>Voting for a better person when no possibility to win gives better results.
Sadly - it does not. In fact, most often, it has led to the worst possible candidate winning. Gore may not have been a good president (I have my doubts about the guy behind the PMRC crap being a good leader) - but Bush II was terrible, and he got the job in 2000 mostly because so many people who would otherwise have voted for Gore voted for Ralph Nader instead. I think Nader would have been a better president than Gore but he was always a no-hoper and he caused 8 years of the shrub instead. On the other side of the dark, dangerous ally one of the only cases in the last 70 years of an incumbent not winning re-election was when Bush 1 lost to Clinton in '92 - a loss almost entirely caused by Bob Dole.
So either way - voting for a non-mainstream candidate ends up, most often, ensuring your second choice loses. This is a major problem in the US system. A better system would let you rank candidates by preference. If you voters could list Nader as first choice, Gore as second and Bush as third - chances are Nader may actually have won, and even if he hadn't, Gore would not be as terrible as Bush was.
In such a system, if your number one choice doesn't get enough votes to win - your vote still counts for your number 2, they don't end up being - effectively, a vote for the person you LEAST want to win. It doesn't much matter if you're a liberal (like me) or a conservative, either way the current system is bad but as long as this is the system the ONLY chance to get somebody else elected is in the primaries. In the general you HAVE to vote with your brain or you end up voting for the thing you wanted least. Right now, any vote not for Hillary is a vote for an avowed fascist who eagerly spouts policies taken straight out of mein kampf and actually can't even be bothered to come up with any explanation of why they may be different.
> If you think a guy whose political views are well known and who is actually working for one side isn't gonna tilt things in his favor? I have a bridge you might be interested in.
And if a private citizen wants to use his private business to push his personal political views then that is entirely his right. You didn't think citizens united would only work for republicans did you ? Did you think really think only the Koch brothers would try to buy elections for candidates that suit their personal business and political desires ? Republicans turned the USA into a complete plutocracy, they don't get to now complain because occasionally a rich guy likes a democrat too - they made this bed now they gotta lie in it.
Ironically - this is far less insidious than what republicans do. Republican supporting rich guys use dark money and bribes. If the worst thing the democrat-supporters do is to slant their own businesses public operations in favor of the candidate and work for the campaigns - then it's still FAR less corrupt.
Democrat voters have been demanding that money be removed from politics, that campaign contributions be severely curtailed (or better yet - outright banned) for decades. They've been clamoring against things like superpacs. Warning that the USA would turned into an oligarchy where the rich chose the powerful if these trends were not stopped. They were ignored. Their own party politicians stopped fighting and went to feed at the same trough and the republican voters called them horrible people who want to censor political speech (because one dollar one vote is soooo democratic right ?).
Now you complain ? Because of what, arguably, is the only ACCEPTABLE way a rich person can influence politics ? Seriously I have only three words to say to that: fuck you all.
> especially after all the predictions of dire consequences that haven't come true. None of the predictions that haven't come true were predicted to have happened yet. The things predicted for now - not only HAVE they come true, they are worse than predicted. If there's a scam with AGW - it's that scientists are so afraid of being called alarmist that they constantly under-predict the effects.
The rate of glacial melt-off is more than 30 times higher RIGHT NOW than was predicted in the 1990s. Entire glaciers have already disappeared. The world is already dotted with abandoned ski-resorts - once wealthy holidaying places, now empty because there is no more snow to ski on. This is something that, in 1990, nobody would have predicted to happen and even if it did - not for 50 or 100 years, and it happened in less than 20. Meantime the ocean temperature changes have led to an octopus population explosion which is threatening marine life across the board (because that's what happens when a major predator has a population explosion).
>And liberals never change the topic like blaming the nra for a Muslim radical democrat murdering 49 in Gun free zone with an illegally gotten gun
Mmmm.... an event that has never, ever happened. If you're talking about Pulse - that guy used legal guns, this is exactly what the NRA is (rightfully) blamed for.
