Both towers of the WTC did take direct hits from airplanes and survived. It was the burning fuel that weakened the columns... that caused them to collapse.
You're playing games and you know it. They survived for what, an hour?
Had the planes not hit the towers, would they be standing today? Presumably. Can we therefore say that they collapsed as a result of getting hit by those planes? Yes we can. Besides, no one said that any potential problems with the power plant had to be a direct result of a collision; it could be an indirect result just like it was with the WTC.
The WTC and containment domes are hardly the same thing.
Never said they were. I was merely pointing out the fact that not all commercial airliners are equal. The WTC was designed to withstand the impact of a commercial airliner, but it was contemporary commercial airliners that were designed for, not the ones that would be in the sky 20 or 30 years later. The same is certainly possible with the nuclear reactor in question.
Early this year, a warning system (a bit like the tsunami system in the Pacific) has been put in place between Rainier and Seattle.
Will it have the neat signs of someone running away from a wall of mud like the tsunami evacuation route signs? (I know, I shouldn't joke about such things, but I did find them extremely funny when I was out on the Oregon coast last summer).
Additionally, the containment building is designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner without threatening the integrity of the core or the heat exchanger.
The World Trade Center was designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner too. So much for that idea. It all depends on the size of the commercial airliner in question.
I posted some pictures from a trip last summer. We were able to climb up to the rim, which is currently restricted due to the new activity. The comment with the pictures is here.
Mt. St. Helens does not have a nice crater, in the Crater Lake sense. The Mt. St. Helens crater is open on the north side, so everything could just flow right out (see this picture from the south side of the rim). The crater is full of snow as well (which is hard to tell from that picture, because the snow is covered in ash), which would contribute to lahars. I also believe there are still glaciers on Mt. St. Helens, but obviously not of the number and size present on Rainier (which is visible in the above picture behind Spirit Lake; Mt. Adams [yet another volcano] is visible to the far right).
I was there last summer, 23 years since the 1980 eruption, and the power with which that thing erupted is still evident all over the area.
For instance:
A picture from high on the flank of the mountain looking back down one of the lava flows from the 1980 eruption. Notice the green patch on the hill to the left, which was missed by the lava flow.
Looking at the same spot, this time from below. You can really see the effects of that hill here -- it diverted the lava, and everything behind it is green, while everything else was destroyed.
A panorama from the rim of the mountain, looking down into the crater. This should give you an idea of how big a crater the eruption left. The top of the mountain was simply blown away. Even while we were there, every few minutes we could here rock tumbling down into the crater, some of them huge boulders. The sides of the caldera still aren't stable, 23 years after the fact.
Spirit Lake. All that gray stuff you see are trees. Thousands of them. They were all killed in 1980 eruption, and are now just floating on the lake. It's called the "floating forest" of Spirit Lake.
Another testament to the destructive power of a volcano is Crater Lake in Oregon (formerly Mt. Mazama), which blew its top 7500 years ago. The eruption, which is estimated to have been more than 40 times more powerful than Mt. St. Helens (link here) left a crater 5 miles wide, which has since filled up with water. There is still a desert-like pumice plain just north of Crater Lake, noticeable 7,500 years after the fact. Even Yellowstone National Park is itself a former volcano. It's just hard to tell when you're there because the caldera is absolutely enormous (a good portion of the park is itself within the caldera rim), and it happened 600,000 years or so ago. Just google for 'yellowstone eruption'.
the fact that we have had so many years of domestic peace and tranquility is a testament to the success of the current policies.
Let's see... how many years was it between attacks on U.S. soil that can be linked to Al Qaeda? Eight. So by your logic, our policies were working from 1993 until... oh yeah, Sept. 11, 2001. So much for that theory.
Hurry up and figure it out folks: Americans think a 30 second commercial is a long time. Al Qaeda plans attacks for YEARS. It could be several more years before they decide to show us that our policies have not accomplished shit.
This is O/T and only tangentially related to what the parent said, but I love it when people complain about postal rates. If someone asked you to bring a letter from Maine to Alaska for 37 cents, would your response be anything less than "go fuck yourself"?
Full color full screen images appear instantly, you cannot even guess that the display is through the network.
Uhhh, I export displays all the time at work over our 100mbps network, and I can easily tell the difference. I export from one Linux box to another, from a Linux box to a Windows box running Cygwin, and from Solaris to Linux. And I can easily tell the difference. It's not enough to be annoying, but it's noticeable. Especially at application load.
And we're talking about the X server, that people like you call it slow and old and needing replacement and let's just throw away network transparency, who needs it anyway, right?
Please point out to me a post in which I EVER said that X is too slow or in need of replacement. Don't tell me what I say when you have no clue.
Go to Start -> All Programs -> Startup. There should be "Microsoft Office". It basically loads Office when the machine starts, so that when you run Word you're only opening a new Word window, rather than loading the entire app.
