In the town I grew up in, the mayor was almost a parody of Diamond Joe Quimby, or would have been if he didn't predate the show. Take your cliches of a corrupt, lying scoundrel of a politician who people inexplicably continue to like anyway - except the fact that he's more or less out in the open about it. Everyone knows he's a corrupt, lying scoundrel of a politician, so he doesn't seem to bother denying the fact either.
I keep trying to decide whether he's incredibly dishonest or just the opposite. I should probably stop that before I damage myself.
I don't know much about ancient wars so lets take the normandy invasion instead.
Let's not, because they're so indescribably different that it's quite useless to see something like the Normandy landings compared with ancient battles. Either way, The Longest Day is a movie, not a documentary.
If even a war as recent as WW2 still turns up new facts that shed a different light on events then how the hell do you suspect accurate facts in a re-enactment of something that happened hundreds if not thousands of years ago?
Aside from agreement of primary sources on both sides written at the time, archaeological evidence, and consistent recollections of what had happened spanning not just decades but centuries after? Cannae was a Roman bugbear into the fourth century CE, and was remembered as it was in the first place. We're talking six hundred years there, and writings spanning that entire time are often very well-preserved.
Someone who says that people can't have a decent understanding of some of the ancient battles is someone who has totally failed to study them to even the smallest extent. Between some of the descriptions of the battles and the fact that many of the battlefields have actually been found and picked over, it's quite possible to understand what's going on.
And once again, comparing something like the campaigns of World War II, with their scope, technology and duration, with the ancient campaigns is wholly, totally inappropriate.
Simple example, there are certain programs that try to rebuilt ancient war weapons. Sometimes they succeed but just often they don't. Because we lost the technology. How the hell are you supposed to decice how effective a certain weapon was for real if you don't even know how it worked.
Actually, just about everything has been successfully recovered or rebuilt. People have this tendency, for some reason, to think that the ancients always used superweapons like the Helepolis, Hellenistic battleships, Greek fire, etc. They didn't. These people generally used chunks of wood with sharp metal bits on them, to really oversimplify it.
Many of the more complex things have been quite well checked out, up to and including the couple of uses of polished shields to ignite sails of ships, and so on, but things like the spears, shields, armor and other weapons? Those are known, for all practical purposes, perfectly, both because of relatively intact finds and of reconstructions made by people with a hell of a lot more talent and education than either you or I. It's not difficult to know how a gladius or a spear worked, especially when you've got literary and graphic evidence for how they were used dating from the time.
I think what a lot of military historians don't want to admitt is that no one really knows why one side or the other won or lost. Generals didn't know what was happening when they gave the orders to move here or there, and the soldiers receiving the orders didn't know where here and there were and received the orders hours later. Most of the "brilliant flanking movements" and shit like that is just someone getting lost and then stumbling into the enemy, and they spin it afterwards for the political advance of the winning side.
Meh. I think that depends on the battle as much as anything else. Some of what you're saying - soldiers tending to get lost, or recieving orders hours later - doesn't pass muster for a lot of historical battles. It does moreso for modern ones where there's immense distances and numbers of troops involved with a zillion things to go wrong, but most pre-gunpowder battles were small (or cramped) enough that one could manage his whole army on the field if he could signal well enough.
This isn't to say that not all battles have the WTF factor. The Battle of Actium has that; Antony's right wing wheels out, comes into contact with Agrippa's ships, and the whole thing just.. falls.. apart. Some of the sources have Octavian coming up the night after the battle and wondering when it was going to start - things imploded that quickly. However, even this had some reasons running far earlier than the battle; one of the morals of the story is Pay Your Troops, Dipshit, And While You're At It Don't Send Them Into Battle While They're Starving And Ill, but...
On the other hand, to say something like Cannae was a stroke of luck (other than "wow, the enemy general is that bad") is pure ignorance. Things are documented clearly and in detail - from the side that lost. They sync well with what's known of the remainder of the campaign and the fighting styles of both empires' armies. The whole of the evidence points to an almost literally perfect battle, one that needed either absolute coordination or a series of flukes so ridiculous as to dull Occam's Razor to a nice, safe edge.
