004)

I imagine the US numbers would come down too if we started aborting that many fetuses.

Here's another (slightly less current) list. It says the same thing.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2504499.html

Regardless of your stance on abortion, crowing about low infant mortality while you're aborting that many fetuses seems a little ridiculous.

Of course a private, rather than state-funded, terrorist group wouldn't have these sorts of resources to draw on, but judging by some of the documented incidents with 'orphaned sources', lethal quantities of nasty isotopes can be frighteningly easy to get hold of, sometimes even by accident:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents

Among civilians, possibly 44,000 to 59,000 were killed the day of the bombing, with another 17,000 missing. Subsequent deaths include about 25,000 through the end of August 1945, 9,000 in September 1945, 2,000 in October-December 1945, and 2,500 in 1946. Many of these subsequent deaths involved radiation injuries.

Actually, it's possible. There were several criticality accidents in oil reservoirs and air filters:

For example, http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1961USSR2.html and several other ones (I'm too lazy to search)
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radcrit.html

Actually, it's possible. There were several criticality accidents in oil reservoirs and air filters:

For example, http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1961USSR2.html and several other ones (I'm too lazy to search)
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radcrit.html

Here in the US we call it Democratism and it hasn't been a nasty..... Oh wait, never mind.

To protect a few hundreds of innocents from McCarthy-like harassment, America shackled its intelligence services in the past, which appears to have contributed substantially to the deaths of several thousands (and billions of dollars worth of destruction) in 2001 alone.

You know its also possible to vote for Gore and yet criticize his handling of those scientific "facts"?

It's true. You can.

Gore has been right around the world (not to worry, he's carbon neutral by investing in his own company) and never yet answered questions from scientists about some of his statements which are simply false. He always begins by telling people not to record or note what he has to say. He then answers no questions.

that looks a lot like it could have been made by Beagle.

Sigh!

Beagle crash landed about a quarter of the way around the planet from Pathfinder.

It's like looking at a satellite image of Washington DC and saying "Hey, Is that Buckingham Palace?"

Either that, or the same ordinary process of erosion

You want to watch out; hysteria is the rule of the day when it comes to global warming.

The facts don't support that global warming causes "sinking of islands." If islands sink, they do so for (relatively) local geological causes. The amount that the seas have risen in response to the (highly doubtful) global warming trend people so badly want to imagine is a matter of centimeters (currently running about 10 per century), and I submit to you all that if an island was mere centimeters from being overcome by the sea, then calling it "inhabitable" was stretching it a bit in any case. Yes, yes, the sea can rise a centimeter and a wave can get over something it previously could not, but really, storms produces wave action you can hardly imagine if you've not been out in the ocean on an isolated island.

The bottom line? Even if global warming is absolutely on target, it had nothing whatsoever with this island succumbing to the sea.

Before you have a cow about current sea level rise and what effects that might have, perhaps you should peruse this. Pay particular attention to the graph; note how unusual our current relative stability is over time, but look at the bottom line; sea level rise simply isn't enough to demonize for eating islands. Some land features will succumb to the sea in the normal course of events, and that is all we have here.

It never ceases to amaze me how readily people will accept a pointed finger if "global warming" is inserted anywhere in the accusation.

Seriously, why do you even bother bringing war into this? This is trying to go beyond war. Sure there's something distinctly optimistic about it, but people have been trying to end war as we know it since at least the first world war, and there's good reason for this.

War will only end when man can trust man, and only insofar as that trust goes.

It's not as if there haven't been quite a lot of nuclear disasters for oh, I don't know, the last 50 years. As a result of accidents, both the American and Russian navies have left ship-based nuclear reactor cores AND nuclear bombs at the bottom of the ocean, all of which will take millions of years to half-life out, some of which are still emitting enough to be detectable near the surface, one of which was recently documented to be producing mutated life forms.

The list of military nuclear accidents is long and a bit frightening, not to mention these related lists of nuclear accidents.