Very few and likely not made there but brought along by the first settlers. And, of course, useless unless you have opposable thumbs. Those are no requirement for technology but they are required for ours. Intelligence is one of evolutions most generic tricks. Its evolved multiple times independently and thats just in extant species. It takes only a tiny advance to go from octopus to human-level intelligence and octopi have been observed using simple tools. From tool-user to tool-maker is no major feat. The hardest part is already over. There have been life on this planet for at least 3.2 billion years. Look what we have done in a mere 0.01% of that. The suggestion that no other species in all that time could have managed most of the same absolutely beggars belief.
Brazil might have the right idea there. Public university is free - but you have to pass a very tough entrance exam to get admission. There are also private universities which will take anybody - but they cost a lot. The public universities are also the highest standard and carry the most prestige, partly because they get the best of the best students.
If its a nuclear powered craft an em-drive is pointless. You just changed the type of fuel not the need for fuel. In that case a chunk of uranium and a funnel will do the same job much cheaper.
And sometimes, the weird behavior is actually the right behavior - even when compilers disagree. Remember the issue a few years ago when it turns out almost all the sshkeys generated on any debian (or debian-derived) system were highly predictable ? It happened because the random-number generator in openssh was throwing a compiler warning for "considered dangerous" handling of a pointer - except that, in that case, it was a critical part of the entropy feed. Some debian packager wrote a patch to "fix" the code to proper bounded behaviour... and ended up castrating the entropy feeder function. It no longer threw a warning - it just led to one of the worst security problems in Linux history and took weeks to recover from when it was discovered years later and everybody had to regenerate their keys.
That depends on the case. Trademarks only apply in the same field. An unaffiliated smartphone product (like an OS) which is not using android code using the name - they'd have an easy victory. Using it to refer to commander Data ? No problem - the trademark does not apply since it's not the same field (fiction versus smartphones). If you built an actual android and called it an android they almost certainly wouldn't try to enforce it since it's common knowledge the term actually means the thing you just called it (and was coined for that purpose decades ago by Asimov).
Well thats a factor for long range missions but not for orbital satelites just trying to compensate for decay. If you make a long range em-drive probe with solar as the electricity source you have the same problem. Solar panels are subject to the same inverse square law as solar sails.
Personally I would advise you to redirect much of the social spending into smarter programs. The best social spending is the programs that increase the numbsr of taxpayers. Everyone use taxfunded services. From refuge removal to roads. From sewage to law enforcement. I did the math for my country. Somebody who never earns a taxable income but is employed their entire working life - excluding all welfare - and lives to 70 years of age costs 5 million over their lifetime and contributes no part to the budget. Thats without considering inflation which hugely increases the number.
Give that poor person a degree and a taxable middle class income and they are nett budget contributors rather than a nett cost. The cost right now of a three year degree is about 500-thousand.
So it actually makes perfect financial sense to give free university to everybody who could succeed at one because it costs only 10% of what it costs me to carry public services for a minimum wage earner. Thats a 900% profit. I dont have the numbers to say exactly how the US would compare but there is a study that says (thrpugh similar calculations) that the US congress makes 7 dollars for every 1 dollar spent on the GI-bill. So that suggests that the profit rate in the US would still be between 500 and 700 percent. Republicans always balk at the cost of social investments but never consider the ROI. Thats very silly to my mind. Especially since they are happy to lose revenue in taxbreaks for the rich to get the ROI from that despite 200 years of trying that consistently failed to produce the expected returns.
>Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
And worth noting that, in science, 100 years can be enough for the "laugh-you-out-of-the-room" crazy idea to become the mainstream consensus theory. A perfect example: 1912 - Wegener proposes continental drift. He gets laughed out of the room. Firstly he's not a geologist but a botanist and he basis his ideas on the agreement of the fossil records between Africa and South America but he has no real explanation for what can move a whole continent. He suggests forces in the mantle but every geologist "knows" those forces are far too weak (today we have a completely different model of those forces that's more than capable of it).