I could go on at quite some length about ancient battles going one way or another. Flukes do exist in them - Alexander had no business surviving the Granicus, and if he hadn't, Things Would Be Different - but battles were far, far removed from the typical crap you'll see on movies where two disorganized rabbles charge head-on into a series of well-spread-out duels. I won't say it's easy to coordinate groups of these sizes, but I will say that it's eminently possible, especially to people who spent their entire lives training for this sort of thing.
You're also showing a tendency to look at ancient battles in terms of modern ones; comparing Cannae or Qadesh to something like Medina Ridge or Stalingrad is silly, because you're comparing apples to oranges. Or Volkswagens, for that matter. Except in the broadest strokes, like the WWII double-envelopments against the Soviets, things are different enough that comparisons of how they were actually commanded aren't really fair to either era.
Although to the credit of slashdotters, the overwhelming majority of the one-star reviews given to katie.com were intelligent explanations of why, given the hypocritical conduct of the publisher, readers should steer clear of the title, not brainless flaming.
Unfortunately, the point of reviews is to review the book, not the publisher.
Well, to be fair, if you're looking at something like "long-term offworld presence," pretty much any possible othe rreasons for manned missions come in under that umbrella. It's broad enough to include most other justifications and then some.
I didn't exhibit misanthropy, cynicism, or arrogance, let alone monstrous arrogance.
"If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading." I think it's pretty clear.
Destroying big asteroids doesn't require human spaceflight; it requires missiles.
It also requires folks giving enough of a damn to think they warrant the price tag, which nobody's willing to do as well, so that's another "let's just doom humanity instead" meme flitting about. Either way, all the missiles in the world aren't going to do much when a rock finally lands in the Bay of Bengal or the mid-Atlantic. This planet won't hang around forever as a usable resource. There's disasters like that, the current mass extinction we're witnessing, and quite a few other things which might be jiggling with our ability to survive a little more than people want to think.
If you seriously worry about solar flares extinguishing humanity, dig a hole.
The ignorance implied in this statement boggles the mind.
The Mars exploration and habitation plan NASA proposed in the 1970s had a total price tag of around $450 billion, as I recall.
You mean the plan which never got so much as a second glance by Congress? NASA's current budget is something like $12 billion.
Either way, $450 billion over the time it would take to establish a settlement there? Bring it on. That's just one year's worth of DoD budget, and I'd rather see the money spent on something important.
With the ISS total cost likely to hit $66 billion for a whit elephant in low Earth orbit?
The ISS is everything that could go wrong with a space program anyway, and is a pretty good example of why projects like that shouldn't be run by committee. Screw that; if you want something useful look at Mir's cost and accomplishments instead.
Either way, the cost of both the ISS and the fictitious Marsshot Reagan pretended to try and start are and would have been spread over a decade or more. These multi-hundred-billion-dollar budgets you talk about simply don't exist, as you'd have to increase NASA's by more than an order of magnitude to even approach such figures. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing..
Bush's NASA budget asks for $910 million just for initial preparations for a return to the Moon or Mars.
That's practically free by the standards of any major aerospace project these days. What're you complaining about? It's not like Bush will do anything about it anyway; as you may recall, the US government commemorated the 35th anniversary of the Moon landings by slashing NASA's budget by about a billion dollars a year.
If you think this won't turn into hundreds of billions before we have our first Martian hometown, well --
Oh, for an actual colony I have no doubt that it will. I'm just different in that I think it's worth it, compared to a number of other ridiculously expensive boondoggles going on around Earth right now which don't even serve the slightest constructive purpose.
Well, that, and I think of the value of the survival of humanity in terms of something other than dollar values. Short of actually razing this planet, anything - anything - is worth it if humanity's long-term survival is assured. I also don't think we have centuries or millenia to worry about it.
