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George Washington and Sam Adams are turning over in their graves right now listening to the sort of sad immoral people produced by our business schools who put profit over freedom. They said give me LIBERTY or give me death, not give me venture capital or give me death. If repulsive immoral greedy cretins such as yourself had been the majority in 1776 we surely still be the British Colony of the Americas. I'm sure the "investment opportunities" were quite good in the British East India Company:

http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/UsaHistory/AmericanR evolution/TeaParty.htm

The slave trade was quite a gold rush too asshole. Angry, you bet people like yourself and Dubya are turning America into a fascist shit hole for a few greasy dollars. You make me ill. Take your "V.C." and goat sex it...

• British East India Tea Company.

Didn't they cause England to lose the American colonies by inspiring such events as the Boston Tea Party? I'm not sure I want my government to repeat that folly.

What I learned in Second Grade.

Damned Devolutionists.

The Tea was forced upon you by the East India Company buying a law because you lot wouldn't buy their tea in the first place because of the ridiculous tax upon it...

The British East India Company had controlled all tea trading between India and the British colonies. As a result of the tea tax, the colonies refused to buy the British tea. Instead, they smuggled tea in from Holland. This left the British East India Company with warehouses full of unsold tea, and the company was in danger of going out of business.

The British government was determined to prevent the British East India Company from going out of business. It was going to force the colonists to buy their tea. In May 1773, Prime Minister North and the British parliament passed the Tea Act. The Tea Act allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the colonists, bypassing the colonial wholesale merchants. This allowed the company to sell their tea cheaper than the colonial merchants who were selling smuggled tea from Holland.

"Sales tax is under a different system than income tax."

So, the colonists revolted as a result of having to pay income tax? (And only income tax?)

http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/UsaHistory/AmericanR evolution/TeaParty.htm

See my post here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144191&cid=120 87565

all the best,

drew

such a large country, with such low population density.

The problem with that argument is that where there is population - the cities - the density is quite high. Canada's low population density is because of endless stretches of barren wasteland in the Northwest Territories, fields of rock and lake in Manitoba and Northern Ontario, and hundreds of kilometers of farm and ranch land in the praries, dotted occasionaly by cities of two hundred thousand or more people.

To put it another way: Imagine if everyone in the US suddenly disappeared, except for those in the state of California. If Los Angeles, San Fancisco, and the other cities in Cali all stayed the same, then the US would have a similar population density to Canada - but people would still be crammed in like sardines.

From http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/WorldGeography/Canad a/Canada.htm comes a quote that I've been hearing all my life in some form or other: "Most of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the border with the United States. About 75% of the population lives in major cities or towns." There isn't a problem with population density, because once you cover about 20 cities, you've already covered most of the population, and then you can start to expand from there, if it's feasible.

--Dan

detect an asteroid the size of Texas headed straight at us?

Just for the record, Texas is 266,807 sq miles . Does it make sense to compare a two dimensional item like a state to a three dimensional object like an asteroid? How? Compare the surface area of the asteroid to Texas? 4 pi r^2 is the formula for the area of a sphere.

Maybe one should use the largest cross section? This site says Vesta , the third largest asteroid, is the size of the state of Arizona. This site and this site list some of the larger asteroids.

Let me suggest that the chance of Ceres sneaking up on us is not one in a billion, or one in a trillion. Let me suggest it is zero.

Are there any asteroids the size of US states that haven't been discovered yet? None with Earth crossing orbits.

Are Kuiper Belt Objects asteroids? If so Ceres is no longer the largest asteroid. . But it is even more unlikely that something would divert a Ceres size KBO from past the orbit of Pluto to Earth orbit.

How long would it take to divert an asteroid from an Earth impact? Decades? Centuries? Millenia? Anyhow, Deep Impact had the incoming object be a comet. Even with a project to find deadly NEOs, we could still be snuck up on by a long period or extra-solar comet.

The Apollo moon samples were also quarantined and the chances of finding living material on the moon was very remote. Mars is much more likely to contain living material, and therefore even more caution should be taken. Apart from anything else, we want to make sure that earthly life doesn't infect the mars rock before it's been established that there aren't any martian lifeforms there.