Nuclear power is a boffo idea, on paper, and is not without the well-known risks. Nuclear proponents would be hypocritical to state otherwise.

After considering all the semantic errors in the final text, such as "dwarf planets" that aren't "planets" and not necessarily "dwarfs", and realizing how very hard it is to determine whether a planemo really is a "planet" or a "dwarf planet" ... I simply decided that this IAU definition doesn't work. I reject it because of its inherent absurdity. In my vast pain of this major personal trauma, I found a much much better, and very concise and easy definition ... here: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/astro/planettexas. html It easily measurable and refers to planemo size, nothing else.

In 2004, one of the worst recorded years for terrorism, ~9000 people were injured, and 1900 died. Sexual assaults in 2004 were about 200,000, and 44% were under 18, so about 88,000 minors. I'm not sure if I'd rather have been raped as a child or been injured by a bomb going off, but sexual assault is certainly more widespread.

*Tourism Statistics

*Child abuse statistics

BTW, I juxtaposing the lab gas with nuke heat:

Nuclear Weapon Thermal Effects:

Special Weapons Primer; Weapons of Mass Destruction:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/thermal.htm
-----------

Temperature of a Nuclear Explosion:

The Physics Factbook
  Edited by Glenn Elert -- Written by his students
  An educational, Fair Use website

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/SimonFung.shtm l

----------
Nuclear Weapons Effects--An Overview

  by Wm. Robert Johnston
  last updated 8 March 2005
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/effectsum. html

Bon-therma-tit...

Oh, I agree - for the combatant nations it is more than a bit unpleasant. Europe, for example, would be pretty much totally destroyed (both urban and rural areas) because it's such a "target rich" area - cities and military installations all close together. In the 1970s, Europe alone would probably receive half the megatonnage as it'd be the nuclear battleground before the final exchange. Europe would effectively be carpet bombed.

However, it's likely that as much as half of the US population would survive long term, and a larger proportion of the USSR population would have survived due to the relatively low population densities, leaving large areas of land where life is at least possible.

The Southern Hemisphere would be largely unaffected.

There is a good synopsis here: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar 1.html

The point is - not that it wouldn't be an apocalypse of unseen proportions, but it would not be the end of life on Earth or the human race. The Western world ceasing to exist doesn't equal all of humanity ceasing to exist (no matter how important we in the west think we are).

It would, of course, be very cool. However, they aren't even close. For all their travelling, the Spirit and Opportunity have probably not even left the dot that marks their location.

I've said it before and I've said it again. It saved lives.

Educate me.

Fix Wikipedia.

I won't say you're wrong. I will say that I can't be as certain as you are without knowing a lot of facts modern historians don't know the answers to. The fact is, I don't know the truth and I believe nobody ever will. I don't think the Japanese, Americans or Soviets knew everything that was going on. Nuclear war certainly wasn't on the table when Japan decided to make its move. How do you evaluate a risk like that when scientists haven't even proven it works?

It saved the lives of approximately One Million US Service Personnel, and it saved the lives of Millions of Japanese Civilians and Soliders

The bombings claimed 70,000+ lives in Nagasaki (they recently released the list of names) about 130,000 in Hiroshima, an additional 65,000 are estimated to have died from fallout. How many US lives would not dropping the bombs cost? Japanese lives? How many Soviet lives would it have cost, if they had finished up getting over China to Kyushu where, by modern theory, the Soviets would have accepted a conditional surrender of the Japanese, ending the war only two weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped? (57M/8 years /52 weeks in a year = 137,000 per week, 270,000 in 2 weeks and that's a severe overestimate because the Mediterranian and European theaters were over by then). Please cite some sources for killing 3 million people inside of two weeks.

How many generations does a life cost? The murdered children? The pregnant women? The women still yet to get pregnant? (Men are easy to count.) The bad will the US earned from the rest of the world by being the only nation to use atomic weapons in war?

