Yeah, I used to think that, too. Then I started to get heavily into buddhism and it turned into another religion with entrenched dogma, gods, spirits, arbitrary rules, and all the rest of the crap that I was trying to get away from. I had to give up on it because as an atheist, I simply could not pretend to believe all that stuff just to obtain whatever wisdom came with it.
YMMV, however, but if you ever try buddhism and have the same experience, don't feel bad- you're not alone.
Yes, but the OP was talking about situations where the metaphysical was having an effect on our physical universe. Newton, bayes, et al could write a paper without using the word god. That is not what the OP was talking about. If Newton found irrefutable proof for some metaphysical explanation for physical processes but was laughed at by the silly atheists, then the OP would have a point.
The OP's comment was nonsense anyways, as he was saying, "Don't ignore real things unless they aren't real."
-Humans/animals/subatomic particles have free will somehow; as in, they can make arbitrary decisions and cause action that is unpredictable by any model of physics.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by laws of physics; said laws are natural and immutable and will lead to a predictable model of the universe.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by the whims of a god or other conscious entity. This scenario, much like creation theories, really just moves the determination of free will to another actor: If we are merely cogs in god's plan, does god have free will? This scenario, even if true, would not provide us with any useful information.
As an atheist I cannot fathom option 3. Of the remaining scenarios, the only one I can rationally support is number two (no free will thanks to physics). As it hurts my ego to claim that I have no free will, I believe that the concept of free will ought to be divided into distinct categories: mathematically-derived actions of matter and energy and sentient actions (which would not cover particles unless they were shown to be conscious). I think they ought to be treated as separate fields.
Or maybe individuals have free will, but the species does not. If you can predict birthrate, accident rate, crime rate, etc with a high degree of accuracy, is free will threatened? If you can predict with great accuracy that 1.2% of RV owners will experience a collision while driving their RV, do RV owners still retain free will?
I started getting 5 points at a time, then 10 points, and now I get 15 points about once per week, give or take a slow week here or there. It also seems to happen if two or more of my comments are modded up in the same time frame. I won't claim to undertand the mod point system.
I actually preferred the old style of 5 points better. I could easily use them all in one discussion that I had a background in, or I could use them on 5 stories if I felt like it. Having 15 mod points forces me to choose between modding or posting on virtually every discussion I read as long as I have the points. It's not often that I use all of the mod points, either.
>>How dare they??? I want government oversight of this dangerous endeavor immediately! I want it taxed
I should point out that a great deal of the maintenance of our road system is funded through gas taxes; in the current system, people who drive the most help pay for the roads the most. While I dislike gov't meddling for the most part, I do enjoy using our roads and highways. If EVs take off in a big way, you can expect to pay for the lost gas tax revenue in some other way.
I am just a layman, but I was under the impression that in the U.S., libel and slander both fall under the legal category of defamation (unlike places like the U.K. where they are separate).
If you have a background in this field, could you elaborate on the differences between libel/slander vs defamation?
That is pretty funny, but without the server error I've found chinese translators (traditional and simplified han) to work better than most languages. I was going to find a funny mistranslation, but my systran translator worked flawlessly. The worst I could find with my original subject line, "that was pretty funny," was, "that was quite funny."
The situation is worse with longer or more complex sentences and turns of phrase, but I was surprised at the level of sophistication of modern machine translation. This story should really be making fun of whatever server the translator was running on rather than the cafe owner or the translator itself.
What I find interesting about printed chinese english is that it is often printed in the same typeface. Look at many of the inspection tags, instructions, or 'made in china' tags that you have on products laying about; chances are that they are all in an identical old-fashioned serif typeface. Can anyone tell us the story behind this generic 'english' typeface that I run into so often?
Um, look, I hate to tell you this, but native americans fought major wars with each other, wasted thousands upon thousands of tons of meat, cheated on their partners, killed their leaders, raided other villages for food and women, etc. just like every other damned human civilization on earth at some point. They had clean air and water because they weren't numerous enough to pollute an entire continent. Did they live in a more harmonious relationship with nature than most of us do today? Probably. And so did the aboriginal cultures of ALL our ancestors at an early enough stage in their development.