1930s - Arthur Holmes proposes an early version of plate-tectonics theory that at least makes Wegener's ideas sound a bit more plausible. Most geologists remain unconvinced to say the least.
1955 - Two scientists show up at a geology conference to rehash Wegener's idea. But they are armed with two key new weapons. One - they didn't used the land-shorelines but the shorelines about 50miles into the sea where erosion is less prevalent. Two, they used a computer to model the pieces - and the fits were just too damn perfect to ignore. They also propose a new mechanism for what could actually provide the force to move the continents - the theory we now call plate tectonics, basically an updated version Holmes's ideas. The conference ends up just as divided but, somehow, moving continents are now the consensus theory.
1990s - the new theory of plume tectonics explains most of the remaining questions about the subject, and what has long been mainstream science with a lot of unanswered bits suddenly makes tremendous sense. This is the prevailing theory today.
But look at that timeline - in a matter of about a hundred years an idea that probably occurred to many people over the centuries but was dismissed as fantasy by any serious scientist goes from ridiculous to mainstream - because we develop ever better technologies to gather data and test theories in simulations which gives us information not previously available. Now we've even got strong evidence that plate tectonics happen on other planets (notably Mars).
Assuming the theory is correct, you may be right. But this is a new theory - and key to it is that it means the EM-drive does, in fact, have an exhaust - it's just that the exhaust is mass-less photons rather than matter. But the whole reason we have the name 'photon' is because light behaves so much like a particle to begin with - and photons are known to have momentum after all.
That said, since it's apparently able to convert something like sunlight into useful thrust without fuel - it could, in theory, keep providing thrust for many centuries (well until something hits or damages it). Your decaying matter will be useful only as long as the fuel remains(but may provide more thrust since the particles it exudes have mass which hugely increases their momentum). Then again - depending what you use, quite a lot of decaying matter have half-lives in the thousands-of-years category.
All that said - assuming both technologies prove viable, you can expect more prosaic and immediate concerns to dominate the decision - like what happens if something goes wrong and the damn thing crashes to earth. Space agencies tend to be rather reticent about putting things in orbit which, if they crash, could spread highly reactive material around the area they land in. This is why RTG's tend to only be used on long-range space-probes, the only risk of spreading that plutonium on the planet is if it crashes during launch.
Having said all that - if we imagine an EM-drive which uses solar-power to produce microwaves to produce photons to produce miniscule levels of thrust - well magnetrons are fairly heavy, and the parts in there are quite pricey... would you not be able to do it more cheaply for about the same weight (if not volume) by skipping all the intermediary steps and just fitting the satelites with solar sails ?
But Finland has had a significant Swedish-speaking minority for a very long time (long before the EU opened the borders). They have no herritage with Sweden and the only thing they have in common with the Swedes is that they speak a dialogue of the language. They are no more Swedish than the entire population of Switzerland is German (despite speaking a variant of German as their language).
For every universal in nature there are hundreds of parochials. Moreover the analogy does not apply. Evolution throws random events at the environment and sees what works. Technology on the other hand is intentional and designed. The options available are detrmined by both the bodies of the designers (none of the tools humanity has created could be used by a species without opposable thumbs) and the environment you live in (which determines both what resources you have available and which tools would be most useful). A species living in a region with bamboo would likely not develop stone tools because bamboo is more flexible, easier to work with and just as strong - humans didnt develop stone tools where bamboo was available. A species 100 million years ago may well have had access to a resource which, like bamboo in Asia, could meet technological needs for millions of years without being prone to fossilize and which we do not even know existed.
Actually yes, including those programs. As another commenter pointed out - the US apparently has TWO budgets. Republicans always cite the one - because in that one military is small and social is big, while democrats always cite the other one - where military is around 56% and social programs about 5%.
I admit I don't understand the American system well enough to say which budget is more appropriate to cite for the purposes of this discussion - but the numbers I gave are in fact accurate, it's just that it turns out the numbers given to contradict me are ALSO accurate, it just depends which of the two congressional budgets you look at.
