The Saturn V needed to push that VW-sized object out of a significant gravity well. In the proposed scenario, the gravity well would be acting in favor of rather than against the goal (albeit very attenuated by distance). Yes, changing the velocity of the mass is still significant, but you want to talk about orders of magnitude, taking something from sea level to escape is ridiculous to contrast with something already in orbit.
And if you RTFA, you'll find that the object is only 10 meters, and would be done more as an experiment and proof-of-concept than for profit.
Sprint does offer unlimited data on their wimax ("4G"). I'm using it right now. It's pretty decent so long as you're not moving. Using it on the train is a bit painful, especially with the spotty coverage on the VA side of DC metro.
Ah yes, the evil of inequality vs the supposed good goal of equality, which stipulates that it doesn't matter if the poor are made poorer so long as the rich are less rich. And anybody who disagrees with that ideological nonsense will be ignored. Good show, old bean.
Well, you have certainly shown your true colors. You would gladly support barbarians murdering Hans for not cutting their hair before any religion, eh? Who's crazy now? Maybe not crazy but surely evil. You would gladly wage a war against Chinese culture and kill Chinese people so long as it was done in the name of atheism? Well, you surely are a Maoist then, and a clear enemy of Chinese culture and the Chinese themselves, a traitor who would collude with barbarian murderers.
The Taiping rebels were crazy, but even if they hadn't collapsed under their own stupidity (which I think did them more harm than the weak Qing could have done), any government established by them would not have lasted very long. It would have been better to have tolerated their craziness for a few years if it would have gotten the Manchus out sooner. In the end it would have still been the same, at least the Hans would regain control of their own destiny again to reprise their own culture.
The CCP isn't afraid of FLG because the FLG practitioners hurt themselves, it's because the FLG is an organization that ostensibly is under a hierarchy that refuses CCP control. Because of the CCP persecution of FLG, now that whole organization is also focused on calling out all the faults in the CCP and its administration of China.
During the first decades after the Chinese Civil War, petty government officials and wannabes of all stripes accused anybody they didn't like of being 'counter-revolutionary' and beat the shit out of them, half the time to death, but you didn't see the CCP doing anything about Mao Zedong Thought making people crazy and hurting each other. Of course not, that was *their* craziness and stopping that would be bad for the authority of the party. The party doesn't care about people's safety, it cares about its own power.
I also happen to like turtles, regardless of their connotation in Chinese culture. Though by coincidence I am adopted and do not know my biological father. Who cares? I thought you were against superstitious nonsense, but now you want to make something of 'filial piety' or something? Hypocrite.
The thing is that all the death and destruction wrought by the CCP is demonstrably unnecessary. The demonstration is Hong Kong. Hong Kong people were living a first world lifestyle long before the mainlanders or even the Taiwanese (where the KMT's white terrors were almost as bad as the CCP's cultural revolution and similar episodes, albeit naturally on a smaller scale), and they didn't have to sacrifice any cultural freedom to do it. Education, a relatively less corrupt system of justice, and minimizing the government drag on commerce was all that was necessary to propel the Hong Kong Chinese into a successful and prosperous modern society.
You are really too obsessed with religion. It blinds you to real history.
Nobody is truly free if they are not also free to be not free, if they so decide. If subjecting themselves for false promises makes them happy, then you ruin their lives by your external imposition to save them from ruining their lives by your judgement. Either way their lives are ruined, but only in one way can they be at least happy masters of their own destiny, even if that ironically means the pretend not to be masters of their own destiny.
The most difficult aspect of freedom is that people must be free to harm themselves, to associate, commiserate, and organize with others who would harm themselves, or there is neither freedom nor happiness. Freedom must apply equally to the stupid, the gullible, the naive, the tasteless, the slothful, and indeed all kinds of persons and their wasteful behaviors so long as those behaviors are not forced upon others. Anything less is no better than the theocratic moral tyranny you pretend to oppose. A secular moral tyranny that prosecutes thought crimes of superstition will itself be ultimately immoral for the wrongful initiation of force to rob comfort from persons for no provocation. Even as an atheist I would fight such tyranny.
However, the toxic influence of religion throughout history makes any moves against it reasonable.