The first things I look at when I am comparing countries' standards of living are life expectancy and infant mortality rates. By those measures, yes: we are doing quite well for ourselves. I can honestly say that I would rather be me right now than a native american 300 years ago, or a magdalenian hunter-gatherer in what is now spain or italy. I do have it good now, and yes it is the result of 200 years of exploitation of the land and people. I can't change that. And I'm not going to try. And here's why.
I treat people according to their actions and intentions. I try to treat people as individuals instead of groups, as in, black people, fat people, italians, poor people. We have all been told why negative stereotypes are bad. But positive stereotypes are also bad, and they are very much racist when used along racial boundaries. And judging someone based on their ancestors is a form of racism, in that they are both based on your parents (something you cannot control).
What you said probably felt like a compliment to native americans, but it was not. When, for example, an asian person is good at math, he/she is not applauded nearly as much as other people. Why? Because everyone knows that asians are good at math, right? So it stands to reason that he/she didn't have to bust their ass studying for years to learn what they know. Except that they did bust their ass the same as anyone else. Positive stereotypes steal personal achievements from people just as much as negative ones.
My point is that we need to judge people, for better or worse, based on their personal actions and intentions. The current anti-french craze bugs me, the anti-muslim craze bugs me, and your rose-colored version of native americans bugs me. A native who lives in harmony with nature and lives sustainably should be applauded for HIS OWN actions, and a native who commits crimes or otherwise displeases society should be judged as an individual just like everyone else. It matters not that they have sovereign nations. We should treat them the same way we treat frenchmen or poles or russians. Which is to say, we should treat them as people who were born far away maybe, and speak another language maybe, but first and foremost as humans who are accountable for their actions.
I don't respect or disrespect any nation, including native american nations like the navajo. I deal with people. We can't have a discussion about this issue until people can start treating native americans as human beings instead of storybook stereotypes, even if it's a 'good' stereotype.
End of rant. Now all the people who think it's OK for Carlos Mencia to make fun of mexicans but that white people cannot can go ahead and mod me down.
Not posted anonymously for reasons of personal integrity. -b
>>If it was ok for them to do it, then as far as I was concerned it was ok for me too.
There is quite a difference between copying adult actions and copying adolescent actions. Childhood and high school are times when you are expected to make mistakes, although of course this is not encouraged. There are reasons that laws apply differently to kids under 18. It is because their worldview and ability to foresee the true consequences of their actions make them prone to mistakes that would otherwise cause major legal problems for an adult, who is supposed to act rationally. I'm sorry, I haven't had my coffee yet.
What I mean is this: When I was very young (1), I crapped my pants. When I was a little older (5), I painted the dog. And when I was even older (14), we went around making drano bombs in the woods. Those would all be considered pretty major mistakes if I made them now at 25, barring some kind of illness. And I think that teenage sex, drinking, and drug use ranks up there with crapping one's pants or making drano bombs. At 14 I was incapable of making the right decision about mixing pressurized caustic liquids without eye protection. Would you trust me or other like me to have sex and deal with a child? To reduce my already questionable judgment with alcohol or other drugs?
Kids are not little adults- they are entirely different creatures with different though processes, priorities, and perspectives. I mean no disrespect by saying this, but there are very real physiological and psychological reasons that adolescents are different and less fit to make life-changing decisions than adults.
Your argument only works for you because you pick adults who are alive and well after making possibly poor decisions as teens; I'll bet you wouldn't say, "Well uncle steve got drunk when he was 17 and drove into a tree and died and killed his date as well, and dammit if he did it then so can I." You can cherry pick all the people who had sex with no consequences, smoked pot and never got caught, took lsd and somehow managed after all that to make it into respectable adulthood. Of course you are ignoring all the people who started smoking at 12 who will be dead before retirement, the people who had babies as teenagers and whose lives were basically ruined, and so on. I know many people who ruined their lives by making adult decisions as teenagers.
"Don't be such a chicken, Kif. Teenagers smoke, and they seem pretty on-the-ball."