>Religious ideas have consequences, and if it's accurate to point that out for one religion, it's accurate to point it out for other religions. I never disputed the accuracy, I said the consequences of saying it, and how it is said, are not the same.
>You clearly think it's a completely accurate statement for Christianity, but I'm not getting why Islam is not equivalent My whole point is that it is equivalent - but not greater. But the consequences do matter.
3 is true and I made that point in the second part of my post. But my primary reason is that it's unjust to say it about the one because too many people say it about that one and too few say it about the other one. In short, we don't speak in a vaccuum - we are part of a conversation, and if you want accuracy and the conversation is one-sided you need to be tilting it back toward the center by siding with the underdog. Its the same reason criminal justice in the free world is tilted in favour of the defendant (innocent until proven guilty, right not to self-incriminate etc. etc.) - because when you have one ordinary person against the full resources of the state you will never have a just outcome unless the proceedings are tilted in favour of the weaker party.
>I'm not sure why I should expect people on the other side to let it slide when my preferred candidate says something equally dumb about a different religious atrocity.
Because it's not a person speaking. It's one voice in a whole world talking -and the conversation is extremely one-sided, so accuracy can only come about by siding with the underdog. I don't see the same condemnation of the slaughter of Muslims that happened in India in 2003 or the genocide against Muslims being committed by Budhists right now. Hell most Americans probably don't even know about the latter since the American news media has barely even covered it and the former barely made news when it was happening. The only reason Americans knew about it now is because it was back in the news just a few months ago when the man responsible became the Indian prime minister.
Dawkins is wrong - there is such a thing as Islamophobia and it's not because it's politically incorrect to criticise a religion. He is conflating criticism of religions with how adherents are treated in society - these are two different conversations entirely. Even if you can argue that at this point in time Islam is worse than other religions (and the fact that two other religions - both of them supposedly pacifists have tried to genocide Muslims in recent history suggests otherwise) - then that doesn't mean you must not still defend the right of Muslims to practise their religion unmolested and undisturbed. The majority of Muslims are actually pacifists as well. Muhamed Ali, the one who refused to go to Vietnam and blatantly defied the government to throw him in jail for refusing to adhere to the draft, was a much more typical muslim than anybody in ISIS is.
So as a voice of reason and an angry pastafarian - I make a point of criticising religion in general, and never focusing on one in particular. When I need real-world examples I make a point of taking those from the dominant world-religion, this speaks to the largest audience and it avoids furthering the discrimination against minority religions. It's not like I have a soft spot for christianity and the stuff done by it's fundamentalists every day are no less evil in my mind. Thousands of children die every year because Christian parents refuse medical care - and in many US states they can't be prosecuted even though by any rational standard their actions are murder.
Yesterday evening Marco Rubio said that, in light of this massacre, he is considering running for the Florida senate again (he was not previously planning to seek re-election). Just think about that. A man who, throughout his entire political career had consistently thought against equal rights for gay people - is using a tragedy that targeted the gay community as an excuse to rescind his previous
>at some point you've also really gotta define what you mean by technology. because it seems like something of a moving target.
Because it is - and because it's really only a proxy. What you're actually trying to ask is - was there ever a previous species capable of abstract thought, capable of reprogramming the brains they evolved for tasks evolution never considered, capable of asking "why are we here" ? Capable of asking questions about the world ? Capable of abstract communication ? A species that could turn the pattern-matching abilities of the brain on itself and become self-referential as we have ?
But those things don't leave fossils - technology is the only proxy we have that might have. But any species that got that, WOULD become technologically advanced if given enough time. There's just no reason to assume their advanced technology would share a single item with any of our technology and plenty of reasons to consider such a coincidental overlap by far the least likely thing to happen.
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>Voting for a better person when no possibility to win gives better results.
Sadly - it does not. In fact, most often, it has led to the worst possible candidate winning. Gore may not have been a good president (I have my doubts about the guy behind the PMRC crap being a good leader) - but Bush II was terrible, and he got the job in 2000 mostly because so many people who would otherwise have voted for Gore voted for Ralph Nader instead.