I wasn't advocating preloading all applications. And I really didn't intend for this to degrade into a discussion of pre-loading apps. Maybe I should have thought of that before mentioning Word. Anyways, the intention was more to point out the fact that CPUs are so fast that application load time is all but negligible, and certainly not so lengthy as to make me wish I could farm it all out to a central server.
A minute? What kind of PC do you have? My work PC barely takes a minute to completely load XP from the moment I hit the power button. And re: office pre-loading, I'm well aware of it; see my response to the other guy that already said the same thing you did.
And the fact that Office apps are mostly loaded into memory at boot, thus providing the illusion of speed when they're 'opened', hasn't been pointed out to you?
Your point? When I double-click on the Word icon, it takes two seconds for the window to come up. Why should I care if the app is pre-loaded or not? If it's pre-loaded on everyone's system, why should we time it as if it weren't?
And you still conveniently neglected to address the fact that I mentioned other apps, and that even in today's high-speed world, a few seconds of waiting for your app to load really isn't a big deal. Like I said, I dedicate more time to excretory bodily functions every day than I do to waiting for my software to load.
He deserved a spot on the Medley relay. He did not deserve it on the Free relay.
I assume you're talking about Phelps here? Both he and Crocker will be in both relays.
If you were referring to Phelps, this is wholly irrelevant to the discussion. It was not Phelps's decision whether or not he got a spot on the free relay, it was up to the U.S. coaches. And I doubt you can prove to me that Phelps pressured them to put him on the team. Yes I know Gary Hall Sr claimed the coach was under pressure to see that Phelps got as many chances for medals; that does not equate to Phelps applying the pressure. Could he have said he wouldn't accept the spot? Perhaps. But if he thinks the coach is acting in the best interests of the team, why would he? It would be hard to discuss this without again mentioning the person he displaced on that team, Gary Hall. Did you watch the 50m tonight? Did you watch his reaction after he won? Have you seen Phelps act like that yet? I didn't think so.
If you were talking about Crocker deserving to be on the medley relay, then you're right, he did deserve it. But not according to how the U.S. team puts together the medley team -- according to that, Crocker did not deserve it. There was nothing saying that Phelps needed to give up his spot. And if he was such a cocky asshole who can't get enough of the spotlight as you assert, then he wouldn't have given up his spot. But he did. I think this article sums it up best:
Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion by winning more gold medals than all but a handful of competitors ever had.
It takes about 2 seconds for MS Word to come up on my laptop when running on batteries. When plugged in, that would presumably be a tad faster. Even if your central server can have it open in 0.1 seconds, I would bet that the network latency would make that 1.9 seconds all but go away, and 1.9 seconds isn't much of an inconvenience to me anyway. Sure, some apps take longer, but once I've started those up, they usually stay open for a long long time. Besides, we're still only talking about a few seconds of initialization time -- Visual Studio just took 4 seconds, Photoshop CS took 20. I waste more time blowing my nose.
There's a reason nobody runs client-server. Desktop systems with fast processors are just too cheap.
Oh yeah, and if Phelps was a "raving asshole", he most certainly wouldn't have given up his spot on the medley relay to Ian Crocker so that Crocker can have a chance for gold. Give me a friggin break. If you want to talk about cocky, how about Gary Hall? How about Jason Wariner, the U.S. 400m runner? And those two were just from tonight!
He's just incredible but that doesn't give him the right to stomp around like the raving asshole he is.
Examples please? Phelps CERTAINLY does NOT celebrate his victories as much as some of the other competitors in these Olympics. Usually he's VERY restrained. The only asshole-ish thing I've seen him do was when he said something to the effect of "I can win as many medals as I want"; unless there's a lot more than this incident your branding him a raving asshole is unjustified.
I also haven't seen him do anything but talk about that damn picture of Ian Crocker on his wall
Well, I don't know what you've been watching, but I've seen him win seven medals so far, five of them gold, and it's looking very likely that he'll add another gold before the end of the week. I think that counts for something.
And I don't think him talking about a picture on his wall really supports your assertion of him as an asshole. Maybe if every time he brought up the picture he added "and that's the guy whose ass I'm gonna kick in the butterfly!", but I haven't seen him say that yet.
I don't think Spitz walked around with that smug attitude when he was a part of 7 Golds and 7 WR's.
Well, given that Spitz's heroics took place in 1972, and it's currently 2004... 32 years ago... I hope you're at least 50 years old to be making assertions about Spitz's attitude in the '72 games.
Phelps is just riding his hype.
Given that the fame of the average Olympian lasts about as long as ice cream left outside in the Saraha desert, I can't fault him for soaking it up for the month that it will be available to him, because it'll be another four years (if ever) before he gets it again.