Maybe the atomic bombs saved lives in the short term. Heck, maybe Japan would have been communist otherwise and the cold war would have not been so cold because someone would need to use the weapons in wartime to prove their effectiveness.

We're just guessing here. There are no clear cut answers. The fact of the matter is, the US had two reasons, one was saving US servicemen lives (accomplished) and two was saving Japan (and the rest of the world) from them falling to the communists (accomplished). The rest of it is retrospective optimism.

Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence. Cast aside everything inside as propaganda, because that's what it'll take not to put your American / European education into perspective.

So the only way to force an unconditional surrender was a rather raw display of power. The Bombs were a way of saying, "We don't need to use people to decimate you -- we can do it in a manner that you cannot possibly defend against. Now, will you give up?"

I agree with everything you just said. Now how many lives did it cost by dragging the war out an extra month by demanding an unconditional surrender, as suggested by then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson? (By the way, if we're going to discuss "intent to save lives", let's discuss the plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in to prevent another Normandy, shall we? At least

Which source is correct? Who knows?... the bias of your source is painstakingly clear. My source's only reference that I am aware of is it's google PageRank.

Beagle II is on a completely different part of the planet. Trust me, it didn't roll a quarter of the way around the planet.

/Mikael

I am surprised that so many people find it amazing that America elected Bush again. I think it would be obvious (and the pollsters agreed last night from the news I watched) that moral issues trump almost all else. When 11 states, including liberal ones like Oregon, pass amendments banning gay marriage the left should realize that the cries of "no blood for oil" and all that other propoganda means little in the face of issues like abortion and gay marriage. You cannot claim that the "christian right" passed the amendment in Oregon. It seems that there are a lot of christian liberals and undecideds that feel more strongly about these moral issues than the other issues being debated (what few there were).

-Styro

The complications involved in pregnancy are endless. Many can result in the death or permanent injury of the mother, the baby, or both. In the end, it's safer and more merciful simply to abort the pregnancy -- it's not like we need any more children.

And possible complications justify ending a human life? That's bullshit. First, there are many risks to abortion -- increase in risk for uterine cancer, various potential psychological problems, sterilization, and death. Probably more too.

Here's something: how about NOT GETTING PREGNANT. Approximately 1% of abortions are because of rape or incest. That means 99% are due to irresponsibility. If abortion on demand were not available as a method of birth control, I think people would think before they act a little bit more. Sex is a serious thing, and has consequences, and should be treated as such.

As far as not needing more children -- the US (and most of the civilized world) is in a state of population decline. The birth rate in the US is about 2.0 children per woman. Replacement rate is 2.2. Spain and Italy are having a population shortage crisis. Most of Europe will follow next, as will we if this keeps up.

Huh. last I heard, the cigarette was far more lethal a cause of cancer than the Sun.

*Interesting side note: During WW I women were hired to paint the controlls on the inside of fighter planes. The paint was composed of radium, so that pilots could see the controlls in the dark. The women would like their brushes between painting jobs to keep the tip fine enough for the small writing. When the women died, they had to be buried in lead lined coffins. *

This last part sounds like an urban myth. The radium painters indeed suffered (and the worst cases experienced extremely high rates of bone cancer (20 cases of bone cancer out of the 44 worst exposure cases). This doesn't describe the full story. There apparently were other nasty illnesses they could fall prey to. But they were ingesting paints with high concentrations of radium. Someone handling the unshielded coffin of such a victim wouldn't receive significant dosage (IMHO of course), and I don't see any other obvious benefit to a lead-lined coffin. After all, six feet or so of earth is a very effective shield.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that several of these poor women were buried in lead-lined coffins (perhaps out of ignorance or for propaganda purposes), but you don't need to bury them that way.

Ceres is round. Vesta is nearly so. Do they get promoted to planet status?

I have this theory. We point out mistakes here, and the BBC reporter changes the article. Let's try again shall we? Quoting the BBC:

570km (350 miles) isn't all that big for an EKO. 2003 VS2's actual size is 904km (561 miles).