We already have this. It's called the Phalanx sometimes, or just CIWS (close in weapons system). It features a 20 mm vulcan cannon, multiple radars, autonomous operation, and on top of that it can track multiple (dozens) incoming targets as well as its own outgoing projectiles. They can also network together to form a basewide protective shield. They are loaded with a tracer every 20 or 30 rounds and at night the bullet stream looks like the world's most powerful and accurate garden hose- one continuous stream of projectiles. The sound and feeling even from 200 yards is something you'll never forget, especially after you clean your pants the first time they fire without warning. Watching 5 of them fire in synch during a test is awe-inspiring (in good and bad ways, I guess).
Yeah, lasers, great... But in a deployed area, the CIWS provides early warning and interception of incoming mortars and missiles and doesn't require anything more than a generator and a full magazine. Someday lasers might provide an even better shield but until then we could use a few more CIWS in the field.
There is a tremendous difference between issuing a citation/fine for a misdemeanor and killing someone, and capital punishment should only be carried out in grave instances, if at all. You don't need to tie up the courts for 3 months over a prank call the way things work now; bring the death penalty into it and every single trial will last years. And if you want to throw out due process, I don't know what to say to you. And frankly it doesn't even matter because your motivation (selection) only applies to kids. And so on.
"Driving under the influence of disabling drugs" -How disabling? One percocet? Two? Can you blow a.0x for caffeine? Or maybe you could say that "disabling" means that the driver was driving recklessly. That's fine, and that's why we already have laws against reckless driving. Why do we punish people for the WAY they commit a crime instead of just the crime?
"Prank calls to emergency services" -Define 'prank'. Differentiate that from confused elderly, people like me who called 911 few times for domestic disturbances downstairs that probably weren't actually emergencies, situations that seemed like emergencies at first (child gone missing, shows up again), etc. How does a person prove that they genuinely believed they were making the correct call?
"Sexual abuse of children" -Where do you draw the line? Spanking? Pictures of my toddlers in the bath or on the beach? Public urination (has resulted in more than one sex offense convictions)? Any neighbor who gets the wrong idea can cast a death sentence on someone else? And why not punish regular old child abuse, neglect, driving without your child in a carseat, etc?
"Invasion of privacy by a government official" -Define invasion of privacy. At the beginning of the last century, all you had was a name and maybe a birth certificate. Now you get a social security number when you're born that is permanent and unique. You basically cannot live in the U.S. without one. So who should be shot? The politicians who mandated the original program? Politicians who come up with new and similar and yet also very useful programs? Define privacy. Define where privacy ends- as you cross your front door? As you leave your property line? If and only when you explicitly declare, "this is not private"?
"Inability to find the roots of a quadratic" -Maybe a nod to Philip K. Dick, and I assume you're joking. Unless you want everyone under college age to die. Skip this one.
You got modded +5, and more power to you. But there are huge problems with your idea. And the biggest one is last:
Selection only works if members of a population are culled BEFORE SEXUAL MATURITY. And I'm sure that you know that kids as young as 14 can make babies. So what you would have to do is kill children. Childhood is when you get to make mistakes without the repercussions that we adults feel.
And if you meant the executions to act as a deterrent... Heh. We already have jail and death sentences and look at how well they work.
I don't know if you're trying to be funny or serious, but have you considered cases where more than one person uses the same computer, or ISPs that use dynamic IP's?
Google is searching 'us' the same way sociologists and insurance companies search 'us'. They aren't searching 'you'- the 'us' is just that, an 'us'. Google knows a lot about 'us' but very little about 'you' unless you volunteered that information by using gmail or other services. And everyone knows that everything on the internet is public and permanent.
I'm also in my 20s so hopefully we have at least some common experiences with previous generations. I don't know how you can make a case that the greatest generation holds a candle to the baby boomers when it comes to fucking up.
You're right. I guess I conflated the two groups because my interactions with them, when they concerned the subject of the generation gap, have been nearly identical.
I hadn't even thought of the feminist movement. Incidentally, "the handmaid's tale" is a great cautionary story about a possible outcome of the degeneration of feminism; i.e., a regression via ignorance and complacency of younger generations back to pre-industrial gender roles for women. I know it seems ironic that I would bring that up, but I consider it to be an entirely separate topic from what I discussed earlier.