The context made it clear that you don't believe manned missions should be undertaken at all right now. Your providing the claims that we aren't near doing X yet were pretty plainly meant as refutations to Max's reasons for not discarding manned flights.
The only way to reliably prepare for manned missions is to actually attempt manned missions. So they're hard or dangerous. Who cares? The astronauts are volunteers who know what they're potentially heading into, and someone has to be the first anyway. For things like that people really overestimate the value of robotic missions, which shouldn't be the end goal of spaceflight at all. People also tend to either say or strongly imply that we have to choose between robotics or manned flights. Why not both? I've yet to hear a good response to that question.
If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading.
'Cause of course, Chicxulub-scale meteors, a few of which have come within hair's breadths of Earth in the past decade without being noticed, are our own fault. Ditto goes for solar flares and whatnot. Silly me, I didn't know we were responsible for such events; I could've sworn they were beyond our control and just the reason we should be thinking of an insurance policy.
If there's no other life out there, then there's nothing out there to affront or do a favor to. Who gives a shit about what an uninhabited place would think if it could think in the first place? If we're alone, then we need only be concerned with ourselves. If we're not alone, then things muddy up a bit, but since we have no proof yet we should move on the assumption that we are.
To say nothing of the absolutely monsterous arrogance of people like you, who literally argue for the death of the human race because misanthropy and cynicism are so much easier than a little effort and thinking in a longer term than the next presidential term.
Satisfying an inherent human instinct shouldn't require a multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget.
Show me this multi-hundred-billion-dollar spaceflight budget. Oh, wait, you can't.
(1) While it would be nice to colonize some other planet, we're not even close to being able to do that. At the moment, robots can do the missions which will move us in this direction.
(2) Same as 1. Send robots to the asteriods or wherever you want. Were not even close to having manned mining ships digging up stuff.
Yep. They're hard, so we shouldn't bother thinking of them as worthwhile concerns. Gee.
Just what is it with this "we must either do manned missions, or robotic missions and never both!" bullshit?
it could easily be argued by using a cheap analogy that doing manned spaceflight now is joggling with eggs when you could learn more about them and hatch them..
An analogy as bad as it is cheap. Your analogy implies that if we work on manned spaceflight now we'll be risking the destruction of the human race or some silliness like that. Contrary to the paranoia of the Cassini protestors and the like aside, that's simply a load of crap. Manned flights consistently have a high ROI, to say nothing of not exactly endangering the entire planet.
If we stick to this more or less cowardly insistence on Waiting Till We're Ready, a point which I have never seen defined in an attainable manner, we might as well abandon any considerations of manned flight altogether, which guarantees humanity's extinction in the long term.
People who say "Let's just wait a little longer" have a tendency to miss the bus.
I've been hearing of some other options lately, which are both less destructive and pretty much reversible/adjustable. Strikes me as more palatable than having some of my eye's tissue permenantly vaporized.
I'm still hiding behind a pair of armor plates suspended ahead of my eyes on metal frames, but when I get to the point of actually doing some vision repair/etc, I'd be leaning towards this type of procedure instead of laser surgery.
The more important question is, will they be friendly?
Naw, the important question is "do they exist?"
If there's ETs out there, that means that all the eggs aren't necessarily in our basket. That'd make me feel a little better about the future of life in general.
I infer that there are a lot of people tossing the word "Olympiad" around to give the impression that their fields are sports when they aren't. Nothing more.
. If we suddenly have 100 miles of superstrong material slamming down at hypersonic speed, it's going to be extremely bad - somebody ought to calculate how many Teratons of TNT that corresponds to.
Well... let's see.
Carbon nanotubes are a ridiculously strong, ridiculously light material - strong does not automatically equal heavy. In fact, the weight of the ribbon is in the range of 26 pounds per mile or so. Any given chunk of it would fall with all the impact of a piece of paper or length of yarn, unless they balled it up into a gigantic ball before hurling it at the planet.
The cable would be 62,000 miles long.
So what's the cable weigh? The cable weighs approximately eight hundred tons through its entire weight.