I think Nader would have been a better president than Gore but he was always a no-hoper and he caused 8 years of the shrub instead. On the other side of the dark, dangerous ally one of the only cases in the last 70 years of an incumbent not winning re-election was when Bush 1 lost to Clinton in '92 - a loss almost entirely caused by Bob Dole.
So either way - voting for a non-mainstream candidate ends up, most often, ensuring your second choice loses. This is a major problem in the US system. A better system would let you rank candidates by preference.
If you voters could list Nader as first choice, Gore as second and Bush as third - chances are Nader may actually have won, and even if he hadn't, Gore would not be as terrible as Bush was.
In such a system, if your number one choice doesn't get enough votes to win - your vote still counts for your number 2, they don't end up being - effectively, a vote for the person you LEAST want to win.
It doesn't much matter if you're a liberal (like me) or a conservative, either way the current system is bad but as long as this is the system the ONLY chance to get somebody else elected is in the primaries. In the general you HAVE to vote with your brain or you end up voting for the thing you wanted least. Right now, any vote not for Hillary is a vote for an avowed fascist who eagerly spouts policies taken straight out of mein kampf and actually can't even be bothered to come up with any explanation of why they may be different.
> non-felon used-car salesmen
Why not just ask for honest lawyers or smart generals ? I mean if you're trying to limit the lottery to the shortest list possible...
The web is not the same thing as the internet... zip up dude your stupid is showing.
> If you think a guy whose political views are well known and who is actually working for one side isn't gonna tilt things in his favor? I have a bridge you might be interested in.
And if a private citizen wants to use his private business to push his personal political views then that is entirely his right. You didn't think citizens united would only work for republicans did you ? Did you think really think only the Koch brothers would try to buy elections for candidates that suit their personal business and political desires ?
Republicans turned the USA into a complete plutocracy, they don't get to now complain because occasionally a rich guy likes a democrat too - they made this bed now they gotta lie in it.
Ironically - this is far less insidious than what republicans do. Republican supporting rich guys use dark money and bribes. If the worst thing the democrat-supporters do is to slant their own businesses public operations in favor of the candidate and work for the campaigns - then it's still FAR less corrupt.
Democrat voters have been demanding that money be removed from politics, that campaign contributions be severely curtailed (or better yet - outright banned) for decades. They've been clamoring against things like superpacs. Warning that the USA would turned into an oligarchy where the rich chose the powerful if these trends were not stopped.
They were ignored. Their own party politicians stopped fighting and went to feed at the same trough and the republican voters called them horrible people who want to censor political speech (because one dollar one vote is soooo democratic right ?).
Now you complain ? Because of what, arguably, is the only ACCEPTABLE way a rich person can influence politics ? Seriously I have only three words to say to that: fuck you all.
> especially after all the predictions of dire consequences that haven't come true.
None of the predictions that haven't come true were predicted to have happened yet. The things predicted for now - not only HAVE they come true, they are worse than predicted. If there's a scam with AGW - it's that scientists are so afraid of being called alarmist that they constantly under-predict the effects.
The rate of glacial melt-off is more than 30 times higher RIGHT NOW than was predicted in the 1990s. Entire glaciers have already disappeared. The world is already dotted with abandoned ski-resorts - once wealthy holidaying places, now empty because there is no more snow to ski on. This is something that, in 1990, nobody would have predicted to happen and even if it did - not for 50 or 100 years, and it happened in less than 20.
Meantime the ocean temperature changes have led to an octopus population explosion which is threatening marine life across the board (because that's what happens when a major predator has a population explosion).
Well if you won't let the government close the loopholes, you can't blame the cops when people slip through the loopholes.
>And liberals never change the topic like blaming the nra for a Muslim radical democrat murdering 49 in Gun free zone with an illegally gotten gun
Mmmm.... an event that has never, ever happened. If you're talking about Pulse - that guy used legal guns, this is exactly what the NRA is (rightfully) blamed for.
If yo mama had followed your advice she could have avoided the shame of your birth.