It is thinking like that which leads inexorably to genocide and crimes against humanity. It is the sort of absolutist confidence which in religion itself leads to atrocities committed in the name of "morality". You lack all the wisdom and nuance that any follower of religious dogma lacks. You resemble your supposed enemy far more than you can pretend to oppose them.
The CCP does a pretty good job of delegitimizing itself. I especially like how they persecute lawyers who dare represent anybody against the government for any reason, and how they tell journalists not to talk about it or else. They're worse than a mafia.
As a 50center you might not realize that many Americans are more upset by the way the Branch Davidians were handled than they were about Branch Davidianism. We don't care if people want to believe crazy things, hell, it's enshrined in the Constitution that they can. The Branch Davidians crossed a line in that they were shooting at people, so until you can show Falun Gong doing such things you'll get very little sympathy from a nation which was founded on the idea of religious tolerance.
All religions are cults. They are founded usually by single individuals (Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.) who frequently ask for uncritical acceptance and claim to perform miracles. Their followers are frequently racist, homophobic assholes or naive idiots. So yeah, by all these dimensions Falun Gong sounds as much like a religion as Christianity or Islam.
And a lot of torture by the Chinese government is real. Fake torture doesn't cancel out real torture, it's only the real torture that matters.
People are free to raise their children how they wish. In an open society people believe what they want, and if an ideology is truly incompatible with a person's nature they will change when they mature and separate as individuals from their parents. I myself was raised in fundamentalist, Biblical literalist Baptist family. I am now an atheist by my own choice as a product of my own development, regardless of what my parents want. My parents were free to communicate their beliefs, and I was free to reject them. That is freedom.
You, as an obviously cheerleader for tyranny, wouldn't understand.
Oh bloo bloo. It sounds to me like you're an oversensitive little twit who would gladly sacrifice the freedom of others so as to protect your fragile ego. People like you are scummier than the average religious dumbass. As easy and comfortable as it might be to not defend ideas you don't like, you seem awfully upset when people don't like your ideas and single you out. You're a hypocrite.
When Christians judge me I judge them right the fuck back. Between Paul's bigotry and Yahweh's institutionalized genocide and slave rape it's pretty easy to get most fundamentalists hoisted on the own petards after their objective morality meets the Euthyphro Dilemma. As Matt Dilahunty so famously said: "I am more moral than your god."
Relations far from warm? And you accuse me of nonsense? Members of my family traveled to the USSR and China both, can you guess which was more closed? And trade ties between China and the US are immeasurably stronger than any period with the USSR. Nonsense indeed, you're projecting.
When Falun Gong starts assaulting the foreign embassies in Shanghai and Beijing I'll give you some serious consideration. Until then I think your analogy is woefully at odds with history and reality.
Falun Gong has only two things in common with the boxers, a spiritual component, and that it was at one time tolerated by the government when the government believed it could be manipulated for its own purposes.
I think you mean Jonestown. Jamestown was the first English colony to survive in North America.
But yes, it's no different in the end from when Europeans were slicing each other up over loyalty to Rome. Thousands were killed when Henry VIII started purging whomever seemed likely to prefer the Pope to him. Even as recently as the Kennedy administration a lot of fundamentalist Protestants were worried that JFK as a Catholic would betray the interests of the US if they conflicted with those of the Vatican.
No, I'm allowing for the albeit incredibly unlikely possibility that people would stop following superstitious nonsense voluntarily. I can dream, at least while there are no thought crimes.
I don't think you understand how beneficial it is to the US armed forces' intelligence arms and the CIA to have fairly warm international relations with China. If we were to cool those off and things closed up, we would know less about them than they would of us (it's easier for them to work by proxy than it is for us, by and large).
Falun Gong calls attention to how the Chinese Communist Party acts in opposition to many traditional Chinese values. This is incredibly seditious considering that the CCP relies on the Chinese achieving more or less blind unity based on what are pushed as shared cultural values.
I was recently watching a CCTV documentary on the Seven Scholars of the Bamboo Grove, and like everything on CCTV I always start wondering 'what is their political angle?' And sure enough, they were primarily focusing on the Seven Scholars deliberate avoidance in politics and how that preserved them when others were being purged for their intrigues. The CCP wants people to avoid politics as much as possible, which includes any criticism of the government.