So. 2,600 pounds coming down at those kinds of speeds, the impact happening along an strip one hundred miles or less in length. IANAP; I'm sure there's someone else who could determine how many teratons of TNT that corresponds to. It's a wee bit over to the right side of the decimal, though.
Yep, let's never do anything big or useful or important again, because there's a non-zero chance of something going wrong. Gotta tear down every skyscraper and bridge out there, 'cause they're big and not invincible and need to be replaced with the architectural equivalents of those plastic, curvey playgrounds plaguing the continent these days.
You cannot amend the Constitution via the Notwithstanding Clause; there is a very specific formula for doing so, and the clause is only applicable to certain parts of the Charter, intended for use of things like the Emergency Powers Act or any law passed in Quebec these days.
Incidentally, the Charter is not the Canadian constitution anyway.
If by "basically legal" you mean "in practice," then you're basically right. The police tend not to make much effort to prosecute for marijuana possession in Canada.
Anyone who's been out of doors on July 1 will probably understand the extent to which that goes.
Speaking from my own chunk of the country in Halifax, a lot of the local drug scene gets together on Canada Day to celebrate Cannabis Day. They gather by the scores or hundreds in the commons and, well, do what they do best.
Cops won't touch 'em.
It's happened several years in a row, and I'm fairly certain it's fairly widespread across the country. Granted, I'm gonna be on the other side of town tomorrow, so I don't have to end up dealing with the second-hand effects of a whole lot of people trying their darndest to hotbox several acres of park.
The ruling is based on existing legislation, but the effects of the ruling are applicable on a broader level.
If the Supreme Court says "Law X's claim Y is not kosher," then that's that on the issue, short of the court declaring otherwise in a later ruling, or playing with the constitution and the like, which is effectively impossible in Canada.
If new legislation trying to reimpose the original law is passed, the Supreme Court can just say "piss off" again, and SCAMP Canada is left right back on square one.
You could have a three-part setup - your bundle-o-rods, your satellite, and a propellant package. THe rods and propellant are connected, and they're both attached to the satellite itself.
When you need to call down a few hundred/thousand/etc crowbars on an armored division, the small rocket hooked to the bundle fires it out of orbit, kicks the projectiles away, and hilarity ensues.
Alternately, you could put really cheap guidance systems on the bars themselves, enough to recognize the Other Guy's armor from above, and bring the whole mess down, satellite and all, provided you could make the whole platform cheap enough.
There's long term and there's long term. If that was launched and hit Alpha Centauri in 300 years, by the time the guy's descendants got back to claim the prize $100 billion might buy a can of Pepsi.
I gotta wonder how well a ridiculously huge prize like that - $100 million, or $1 billion, etc - would do for gathering interest. Not necessarily for hitting Alpha Centauri or something, but say, $1 billion to the first person to establish some sort of viable industry in orbit. That kinda potential would make me think for awhile about switching disciplines..
Slashdot Mirror
Is there another kind?
In the town I grew up in, the mayor was almost a parody of Diamond Joe Quimby, or would have been if he didn't predate the show. Take your cliches of a corrupt, lying scoundrel of a politician who people inexplicably continue to like anyway - except the fact that he's more or less out in the open about it. Everyone knows he's a corrupt, lying scoundrel of a politician, so he doesn't seem to bother denying the fact either.
I keep trying to decide whether he's incredibly dishonest or just the opposite. I should probably stop that before I damage myself.
-PS
-PS
Let's not, because they're so indescribably different that it's quite useless to see something like the Normandy landings compared with ancient battles. Either way, The Longest Day is a movie, not a documentary.
If even a war as recent as WW2 still turns up new facts that shed a different light on events then how the hell do you suspect accurate facts in a re-enactment of something that happened hundreds if not thousands of years ago?
Aside from agreement of primary sources on both sides written at the time, archaeological evidence, and consistent recollections of what had happened spanning not just decades but centuries after? Cannae was a Roman bugbear into the fourth century CE, and was remembered as it was in the first place. We're talking six hundred years there, and writings spanning that entire time are often very well-preserved.