Very few and likely not made there but brought along by the first settlers. And, of course, useless unless you have opposable thumbs. Those are no requirement for technology but they are required for ours.
Intelligence is one of evolutions most generic tricks. Its evolved multiple times independently and thats just in extant species. It takes only a tiny advance to go from octopus to human-level intelligence and octopi have been observed using simple tools. From tool-user to tool-maker is no major feat. The hardest part is already over.
There have been life on this planet for at least 3.2 billion years. Look what we have done in a mere 0.01% of that. The suggestion that no other species in all that time could have managed most of the same absolutely beggars belief.
Brazil might have the right idea there. Public university is free - but you have to pass a very tough entrance exam to get admission. There are also private universities which will take anybody - but they cost a lot. The public universities are also the highest standard and carry the most prestige, partly because they get the best of the best students.
If its a nuclear powered craft an em-drive is pointless. You just changed the type of fuel not the need for fuel.
In that case a chunk of uranium and a funnel will do the same job much cheaper.
And sometimes, the weird behavior is actually the right behavior - even when compilers disagree. Remember the issue a few years ago when it turns out almost all the sshkeys generated on any debian (or debian-derived) system were highly predictable ? It happened because the random-number generator in openssh was throwing a compiler warning for "considered dangerous" handling of a pointer - except that, in that case, it was a critical part of the entropy feed. Some debian packager wrote a patch to "fix" the code to proper bounded behaviour... and ended up castrating the entropy feeder function.
It no longer threw a warning - it just led to one of the worst security problems in Linux history and took weeks to recover from when it was discovered years later and everybody had to regenerate their keys.
I got utterly citigrouped at the second hand car-dealer with no lube.
I refuse to buy Apple because I find getting citigrouped by Tim Cook chafes my ass.
I like this...
That depends on the case. Trademarks only apply in the same field. An unaffiliated smartphone product (like an OS) which is not using android code using the name - they'd have an easy victory.
Using it to refer to commander Data ? No problem - the trademark does not apply since it's not the same field (fiction versus smartphones). If you built an actual android and called it an android they almost certainly wouldn't try to enforce it since it's common knowledge the term actually means the thing you just called it (and was coined for that purpose decades ago by Asimov).
>Hell, half the commenters on this site think Apple owns anything with a rounded corner.
Well, apple thinks so too.
Well thats a factor for long range missions but not for orbital satelites just trying to compensate for decay. If you make a long range em-drive probe with solar as the electricity source you have the same problem. Solar panels are subject to the same inverse square law as solar sails.
Personally I would advise you to redirect much of the social spending into smarter programs. The best social spending is the programs that increase the numbsr of taxpayers. Everyone use taxfunded services. From refuge removal to roads. From sewage to law enforcement. I did the math for my country. Somebody who never earns a taxable income but is employed their entire working life - excluding all welfare - and lives to 70 years of age costs 5 million over their lifetime and contributes no part to the budget. Thats without considering inflation which hugely increases the number.
Give that poor person a degree and a taxable middle class income and they are nett budget contributors rather than a nett cost. The cost right now of a three year degree is about 500-thousand.
So it actually makes perfect financial sense to give free university to everybody who could succeed at one because it costs only 10% of what it costs me to carry public services for a minimum wage earner. Thats a 900% profit.
I dont have the numbers to say exactly how the US would compare but there is a study that says (thrpugh similar calculations) that the US congress makes 7 dollars for every 1 dollar spent on the GI-bill. So that suggests that the profit rate in the US would still be between 500 and 700 percent.
Republicans always balk at the cost of social investments but never consider the ROI. Thats very silly to my mind. Especially since they are happy to lose revenue in taxbreaks for the rich to get the ROI from that despite 200 years of trying that consistently failed to produce the expected returns.
>Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
And worth noting that, in science, 100 years can be enough for the "laugh-you-out-of-the-room" crazy idea to become the mainstream consensus theory. A perfect example:
1912 - Wegener proposes continental drift. He gets laughed out of the room. Firstly he's not a geologist but a botanist and he basis his ideas on the agreement of the fossil records between Africa and South America but he has no real explanation for what can move a whole continent. He suggests forces in the mantle but every geologist "knows" those forces are far too weak (today we have a completely different model of those forces that's more than capable of it).