Yeah, kids these days. Not like the old kids who liked math and had long attention spans and followed the rules and put study before play. Yeah, those were the days. It's too bad those cosmic S-rays came out of the crab nebula and changed this generation's genetic code to make us all stupid and childlike. Otherwise the generation that is doing the most bitching would find themselves shouldering the responsibility and no one wants that. So it's way better to tell 12-year-olds how terrible they are and focus the spotlight on them as if they were abnormal specimens in jars.
-The first astronauts were pilots first, dial-readers second. I know some of them had advanced degrees but flying gemini/mercury/apollo took more balls than brains. They were celebrated not as rocket scientists but as war heroes.
-The late fifties/sixties were a time of tremendous conflict within the U.S.; racial and political conflicts were shedding blood across the country. Kent state? MLK? JFK? Come on, these were only halcyon days if you cut out all the bad parts.
-Science has always had a pop aspect to it. we have one now, but the real science is being done in labs away from the public's eye. 99% of scientific research (if I had to guess) goes completely unnoticed by the public until it's on sale at best buy or gnc or sears. It was around the time of the first space exploration that we were having such scientific debates as: can black kids ever be as smart as white kids? How long should you let a baby cry before you pick it up (all day or never, depending on the book); can you teach normal children to have permanent speech impediments (yes, it turns out); how does radiation affect soldiers? Will the public notice our noise tests for several years of sonic booms over a city (oklahoma city)?; Is it ok to displace island after island of otherwise content natives in order to conduct nuclear weapons tests?; Is this defoliant 'agent orange' safe? How much dioxin can we pump into lakes and rivers before people notice that the birds are gone? etc.
etc. etc.
I hate to rain on your parade but people are people and I really think you are exaggerating the differences between generations. The teenagers of today will be talking all sorts of the same nonsense to their kids and grandkids. I can't even imagine what the future has in store for us, but i can imagine these old teenagers bitching about how they used to have to TYPE their text messages and they had to unwrap the damned poptarts and put them in the damned toaster all by themselves and how HARD driver's ed used to be before cars drove themselves... and on and on. It's a cycle, people. We need to remain diligent about the situation but I seem to remember a certain class i took... History, it was called.
History doesn't repeat itself... but it does rhyme. Take heart in the consistent mediocrity of humanity when you think we are on the path to destruction.
Sorry to rant, but I'm sick of all this Dan Rather crap trying to make me feel like a worthless loser for being 25. We haven't had enough damned time to be the greatest generation yet, you self-indulgent prick (dan rather, i mean). And if fighting a war is what makes you a great generation, then I think we've got that covered, too. Oh really, you had to ration gas and copper was expensive? Oh damn, well guess what 'greatest generation', the economy you created has left me unable to afford anything more than a ramshackle bungalow 15 miles out of town with my modest military wages. So screw you and your american dream. It's easy to have an american dream when houses are $10,000.
Maybe you were talking about just internal clocks and stuff, but I'd say the reason that your RF devices don't function under water is that RF cannot propogate through water until you get into the ELF range.
It's not a spray, it's a vapor-deposition process and they don't say but I'd bet it is some kind of fluorinated chains like teflon or somesuch. It is likely that the labor and installation tools are 99% of the cost. It'd be a lot cheaper to just dip your electronics in soft wax, but what do I know.
Part of the reason is redundancy, another part is wing loading, and another part is aerodynamics. Another reason still is simple geometry- assume the engine is a sphere, and compare the volume (which translates into throughput) of a sphere with d X versus d x/2. An engine in thin atmosphere requires lots and lots of volume as opposed to sea-level air or water, where you see a smaller number of much larger movers (fans, propellers, etc.). There are undoubtedly other considerations taken into account such as part cost/availability, turbulent vs laminar airflow, maintenance turn-around time, etc. It's a complicated business.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant "phreaker", not cracker.
-b
>>Hence Buddhists, for example, are atheist.
Yeah, I used to think that, too. Then I started to get heavily into buddhism and it turned into another religion with entrenched dogma, gods, spirits, arbitrary rules, and all the rest of the crap that I was trying to get away from. I had to give up on it because as an atheist, I simply could not pretend to believe all that stuff just to obtain whatever wisdom came with it.
YMMV, however, but if you ever try buddhism and have the same experience, don't feel bad- you're not alone.