Someone who says that people can't have a decent understanding of some of the ancient battles is someone who has totally failed to study them to even the smallest extent. Between some of the descriptions of the battles and the fact that many of the battlefields have actually been found and picked over, it's quite possible to understand what's going on.
And once again, comparing something like the campaigns of World War II, with their scope, technology and duration, with the ancient campaigns is wholly, totally inappropriate.
Simple example, there are certain programs that try to rebuilt ancient war weapons. Sometimes they succeed but just often they don't. Because we lost the technology. How the hell are you supposed to decice how effective a certain weapon was for real if you don't even know how it worked.
Actually, just about everything has been successfully recovered or rebuilt. People have this tendency, for some reason, to think that the ancients always used superweapons like the Helepolis, Hellenistic battleships, Greek fire, etc. They didn't. These people generally used chunks of wood with sharp metal bits on them, to really oversimplify it.
Many of the more complex things have been quite well checked out, up to and including the couple of uses of polished shields to ignite sails of ships, and so on, but things like the spears, shields, armor and other weapons? Those are known, for all practical purposes, perfectly, both because of relatively intact finds and of reconstructions made by people with a hell of a lot more talent and education than either you or I. It's not difficult to know how a gladius or a spear worked, especially when you've got literary and graphic evidence for how they were used dating from the time.
-PS
I think what a lot of military historians don't want to admitt is that no one really knows why one side or the other won or lost. Generals didn't know what was happening when they gave the orders to move here or there, and the soldiers receiving the orders didn't know where here and there were and received the orders hours later. Most of the "brilliant flanking movements" and shit like that is just someone getting lost and then stumbling into the enemy, and they spin it afterwards for the political advance of the winning side.
Meh. I think that depends on the battle as much as anything else. Some of what you're saying - soldiers tending to get lost, or recieving orders hours later - doesn't pass muster for a lot of historical battles. It does moreso for modern ones where there's immense distances and numbers of troops involved with a zillion things to go wrong, but most pre-gunpowder battles were small (or cramped) enough that one could manage his whole army on the field if he could signal well enough.
This isn't to say that not all battles have the WTF factor. The Battle of Actium has that; Antony's right wing wheels out, comes into contact with Agrippa's ships, and the whole thing just.. falls.. apart. Some of the sources have Octavian coming up the night after the battle and wondering when it was going to start - things imploded that quickly. However, even this had some reasons running far earlier than the battle; one of the morals of the story is Pay Your Troops, Dipshit, And While You're At It Don't Send Them Into Battle While They're Starving And Ill, but...
On the other hand, to say something like Cannae was a stroke of luck (other than "wow, the enemy general is that bad") is pure ignorance. Things are documented clearly and in detail - from the side that lost. They sync well with what's known of the remainder of the campaign and the fighting styles of both empires' armies. The whole of the evidence points to an almost literally perfect battle, one that needed either absolute coordination or a series of flukes so ridiculous as to dull Occam's Razor to a nice, safe edge.
I could go on at quite some length about ancient battles going one way or another. Flukes do exist in them - Alexander had no business surviving the Granicus, and if he hadn't, Things Would Be Different - but battles were far, far removed from the typical crap you'll see on movies where two disorganized rabbles charge head-on into a series of well-spread-out duels. I won't say it's easy to coordinate groups of these sizes, but I will say that it's eminently possible, especially to people who spent their entire lives training for this sort of thing.
You're also showing a tendency to look at ancient battles in terms of modern ones; comparing Cannae or Qadesh to something like Medina Ridge or Stalingrad is silly, because you're comparing apples to oranges. Or Volkswagens, for that matter. Except in the broadest strokes, like the WWII double-envelopments against the Soviets, things are different enough that comparisons of how they were actually commanded aren't really fair to either era.
-PS
Unfortunately, the point of reviews is to review the book, not the publisher.