My last name is Smith, and you would not believe the number of people who look at me incredulously when I tell them this. For being the most common last name in the U.S., I don't understand why people seem so surprised by it. Doe I could understand, but Smith?
Olympic marmots, as well as a variety of other species, are only found on the Olympic peninsula. The peninsula at one point was completely separated from the mainland, so any species that were already there were not inter-breeding with animals from outside the peninsula. Even today, if you look at the peninsula on a map, it's really quite isolated, being surrounded mostly by water. Evidence of isolation is that a number of animals that are present elsewhere in Washington state are not found in Olympic: grizzly bears, wolverines, etc, despite the peninsula being a suitable habitat for them. Anyways, as a result of this isolation, there are a number of plants and animals that are endemic to the region, including the Olympic Marmot, which is related to but is a different species than the hoary and yellow-bellied marmots found elsewhere in Washington.
Similarly, the Vancouver Island Marmot is only found on (you guessed it) Vancouver Island, which is another very isolated part of the world.
Ok, perhaps Olympic marmots aren't "proof" per se. Fairly strong evidence would be more appropriate, though I agree, it would be quite easy to argue that God just put them only on the Olympic peninsula.
And I agree. If you're going to be offended by the AG doing it, then you must be just as offended by the individual libraries doing it. Which is the point I was trying to make. It sounded as if a lot of people around here only had a problem with what the AG did because he was the AG, but they wouldn't have had any problem with it had the individual libraries taken the initiative, which doesn't make any sense to me...
I'm aware of this; that's why I've tried to use the phrase "proven beyond a reasonable doubt", which I did not use in that part of my post. I apologize for the confusion.
Creationism says the universe is only ~7000 years old.
I never advocated any specific creation story. Specifically, I did not advocate the Judeo-Christian version. Also, as far as I am aware, the Bible never comes right out and says the universe is only ~7000 years old. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe that number was reached by adding up the ages of all the people mentioned in the Bible, which makes it suspect at best. (Disclaimer: I am not a Christian, so I'm not trying to defend my beliefs here or anything)
I've read some interesting pieces about experiments done where some of this primordial soup is zapped with electricity (a la lightning), and amino acids are formed, which eventually combine into proteins. Fascinating stuff. I just sometimes have a hard time convincing my brain of the concept that all the marvelous adaptations in all the plants, animals, etc around the world could possibly be the result of nothing more than random genetic mutations. But hey, anything can happen given a few billion years, right?
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You're playing games and you know it. They survived for what, an hour?
Had the planes not hit the towers, would they be standing today? Presumably. Can we therefore say that they collapsed as a result of getting hit by those planes? Yes we can. Besides, no one said that any potential problems with the power plant had to be a direct result of a collision; it could be an indirect result just like it was with the WTC.
The WTC and containment domes are hardly the same thing.
Never said they were. I was merely pointing out the fact that not all commercial airliners are equal. The WTC was designed to withstand the impact of a commercial airliner, but it was contemporary commercial airliners that were designed for, not the ones that would be in the sky 20 or 30 years later. The same is certainly possible with the nuclear reactor in question.
Early this year, a warning system (a bit like the tsunami system in the Pacific) has been put in place between Rainier and Seattle.
Will it have the neat signs of someone running away from a wall of mud like the tsunami evacuation route signs? (I know, I shouldn't joke about such things, but I did find them extremely funny when I was out on the Oregon coast last summer).
Additionally, the containment building is designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner without threatening the integrity of the core or the heat exchanger.
The World Trade Center was designed to take a direct hit from a commercial airliner too. So much for that idea. It all depends on the size of the commercial airliner in question.
I posted some pictures from a trip last summer. We were able to climb up to the rim, which is currently restricted due to the new activity. The comment with the pictures is here.
Mt. St. Helens does not have a nice crater, in the Crater Lake sense. The Mt. St. Helens crater is open on the north side, so everything could just flow right out (see this picture from the south side of the rim). The crater is full of snow as well (which is hard to tell from that picture, because the snow is covered in ash), which would contribute to lahars. I also believe there are still glaciers on Mt. St. Helens, but obviously not of the number and size present on Rainier (which is visible in the above picture behind Spirit Lake; Mt. Adams [yet another volcano] is visible to the far right).
I was there last summer, 23 years since the 1980 eruption, and the power with which that thing erupted is still evident all over the area.
For instance:
- A picture from high on the flank of the mountain looking back down one of the lava flows from the 1980 eruption. Notice the green patch on the hill to the left, which was missed by the lava flow.
- Looking at the same spot, this time from below. You can really see the effects of that hill here -- it diverted the lava, and everything behind it is green, while everything else was destroyed.
- A panorama from the rim of the mountain, looking down into the crater. This should give you an idea of how big a crater the eruption left. The top of the mountain was simply blown away. Even while we were there, every few minutes we could here rock tumbling down into the crater, some of them huge boulders. The sides of the caldera still aren't stable, 23 years after the fact.