Falun Gong questions the morality of the government and the CCP within the tradition three dimensional contexts of Chinese morality: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Even though China is a very secular society, these criticisms are very seriously taken by the CCP, which is always living in fear of losing control.
If you're really interested you could look into the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (which is banned in China) and the Tuidang Movement. Both of which are sourced in Falun Gong and do have an air of propaganda to them at times, but a thinking person can still find useful information even among such chaff.
I know how markets work, homeslice. You're conflating the criticism of a value of a thing morally with the value of a thing as defined by those who pay for it (the market). In the end I'm saying that people should value things less than they do, not that markets should artificially lower the value of things that people obviously value highly by nature. I am criticizing the motivations and tastes which, run through the machinations of the market, produce the reality that is observed. I am not criticizing the market itself.
Difference being that, conservatively, tens of millions live in the Deep South, so generalizing about them has limited utility. Whereas when it comes to world champion Scrabble players, there are only a few dozen of those. It's pretty easy to survey that group.
While I agree that entertainment has value, at the same time I think it is frequently overvalued, and that entertainers of all stripes are overpaid in the top tier. Hollywood actors and pro athletes/sports players are not doing things that should merit millions of dollars. However because their simple talents engage simple minds, uncountable boors fling their meager earnings at the feet of these panderers, exchanging any hope of achieving personal comfort and security through diligence and thrift for the thrill of the success of some proxy's exploits and lifestyle built upon such waste.
Nothing is going to convince me that it is beneficial to society that most people seem to aspire only to have enough credit to finagle the biggest possible TV on which to watch "the big game" and Jersey Shore.
Word Wars was focused on people who were or had a reasonable chance of becoming tournament champions. I don't disagree that there are tournament players who are balanced people and good citizens, but at the absolute "top" of the game it's misfits and whackjobs.
Who said anything about dictating? Just because I don't value something doesn't mean I want to use the state's monopoly on force to ensure that nobody does it. People must be free to do things that are not valuable in order for there to be any chance of happiness for people in society. By the same token nothing obligates or should force me to value something I think is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
See now that could have been funnier if you had just gone the extra step to s/FatLab/FatCave
The Saturn V needed to push that VW-sized object out of a significant gravity well. In the proposed scenario, the gravity well would be acting in favor of rather than against the goal (albeit very attenuated by distance). Yes, changing the velocity of the mass is still significant, but you want to talk about orders of magnitude, taking something from sea level to escape is ridiculous to contrast with something already in orbit.
And if you RTFA, you'll find that the object is only 10 meters, and would be done more as an experiment and proof-of-concept than for profit.
Sprint does offer unlimited data on their wimax ("4G"). I'm using it right now. It's pretty decent so long as you're not moving. Using it on the train is a bit painful, especially with the spotty coverage on the VA side of DC metro.
Ah yes, the evil of inequality vs the supposed good goal of equality, which stipulates that it doesn't matter if the poor are made poorer so long as the rich are less rich. And anybody who disagrees with that ideological nonsense will be ignored. Good show, old bean.
Well, you have certainly shown your true colors. You would gladly support barbarians murdering Hans for not cutting their hair before any religion, eh? Who's crazy now? Maybe not crazy but surely evil. You would gladly wage a war against Chinese culture and kill Chinese people so long as it was done in the name of atheism? Well, you surely are a Maoist then, and a clear enemy of Chinese culture and the Chinese themselves, a traitor who would collude with barbarian murderers.
The Taiping rebels were crazy, but even if they hadn't collapsed under their own stupidity (which I think did them more harm than the weak Qing could have done), any government established by them would not have lasted very long. It would have been better to have tolerated their craziness for a few years if it would have gotten the Manchus out sooner. In the end it would have still been the same, at least the Hans would regain control of their own destiny again to reprise their own culture.
The CCP isn't afraid of FLG because the FLG practitioners hurt themselves, it's because the FLG is an organization that ostensibly is under a hierarchy that refuses CCP control. Because of the CCP persecution of FLG, now that whole organization is also focused on calling out all the faults in the CCP and its administration of China.
During the first decades after the Chinese Civil War, petty government officials and wannabes of all stripes accused anybody they didn't like of being 'counter-revolutionary' and beat the shit out of them, half the time to death, but you didn't see the CCP doing anything about Mao Zedong Thought making people crazy and hurting each other. Of course not, that was *their* craziness and stopping that would be bad for the authority of the party. The party doesn't care about people's safety, it cares about its own power.