-PS
-PS
"If we're so stupid we can destroy the only planet we live on, I don't see how we're doing the universe a favor by spreading." I think it's pretty clear. Destroying big asteroids doesn't require human spaceflight; it requires missiles.
It also requires folks giving enough of a damn to think they warrant the price tag, which nobody's willing to do as well, so that's another "let's just doom humanity instead" meme flitting about. Either way, all the missiles in the world aren't going to do much when a rock finally lands in the Bay of Bengal or the mid-Atlantic. This planet won't hang around forever as a usable resource. There's disasters like that, the current mass extinction we're witnessing, and quite a few other things which might be jiggling with our ability to survive a little more than people want to think.
If you seriously worry about solar flares extinguishing humanity, dig a hole.
The ignorance implied in this statement boggles the mind.
The Mars exploration and habitation plan NASA proposed in the 1970s had a total price tag of around $450 billion, as I recall.
You mean the plan which never got so much as a second glance by Congress? NASA's current budget is something like $12 billion.
Either way, $450 billion over the time it would take to establish a settlement there? Bring it on. That's just one year's worth of DoD budget, and I'd rather see the money spent on something important.
With the ISS total cost likely to hit $66 billion for a whit elephant in low Earth orbit?
The ISS is everything that could go wrong with a space program anyway, and is a pretty good example of why projects like that shouldn't be run by committee. Screw that; if you want something useful look at Mir's cost and accomplishments instead.
Either way, the cost of both the ISS and the fictitious Marsshot Reagan pretended to try and start are and would have been spread over a decade or more. These multi-hundred-billion-dollar budgets you talk about simply don't exist, as you'd have to increase NASA's by more than an order of magnitude to even approach such figures. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing..
Bush's NASA budget asks for $910 million just for initial preparations for a return to the Moon or Mars.
That's practically free by the standards of any major aerospace project these days. What're you complaining about? It's not like Bush will do anything about it anyway; as you may recall, the US government commemorated the 35th anniversary of the Moon landings by slashing NASA's budget by about a billion dollars a year.
If you think this won't turn into hundreds of billions before we have our first Martian hometown, well --
Oh, for an actual colony I have no doubt that it will. I'm just different in that I think it's worth it, compared to a number of other ridiculously expensive boondoggles going on around Earth right now which don't even serve the slightest constructive purpose.
Well, that, and I think of the value of the survival of humanity in terms of something other than dollar values. Short of actually razing this planet, anything - anything - is worth it if humanity's long-term survival is assured. I also don't think we have centuries or millenia to worry about it.
-PS
The only way to reliably prepare for manned missions is to actually attempt manned missions. So they're hard or dangerous. Who cares? The astronauts are volunteers who know what they're potentially heading into, and someone has to be the first anyway. For things like that people really overestimate the value of robotic missions, which shouldn't be the end goal of spaceflight at all. People also tend to either say or strongly imply that we have to choose between robotics or manned flights. Why not both? I've yet to hear a good response to that question.
-PS
-PS
'Cause of course, Chicxulub-scale meteors, a few of which have come within hair's breadths of Earth in the past decade without being noticed, are our own fault. Ditto goes for solar flares and whatnot. Silly me, I didn't know we were responsible for such events; I could've sworn they were beyond our control and just the reason we should be thinking of an insurance policy.
If there's no other life out there, then there's nothing out there to affront or do a favor to. Who gives a shit about what an uninhabited place would think if it could think in the first place? If we're alone, then we need only be concerned with ourselves. If we're not alone, then things muddy up a bit, but since we have no proof yet we should move on the assumption that we are.
To say nothing of the absolutely monsterous arrogance of people like you, who literally argue for the death of the human race because misanthropy and cynicism are so much easier than a little effort and thinking in a longer term than the next presidential term.
Satisfying an inherent human instinct shouldn't require a multi-hundred-billion-dollar budget.
Show me this multi-hundred-billion-dollar spaceflight budget. Oh, wait, you can't.