-b
Yes, but the OP was talking about situations where the metaphysical was having an effect on our physical universe. Newton, bayes, et al could write a paper without using the word god. That is not what the OP was talking about. If Newton found irrefutable proof for some metaphysical explanation for physical processes but was laughed at by the silly atheists, then the OP would have a point.
The OP's comment was nonsense anyways, as he was saying, "Don't ignore real things unless they aren't real."
-b
You have basically three choices here:
-Humans/animals/subatomic particles have free will somehow; as in, they can make arbitrary decisions and cause action that is unpredictable by any model of physics.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by laws of physics; said laws are natural and immutable and will lead to a predictable model of the universe.
-Humans et al. do not have free will and their actions are dictated by the whims of a god or other conscious entity. This scenario, much like creation theories, really just moves the determination of free will to another actor: If we are merely cogs in god's plan, does god have free will? This scenario, even if true, would not provide us with any useful information.
As an atheist I cannot fathom option 3. Of the remaining scenarios, the only one I can rationally support is number two (no free will thanks to physics). As it hurts my ego to claim that I have no free will, I believe that the concept of free will ought to be divided into distinct categories: mathematically-derived actions of matter and energy and sentient actions (which would not cover particles unless they were shown to be conscious). I think they ought to be treated as separate fields.
Or maybe individuals have free will, but the species does not. If you can predict birthrate, accident rate, crime rate, etc with a high degree of accuracy, is free will threatened? If you can predict with great accuracy that 1.2% of RV owners will experience a collision while driving their RV, do RV owners still retain free will?
I need more caffeine.
-b
Even a clock flashing "12:00" will be correct twice a day, which is a better record than most politicians.
Brought to you by the Frigidaire 2008 election campaign.
-b
I started getting 5 points at a time, then 10 points, and now I get 15 points about once per week, give or take a slow week here or there. It also seems to happen if two or more of my comments are modded up in the same time frame. I won't claim to undertand the mod point system.
I actually preferred the old style of 5 points better. I could easily use them all in one discussion that I had a background in, or I could use them on 5 stories if I felt like it. Having 15 mod points forces me to choose between modding or posting on virtually every discussion I read as long as I have the points. It's not often that I use all of the mod points, either.
>>How dare they??? I want government oversight of this dangerous endeavor immediately! I want it taxed
I should point out that a great deal of the maintenance of our road system is funded through gas taxes; in the current system, people who drive the most help pay for the roads the most. While I dislike gov't meddling for the most part, I do enjoy using our roads and highways. If EVs take off in a big way, you can expect to pay for the lost gas tax revenue in some other way.
-b
I am just a layman, but I was under the impression that in the U.S., libel and slander both fall under the legal category of defamation (unlike places like the U.K. where they are separate).
If you have a background in this field, could you elaborate on the differences between libel/slander vs defamation?
-b
That is pretty funny, but without the server error I've found chinese translators (traditional and simplified han) to work better than most languages. I was going to find a funny mistranslation, but my systran translator worked flawlessly. The worst I could find with my original subject line, "that was pretty funny," was, "that was quite funny."
The situation is worse with longer or more complex sentences and turns of phrase, but I was surprised at the level of sophistication of modern machine translation. This story should really be making fun of whatever server the translator was running on rather than the cafe owner or the translator itself.
What I find interesting about printed chinese english is that it is often printed in the same typeface. Look at many of the inspection tags, instructions, or 'made in china' tags that you have on products laying about; chances are that they are all in an identical old-fashioned serif typeface. Can anyone tell us the story behind this generic 'english' typeface that I run into so often?
-b
Um, look, I hate to tell you this, but native americans fought major wars with each other, wasted thousands upon thousands of tons of meat, cheated on their partners, killed their leaders, raided other villages for food and women, etc. just like every other damned human civilization on earth at some point. They had clean air and water because they weren't numerous enough to pollute an entire continent. Did they live in a more harmonious relationship with nature than most of us do today? Probably. And so did the aboriginal cultures of ALL our ancestors at an early enough stage in their development.
The first things I look at when I am comparing countries' standards of living are life expectancy and infant mortality rates. By those measures, yes: we are doing quite well for ourselves. I can honestly say that I would rather be me right now than a native american 300 years ago, or a magdalenian hunter-gatherer in what is now spain or italy. I do have it good now, and yes it is the result of 200 years of exploitation of the land and people. I can't change that. And I'm not going to try. And here's why.