I also happen to like turtles, regardless of their connotation in Chinese culture. Though by coincidence I am adopted and do not know my biological father. Who cares? I thought you were against superstitious nonsense, but now you want to make something of 'filial piety' or something? Hypocrite.
The thing is that all the death and destruction wrought by the CCP is demonstrably unnecessary. The demonstration is Hong Kong. Hong Kong people were living a first world lifestyle long before the mainlanders or even the Taiwanese (where the KMT's white terrors were almost as bad as the CCP's cultural revolution and similar episodes, albeit naturally on a smaller scale), and they didn't have to sacrifice any cultural freedom to do it. Education, a relatively less corrupt system of justice, and minimizing the government drag on commerce was all that was necessary to propel the Hong Kong Chinese into a successful and prosperous modern society.
You are really too obsessed with religion. It blinds you to real history.
The most difficult aspect of freedom is that people must be free to harm themselves, to associate, commiserate, and organize with others who would harm themselves, or there is neither freedom nor happiness. Freedom must apply equally to the stupid, the gullible, the naive, the tasteless, the slothful, and indeed all kinds of persons and their wasteful behaviors so long as those behaviors are not forced upon others. Anything less is no better than the theocratic moral tyranny you pretend to oppose. A secular moral tyranny that prosecutes thought crimes of superstition will itself be ultimately immoral for the wrongful initiation of force to rob comfort from persons for no provocation. Even as an atheist I would fight such tyranny.
However, the toxic influence of religion throughout history makes any moves against it reasonable.
It is thinking like that which leads inexorably to genocide and crimes against humanity. It is the sort of absolutist confidence which in religion itself leads to atrocities committed in the name of "morality". You lack all the wisdom and nuance that any follower of religious dogma lacks. You resemble your supposed enemy far more than you can pretend to oppose them.
The CCP does a pretty good job of delegitimizing itself. I especially like how they persecute lawyers who dare represent anybody against the government for any reason, and how they tell journalists not to talk about it or else. They're worse than a mafia.
As a 50center you might not realize that many Americans are more upset by the way the Branch Davidians were handled than they were about Branch Davidianism. We don't care if people want to believe crazy things, hell, it's enshrined in the Constitution that they can. The Branch Davidians crossed a line in that they were shooting at people, so until you can show Falun Gong doing such things you'll get very little sympathy from a nation which was founded on the idea of religious tolerance.
All religions are cults. They are founded usually by single individuals (Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.) who frequently ask for uncritical acceptance and claim to perform miracles. Their followers are frequently racist, homophobic assholes or naive idiots. So yeah, by all these dimensions Falun Gong sounds as much like a religion as Christianity or Islam.
And a lot of torture by the Chinese government is real. Fake torture doesn't cancel out real torture, it's only the real torture that matters.
People are free to raise their children how they wish. In an open society people believe what they want, and if an ideology is truly incompatible with a person's nature they will change when they mature and separate as individuals from their parents. I myself was raised in fundamentalist, Biblical literalist Baptist family. I am now an atheist by my own choice as a product of my own development, regardless of what my parents want. My parents were free to communicate their beliefs, and I was free to reject them. That is freedom.
You, as an obviously cheerleader for tyranny, wouldn't understand.
Oh bloo bloo. It sounds to me like you're an oversensitive little twit who would gladly sacrifice the freedom of others so as to protect your fragile ego. People like you are scummier than the average religious dumbass. As easy and comfortable as it might be to not defend ideas you don't like, you seem awfully upset when people don't like your ideas and single you out. You're a hypocrite.
When Christians judge me I judge them right the fuck back. Between Paul's bigotry and Yahweh's institutionalized genocide and slave rape it's pretty easy to get most fundamentalists hoisted on the own petards after their objective morality meets the Euthyphro Dilemma. As Matt Dilahunty so famously said: "I am more moral than your god."
Relations far from warm? And you accuse me of nonsense? Members of my family traveled to the USSR and China both, can you guess which was more closed? And trade ties between China and the US are immeasurably stronger than any period with the USSR. Nonsense indeed, you're projecting.
When Falun Gong starts assaulting the foreign embassies in Shanghai and Beijing I'll give you some serious consideration. Until then I think your analogy is woefully at odds with history and reality.