-PS
(2) Same as 1. Send robots to the asteriods or wherever you want. Were not even close to having manned mining ships digging up stuff.
Yep. They're hard, so we shouldn't bother thinking of them as worthwhile concerns. Gee.
Just what is it with this "we must either do manned missions, or robotic missions and never both!" bullshit?
-PS
An analogy as bad as it is cheap. Your analogy implies that if we work on manned spaceflight now we'll be risking the destruction of the human race or some silliness like that. Contrary to the paranoia of the Cassini protestors and the like aside, that's simply a load of crap. Manned flights consistently have a high ROI, to say nothing of not exactly endangering the entire planet.
If we stick to this more or less cowardly insistence on Waiting Till We're Ready, a point which I have never seen defined in an attainable manner, we might as well abandon any considerations of manned flight altogether, which guarantees humanity's extinction in the long term.
People who say "Let's just wait a little longer" have a tendency to miss the bus.
-PS
-PS
I'm still hiding behind a pair of armor plates suspended ahead of my eyes on metal frames, but when I get to the point of actually doing some vision repair/etc, I'd be leaning towards this type of procedure instead of laser surgery.
-PS
Naw, the important question is "do they exist?"
If there's ETs out there, that means that all the eggs aren't necessarily in our basket. That'd make me feel a little better about the future of life in general.
-PS
-PS
-PS
-PS
Well... let's see.
Carbon nanotubes are a ridiculously strong, ridiculously light material - strong does not automatically equal heavy. In fact, the weight of the ribbon is in the range of 26 pounds per mile or so. Any given chunk of it would fall with all the impact of a piece of paper or length of yarn, unless they balled it up into a gigantic ball before hurling it at the planet.
The cable would be 62,000 miles long.
So what's the cable weigh? The cable weighs approximately eight hundred tons through its entire weight.
So. 2,600 pounds coming down at those kinds of speeds, the impact happening along an strip one hundred miles or less in length. IANAP; I'm sure there's someone else who could determine how many teratons of TNT that corresponds to. It's a wee bit over to the right side of the decimal, though.
-PS
Mmmmm, cowardice.
-PS
You cannot amend the Constitution via the Notwithstanding Clause; there is a very specific formula for doing so, and the clause is only applicable to certain parts of the Charter, intended for use of things like the Emergency Powers Act or any law passed in Quebec these days.
Incidentally, the Charter is not the Canadian constitution anyway.
-PS
Anyone who's been out of doors on July 1 will probably understand the extent to which that goes.
Speaking from my own chunk of the country in Halifax, a lot of the local drug scene gets together on Canada Day to celebrate Cannabis Day. They gather by the scores or hundreds in the commons and, well, do what they do best.
Cops won't touch 'em.
It's happened several years in a row, and I'm fairly certain it's fairly widespread across the country. Granted, I'm gonna be on the other side of town tomorrow, so I don't have to end up dealing with the second-hand effects of a whole lot of people trying their darndest to hotbox several acres of park.
-PS
If the Supreme Court says "Law X's claim Y is not kosher," then that's that on the issue, short of the court declaring otherwise in a later ruling, or playing with the constitution and the like, which is effectively impossible in Canada.
If new legislation trying to reimpose the original law is passed, the Supreme Court can just say "piss off" again, and SCAMP Canada is left right back on square one.
-PS
When you need to call down a few hundred/thousand/etc crowbars on an armored division, the small rocket hooked to the bundle fires it out of orbit, kicks the projectiles away, and hilarity ensues.
Alternately, you could put really cheap guidance systems on the bars themselves, enough to recognize the Other Guy's armor from above, and bring the whole mess down, satellite and all, provided you could make the whole platform cheap enough.
-PS
I gotta wonder how well a ridiculously huge prize like that - $100 million, or $1 billion, etc - would do for gathering interest. Not necessarily for hitting Alpha Centauri or something, but say, $1 billion to the first person to establish some sort of viable industry in orbit. That kinda potential would make me think for awhile about switching disciplines..
-PS