I treat people according to their actions and intentions. I try to treat people as individuals instead of groups, as in, black people, fat people, italians, poor people. We have all been told why negative stereotypes are bad. But positive stereotypes are also bad, and they are very much racist when used along racial boundaries. And judging someone based on their ancestors is a form of racism, in that they are both based on your parents (something you cannot control).
What you said probably felt like a compliment to native americans, but it was not. When, for example, an asian person is good at math, he/she is not applauded nearly as much as other people. Why? Because everyone knows that asians are good at math, right? So it stands to reason that he/she didn't have to bust their ass studying for years to learn what they know. Except that they did bust their ass the same as anyone else. Positive stereotypes steal personal achievements from people just as much as negative ones.
My point is that we need to judge people, for better or worse, based on their personal actions and intentions. The current anti-french craze bugs me, the anti-muslim craze bugs me, and your rose-colored version of native americans bugs me. A native who lives in harmony with nature and lives sustainably should be applauded for HIS OWN actions, and a native who commits crimes or otherwise displeases society should be judged as an individual just like everyone else. It matters not that they have sovereign nations. We should treat them the same way we treat frenchmen or poles or russians. Which is to say, we should treat them as people who were born far away maybe, and speak another language maybe, but first and foremost as humans who are accountable for their actions.
I don't respect or disrespect any nation, including native american nations like the navajo. I deal with people. We can't have a discussion about this issue until people can start treating native americans as human beings instead of storybook stereotypes, even if it's a 'good' stereotype.
End of rant. Now all the people who think it's OK for Carlos Mencia to make fun of mexicans but that white people cannot can go ahead and mod me down.
Not posted anonymously for reasons of personal integrity.
-b
>>If it was ok for them to do it, then as far as I was concerned it was ok for me too.
There is quite a difference between copying adult actions and copying adolescent actions. Childhood and high school are times when you are expected to make mistakes, although of course this is not encouraged. There are reasons that laws apply differently to kids under 18. It is because their worldview and ability to foresee the true consequences of their actions make them prone to mistakes that would otherwise cause major legal problems for an adult, who is supposed to act rationally. I'm sorry, I haven't had my coffee yet.
What I mean is this: When I was very young (1), I crapped my pants. When I was a little older (5), I painted the dog. And when I was even older (14), we went around making drano bombs in the woods. Those would all be considered pretty major mistakes if I made them now at 25, barring some kind of illness. And I think that teenage sex, drinking, and drug use ranks up there with crapping one's pants or making drano bombs. At 14 I was incapable of making the right decision about mixing pressurized caustic liquids without eye protection. Would you trust me or other like me to have sex and deal with a child? To reduce my already questionable judgment with alcohol or other drugs?
Kids are not little adults- they are entirely different creatures with different though processes, priorities, and perspectives. I mean no disrespect by saying this, but there are very real physiological and psychological reasons that adolescents are different and less fit to make life-changing decisions than adults.
Your argument only works for you because you pick adults who are alive and well after making possibly poor decisions as teens; I'll bet you wouldn't say, "Well uncle steve got drunk when he was 17 and drove into a tree and died and killed his date as well, and dammit if he did it then so can I." You can cherry pick all the people who had sex with no consequences, smoked pot and never got caught, took lsd and somehow managed after all that to make it into respectable adulthood. Of course you are ignoring all the people who started smoking at 12 who will be dead before retirement, the people who had babies as teenagers and whose lives were basically ruined, and so on. I know many people who ruined their lives by making adult decisions as teenagers.
"Don't be such a chicken, Kif. Teenagers smoke, and they seem pretty on-the-ball."
-b
>>Try puttin on a blue UN hat and see what happens.
From what I've seen in central and east Africa: Absolutely nothing.
>>Put yourself in a valley, and your laser defense system might not even track the round until its already too late.
If you're based in a valley, it's already too late.
>>This is one of the reasons the US is not welcomed with open arms when they're coming to liberate a country.
What, we aren't like all those other countries who ARE welcomed with open arms?