Falun Gong has only two things in common with the boxers, a spiritual component, and that it was at one time tolerated by the government when the government believed it could be manipulated for its own purposes.
I think you mean Jonestown. Jamestown was the first English colony to survive in North America.
But yes, it's no different in the end from when Europeans were slicing each other up over loyalty to Rome. Thousands were killed when Henry VIII started purging whomever seemed likely to prefer the Pope to him. Even as recently as the Kennedy administration a lot of fundamentalist Protestants were worried that JFK as a Catholic would betray the interests of the US if they conflicted with those of the Vatican.
No, I'm allowing for the albeit incredibly unlikely possibility that people would stop following superstitious nonsense voluntarily. I can dream, at least while there are no thought crimes.
I don't like religions either, but if the choice is freedom and religion or neither, I'll keep on tolerating religion.
People may be wrong, but to force them to be right through prosecuting thought crimes is a disgusting dystopia that I will not accept.
And what would you have them do, WW3?
I don't think you understand how beneficial it is to the US armed forces' intelligence arms and the CIA to have fairly warm international relations with China. If we were to cool those off and things closed up, we would know less about them than they would of us (it's easier for them to work by proxy than it is for us, by and large).
Epionage works both ways, brah.
Falun Gong calls attention to how the Chinese Communist Party acts in opposition to many traditional Chinese values. This is incredibly seditious considering that the CCP relies on the Chinese achieving more or less blind unity based on what are pushed as shared cultural values.
I was recently watching a CCTV documentary on the Seven Scholars of the Bamboo Grove, and like everything on CCTV I always start wondering 'what is their political angle?' And sure enough, they were primarily focusing on the Seven Scholars deliberate avoidance in politics and how that preserved them when others were being purged for their intrigues. The CCP wants people to avoid politics as much as possible, which includes any criticism of the government.
Falun Gong questions the morality of the government and the CCP within the tradition three dimensional contexts of Chinese morality: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Even though China is a very secular society, these criticisms are very seriously taken by the CCP, which is always living in fear of losing control.
If you're really interested you could look into the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (which is banned in China) and the Tuidang Movement. Both of which are sourced in Falun Gong and do have an air of propaganda to them at times, but a thinking person can still find useful information even among such chaff.
That explains why IBM is out of business, unless you think that servers and POS are carrying all the load.
You're almost getting it, but it tires me to rehash the same points to cajole you to something you could understand already.
P.S. If you think 'homeslice' is ad hominem, you might want to look into what it means first.
Ray Kurzweil is laughing at all the nay-sayers right about now.
I know how markets work, homeslice. You're conflating the criticism of a value of a thing morally with the value of a thing as defined by those who pay for it (the market). In the end I'm saying that people should value things less than they do, not that markets should artificially lower the value of things that people obviously value highly by nature. I am criticizing the motivations and tastes which, run through the machinations of the market, produce the reality that is observed. I am not criticizing the market itself.
Difference being that, conservatively, tens of millions live in the Deep South, so generalizing about them has limited utility. Whereas when it comes to world champion Scrabble players, there are only a few dozen of those. It's pretty easy to survey that group.
While I agree that entertainment has value, at the same time I think it is frequently overvalued, and that entertainers of all stripes are overpaid in the top tier. Hollywood actors and pro athletes/sports players are not doing things that should merit millions of dollars. However because their simple talents engage simple minds, uncountable boors fling their meager earnings at the feet of these panderers, exchanging any hope of achieving personal comfort and security through diligence and thrift for the thrill of the success of some proxy's exploits and lifestyle built upon such waste.
Nothing is going to convince me that it is beneficial to society that most people seem to aspire only to have enough credit to finagle the biggest possible TV on which to watch "the big game" and Jersey Shore.
Word Wars was focused on people who were or had a reasonable chance of becoming tournament champions. I don't disagree that there are tournament players who are balanced people and good citizens, but at the absolute "top" of the game it's misfits and whackjobs.
Who said anything about dictating? Just because I don't value something doesn't mean I want to use the state's monopoly on force to ensure that nobody does it. People must be free to do things that are not valuable in order for there to be any chance of happiness for people in society. By the same token nothing obligates or should force me to value something I think is stupid.