1930s - Arthur Holmes proposes an early version of plate-tectonics theory that at least makes Wegener's ideas sound a bit more plausible. Most geologists remain unconvinced to say the least.
1955 - Two scientists show up at a geology conference to rehash Wegener's idea. But they are armed with two key new weapons. One - they didn't used the land-shorelines but the shorelines about 50miles into the sea where erosion is less prevalent. Two, they used a computer to model the pieces - and the fits were just too damn perfect to ignore. They also propose a new mechanism for what could actually provide the force to move the continents - the theory we now call plate tectonics, basically an updated version Holmes's ideas. The conference ends up just as divided but, somehow, moving continents are now the consensus theory.
1990s - the new theory of plume tectonics explains most of the remaining questions about the subject, and what has long been mainstream science with a lot of unanswered bits suddenly makes tremendous sense. This is the prevailing theory today.
But look at that timeline - in a matter of about a hundred years an idea that probably occurred to many people over the centuries but was dismissed as fantasy by any serious scientist goes from ridiculous to mainstream - because we develop ever better technologies to gather data and test theories in simulations which gives us information not previously available. Now we've even got strong evidence that plate tectonics happen on other planets (notably Mars).
Assuming the theory is correct, you may be right. But this is a new theory - and key to it is that it means the EM-drive does, in fact, have an exhaust - it's just that the exhaust is mass-less photons rather than matter. But the whole reason we have the name 'photon' is because light behaves so much like a particle to begin with - and photons are known to have momentum after all.
That said, since it's apparently able to convert something like sunlight into useful thrust without fuel - it could, in theory, keep providing thrust for many centuries (well until something hits or damages it). Your decaying matter will be useful only as long as the fuel remains(but may provide more thrust since the particles it exudes have mass which hugely increases their momentum). Then again - depending what you use, quite a lot of decaying matter have half-lives in the thousands-of-years category.
All that said - assuming both technologies prove viable, you can expect more prosaic and immediate concerns to dominate the decision - like what happens if something goes wrong and the damn thing crashes to earth. Space agencies tend to be rather reticent about putting things in orbit which, if they crash, could spread highly reactive material around the area they land in. This is why RTG's tend to only be used on long-range space-probes, the only risk of spreading that plutonium on the planet is if it crashes during launch.
Having said all that - if we imagine an EM-drive which uses solar-power to produce microwaves to produce photons to produce miniscule levels of thrust - well magnetrons are fairly heavy, and the parts in there are quite pricey... would you not be able to do it more cheaply for about the same weight (if not volume) by skipping all the intermediary steps and just fitting the satelites with solar sails ?
No, next weekend is Canadian summer.
But Finland has had a significant Swedish-speaking minority for a very long time (long before the EU opened the borders). They have no herritage with Sweden and the only thing they have in common with the Swedes is that they speak a dialogue of the language. They are no more Swedish than the entire population of Switzerland is German (despite speaking a variant of German as their language).
For every universal in nature there are hundreds of parochials. Moreover the analogy does not apply. Evolution throws random events at the environment and sees what works. Technology on the other hand is intentional and designed. The options available are detrmined by both the bodies of the designers (none of the tools humanity has created could be used by a species without opposable thumbs) and the environment you live in (which determines both what resources you have available and which tools would be most useful). A species living in a region with bamboo would likely not develop stone tools because bamboo is more flexible, easier to work with and just as strong - humans didnt develop stone tools where bamboo was available. A species 100 million years ago may well have had access to a resource which, like bamboo in Asia, could meet technological needs for millions of years without being prone to fossilize and which we do not even know existed.
Actually yes, including those programs. As another commenter pointed out - the US apparently has TWO budgets. Republicans always cite the one - because in that one military is small and social is big, while democrats always cite the other one - where military is around 56% and social programs about 5%.