We already have this. It's called the Phalanx sometimes, or just CIWS (close in weapons system). It features a 20 mm vulcan cannon, multiple radars, autonomous operation, and on top of that it can track multiple (dozens) incoming targets as well as its own outgoing projectiles. They can also network together to form a basewide protective shield. They are loaded with a tracer every 20 or 30 rounds and at night the bullet stream looks like the world's most powerful and accurate garden hose- one continuous stream of projectiles. The sound and feeling even from 200 yards is something you'll never forget, especially after you clean your pants the first time they fire without warning. Watching 5 of them fire in synch during a test is awe-inspiring (in good and bad ways, I guess).
Yeah, lasers, great... But in a deployed area, the CIWS provides early warning and interception of incoming mortars and missiles and doesn't require anything more than a generator and a full magazine. Someday lasers might provide an even better shield but until then we could use a few more CIWS in the field.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgpQBZF2sZQ
You should watch that video- dove or hawk, any geek has to admit that the phalanx is one bad ass mutha.
-b
There is a tremendous difference between issuing a citation/fine for a misdemeanor and killing someone, and capital punishment should only be carried out in grave instances, if at all. You don't need to tie up the courts for 3 months over a prank call the way things work now; bring the death penalty into it and every single trial will last years. And if you want to throw out due process, I don't know what to say to you. And frankly it doesn't even matter because your motivation (selection) only applies to kids. And so on.
-b
"Driving under the influence of disabling drugs" .0x for caffeine? Or maybe you could say that "disabling" means that the driver was driving recklessly. That's fine, and that's why we already have laws against reckless driving. Why do we punish people for the WAY they commit a crime instead of just the crime?
-How disabling? One percocet? Two? Can you blow a
"Prank calls to emergency services"
-Define 'prank'. Differentiate that from confused elderly, people like me who called 911 few times for domestic disturbances downstairs that probably weren't actually emergencies, situations that seemed like emergencies at first (child gone missing, shows up again), etc. How does a person prove that they genuinely believed they were making the correct call?
"Sexual abuse of children"
-Where do you draw the line? Spanking? Pictures of my toddlers in the bath or on the beach? Public urination (has resulted in more than one sex offense convictions)? Any neighbor who gets the wrong idea can cast a death sentence on someone else? And why not punish regular old child abuse, neglect, driving without your child in a carseat, etc?
"Invasion of privacy by a government official"
-Define invasion of privacy. At the beginning of the last century, all you had was a name and maybe a birth certificate. Now you get a social security number when you're born that is permanent and unique. You basically cannot live in the U.S. without one. So who should be shot? The politicians who mandated the original program? Politicians who come up with new and similar and yet also very useful programs? Define privacy. Define where privacy ends- as you cross your front door? As you leave your property line? If and only when you explicitly declare, "this is not private"?
"Inability to find the roots of a quadratic"
-Maybe a nod to Philip K. Dick, and I assume you're joking. Unless you want everyone under college age to die. Skip this one.
You got modded +5, and more power to you. But there are huge problems with your idea. And the biggest one is last:
Selection only works if members of a population are culled BEFORE SEXUAL MATURITY. And I'm sure that you know that kids as young as 14 can make babies. So what you would have to do is kill children. Childhood is when you get to make mistakes without the repercussions that we adults feel.
And if you meant the executions to act as a deterrent... Heh. We already have jail and death sentences and look at how well they work.
-b
I don't know if you're trying to be funny or serious, but have you considered cases where more than one person uses the same computer, or ISPs that use dynamic IP's?
Google is searching 'us' the same way sociologists and insurance companies search 'us'. They aren't searching 'you'- the 'us' is just that, an 'us'. Google knows a lot about 'us' but very little about 'you' unless you volunteered that information by using gmail or other services. And everyone knows that everything on the internet is public and permanent.
-b
I'm also in my 20s so hopefully we have at least some common experiences with previous generations. I don't know how you can make a case that the greatest generation holds a candle to the baby boomers when it comes to fucking up.
You're right. I guess I conflated the two groups because my interactions with them, when they concerned the subject of the generation gap, have been nearly identical.
I hadn't even thought of the feminist movement. Incidentally, "the handmaid's tale" is a great cautionary story about a possible outcome of the degeneration of feminism; i.e., a regression via ignorance and complacency of younger generations back to pre-industrial gender roles for women. I know it seems ironic that I would bring that up, but I consider it to be an entirely separate topic from what I discussed earlier.
-b
Yeah, kids these days. Not like the old kids who liked math and had long attention spans and followed the rules and put study before play. Yeah, those were the days. It's too bad those cosmic S-rays came out of the crab nebula and changed this generation's genetic code to make us all stupid and childlike. Otherwise the generation that is doing the most bitching would find themselves shouldering the responsibility and no one wants that. So it's way better to tell 12-year-olds how terrible they are and focus the spotlight on them as if they were abnormal specimens in jars.
-b
You have some good points, but...
-The first astronauts were pilots first, dial-readers second. I know some of them had advanced degrees but flying gemini/mercury/apollo took more balls than brains. They were celebrated not as rocket scientists but as war heroes.
-The late fifties/sixties were a time of tremendous conflict within the U.S.; racial and political conflicts were shedding blood across the country. Kent state? MLK? JFK? Come on, these were only halcyon days if you cut out all the bad parts.
-Science has always had a pop aspect to it. we have one now, but the real science is being done in labs away from the public's eye. 99% of scientific research (if I had to guess) goes completely unnoticed by the public until it's on sale at best buy or gnc or sears. It was around the time of the first space exploration that we were having such scientific debates as: can black kids ever be as smart as white kids? How long should you let a baby cry before you pick it up (all day or never, depending on the book); can you teach normal children to have permanent speech impediments (yes, it turns out); how does radiation affect soldiers? Will the public notice our noise tests for several years of sonic booms over a city (oklahoma city)?; Is it ok to displace island after island of otherwise content natives in order to conduct nuclear weapons tests?; Is this defoliant 'agent orange' safe? How much dioxin can we pump into lakes and rivers before people notice that the birds are gone? etc.
etc.
etc.
I hate to rain on your parade but people are people and I really think you are exaggerating the differences between generations. The teenagers of today will be talking all sorts of the same nonsense to their kids and grandkids. I can't even imagine what the future has in store for us, but i can imagine these old teenagers bitching about how they used to have to TYPE their text messages and they had to unwrap the damned poptarts and put them in the damned toaster all by themselves and how HARD driver's ed used to be before cars drove themselves... and on and on. It's a cycle, people. We need to remain diligent about the situation but I seem to remember a certain class i took... History, it was called.
History doesn't repeat itself... but it does rhyme. Take heart in the consistent mediocrity of humanity when you think we are on the path to destruction.
Sorry to rant, but I'm sick of all this Dan Rather crap trying to make me feel like a worthless loser for being 25. We haven't had enough damned time to be the greatest generation yet, you self-indulgent prick (dan rather, i mean). And if fighting a war is what makes you a great generation, then I think we've got that covered, too. Oh really, you had to ration gas and copper was expensive? Oh damn, well guess what 'greatest generation', the economy you created has left me unable to afford anything more than a ramshackle bungalow 15 miles out of town with my modest military wages. So screw you and your american dream. It's easy to have an american dream when houses are $10,000.
-b
-b
A circuitboard encased in a capsule of wax fares pretty well under water. Works as a heat-sink, as well.
-b
Maybe you were talking about just internal clocks and stuff, but I'd say the reason that your RF devices don't function under water is that RF cannot propogate through water until you get into the ELF range.
Maybe I misunderstood your post...
-b
It's not a spray, it's a vapor-deposition process and they don't say but I'd bet it is some kind of fluorinated chains like teflon or somesuch. It is likely that the labor and installation tools are 99% of the cost. It'd be a lot cheaper to just dip your electronics in soft wax, but what do I know.
-b
Part of the reason is redundancy, another part is wing loading, and another part is aerodynamics. Another reason still is simple geometry- assume the engine is a sphere, and compare the volume (which translates into throughput) of a sphere with d X versus d x/2. An engine in thin atmosphere requires lots and lots of volume as opposed to sea-level air or water, where you see a smaller number of much larger movers (fans, propellers, etc.). There are undoubtedly other considerations taken into account such as part cost/availability, turbulent vs laminar airflow, maintenance turn-around time, etc. It's a complicated business.
My two cents, anyways.
-b