I admit I don't understand the American system well enough to say which budget is more appropriate to cite for the purposes of this discussion - but the numbers I gave are in fact accurate, it's just that it turns out the numbers given to contradict me are ALSO accurate, it just depends which of the two congressional budgets you look at.
>Religious ideas have consequences, and if it's accurate to point that out for one religion, it's accurate to point it out for other religions.
I never disputed the accuracy, I said the consequences of saying it, and how it is said, are not the same.
>You clearly think it's a completely accurate statement for Christianity, but I'm not getting why Islam is not equivalent
My whole point is that it is equivalent - but not greater. But the consequences do matter.
3 is true and I made that point in the second part of my post. But my primary reason is that it's unjust to say it about the one because too many people say it about that one and too few say it about the other one. In short, we don't speak in a vaccuum - we are part of a conversation, and if you want accuracy and the conversation is one-sided you need to be tilting it back toward the center by siding with the underdog. Its the same reason criminal justice in the free world is tilted in favour of the defendant (innocent until proven guilty, right not to self-incriminate etc. etc.) - because when you have one ordinary person against the full resources of the state you will never have a just outcome unless the proceedings are tilted in favour of the weaker party.
>I'm not sure why I should expect people on the other side to let it slide when my preferred candidate says something equally dumb about a different religious atrocity.
Because it's not a person speaking. It's one voice in a whole world talking -and the conversation is extremely one-sided, so accuracy can only come about by siding with the underdog. I don't see the same condemnation of the slaughter of Muslims that happened in India in 2003 or the genocide against Muslims being committed by Budhists right now. Hell most Americans probably don't even know about the latter since the American news media has barely even covered it and the former barely made news when it was happening. The only reason Americans knew about it now is because it was back in the news just a few months ago when the man responsible became the Indian prime minister.
Dawkins is wrong - there is such a thing as Islamophobia and it's not because it's politically incorrect to criticise a religion. He is conflating criticism of religions with how adherents are treated in society - these are two different conversations entirely. Even if you can argue that at this point in time Islam is worse than other religions (and the fact that two other religions - both of them supposedly pacifists have tried to genocide Muslims in recent history suggests otherwise) - then that doesn't mean you must not still defend the right of Muslims to practise their religion unmolested and undisturbed. The majority of Muslims are actually pacifists as well. Muhamed Ali, the one who refused to go to Vietnam and blatantly defied the government to throw him in jail for refusing to adhere to the draft, was a much more typical muslim than anybody in ISIS is.
So as a voice of reason and an angry pastafarian - I make a point of criticising religion in general, and never focusing on one in particular. When I need real-world examples I make a point of taking those from the dominant world-religion, this speaks to the largest audience and it avoids furthering the discrimination against minority religions. It's not like I have a soft spot for christianity and the stuff done by it's fundamentalists every day are no less evil in my mind. Thousands of children die every year because Christian parents refuse medical care - and in many US states they can't be prosecuted even though by any rational standard their actions are murder.
Yesterday evening Marco Rubio said that, in light of this massacre, he is considering running for the Florida senate again (he was not previously planning to seek re-election). Just think about that. A man who, throughout his entire political career had consistently thought against equal rights for gay people - is using a tragedy that targeted the gay community as an excuse to rescind his previous
>at some point you've also really gotta define what you mean by technology. because it seems like something of a moving target.
Because it is - and because it's really only a proxy. What you're actually trying to ask is - was there ever a previous species capable of abstract thought, capable of reprogramming the brains they evolved for tasks evolution never considered, capable of asking "why are we here" ? Capable of asking questions about the world ? Capable of abstract communication ? A species that could turn the pattern-matching abilities of the brain on itself and become self-referential as we have ?
But those things don't leave fossils - technology is the only proxy we have that might have. But any species that got that, WOULD become technologically advanced if given enough time. There's just no reason to assume their advanced technology would share a single item with any of our technology and plenty of reasons to consider such a coincidental overlap by far the least likely thing to happen.