- Spirit Lake. All that gray stuff you see are trees. Thousands of them. They were all killed in 1980 eruption, and are now just floating on the lake. It's called the "floating forest" of Spirit Lake.
- This is a hillside about TEN MILES from the blast site. See how the trees were just blown right over? And no, this one isn't a clearcut. According to this page, most of the trees within a 600 square kilometer area were blown over by the blast.
Another testament to the destructive power of a volcano is Crater Lake in Oregon (formerly Mt. Mazama), which blew its top 7500 years ago. The eruption, which is estimated to have been more than 40 times more powerful than Mt. St. Helens (link here) left a crater 5 miles wide, which has since filled up with water. There is still a desert-like pumice plain just north of Crater Lake, noticeable 7,500 years after the fact. Even Yellowstone National Park is itself a former volcano. It's just hard to tell when you're there because the caldera is absolutely enormous (a good portion of the park is itself within the caldera rim), and it happened 600,000 years or so ago. Just google for 'yellowstone eruption'.Let's see... how many years was it between attacks on U.S. soil that can be linked to Al Qaeda? Eight. So by your logic, our policies were working from 1993 until... oh yeah, Sept. 11, 2001. So much for that theory.
Hurry up and figure it out folks: Americans think a 30 second commercial is a long time. Al Qaeda plans attacks for YEARS. It could be several more years before they decide to show us that our policies have not accomplished shit.
NOOOO!! You can't say these things!! You might give the terrorists ideas!!
This is O/T and only tangentially related to what the parent said, but I love it when people complain about postal rates. If someone asked you to bring a letter from Maine to Alaska for 37 cents, would your response be anything less than "go fuck yourself"?
Uhhh, I export displays all the time at work over our 100mbps network, and I can easily tell the difference. I export from one Linux box to another, from a Linux box to a Windows box running Cygwin, and from Solaris to Linux. And I can easily tell the difference. It's not enough to be annoying, but it's noticeable. Especially at application load.
And we're talking about the X server, that people like you call it slow and old and needing replacement and let's just throw away network transparency, who needs it anyway, right?
Please point out to me a post in which I EVER said that X is too slow or in need of replacement. Don't tell me what I say when you have no clue.
Go to Start -> All Programs -> Startup. There should be "Microsoft Office". It basically loads Office when the machine starts, so that when you run Word you're only opening a new Word window, rather than loading the entire app.
I wasn't advocating preloading all applications. And I really didn't intend for this to degrade into a discussion of pre-loading apps. Maybe I should have thought of that before mentioning Word. Anyways, the intention was more to point out the fact that CPUs are so fast that application load time is all but negligible, and certainly not so lengthy as to make me wish I could farm it all out to a central server.
A minute? What kind of PC do you have? My work PC barely takes a minute to completely load XP from the moment I hit the power button. And re: office pre-loading, I'm well aware of it; see my response to the other guy that already said the same thing you did.
Your point? When I double-click on the Word icon, it takes two seconds for the window to come up. Why should I care if the app is pre-loaded or not? If it's pre-loaded on everyone's system, why should we time it as if it weren't?
And you still conveniently neglected to address the fact that I mentioned other apps, and that even in today's high-speed world, a few seconds of waiting for your app to load really isn't a big deal. Like I said, I dedicate more time to excretory bodily functions every day than I do to waiting for my software to load.
I assume you're talking about Phelps here? Both he and Crocker will be in both relays.
If you were referring to Phelps, this is wholly irrelevant to the discussion. It was not Phelps's decision whether or not he got a spot on the free relay, it was up to the U.S. coaches. And I doubt you can prove to me that Phelps pressured them to put him on the team. Yes I know Gary Hall Sr claimed the coach was under pressure to see that Phelps got as many chances for medals; that does not equate to Phelps applying the pressure. Could he have said he wouldn't accept the spot? Perhaps. But if he thinks the coach is acting in the best interests of the team, why would he? It would be hard to discuss this without again mentioning the person he displaced on that team, Gary Hall. Did you watch the 50m tonight? Did you watch his reaction after he won? Have you seen Phelps act like that yet? I didn't think so.
If you were talking about Crocker deserving to be on the medley relay, then you're right, he did deserve it. But not according to how the U.S. team puts together the medley team -- according to that, Crocker did not deserve it. There was nothing saying that Phelps needed to give up his spot. And if he was such a cocky asshole who can't get enough of the spotlight as you assert, then he wouldn't have given up his spot. But he did. I think this article sums it up best:
There's a reason nobody runs client-server. Desktop systems with fast processors are just too cheap.
Oh yeah, and if Phelps was a "raving asshole", he most certainly wouldn't have given up his spot on the medley relay to Ian Crocker so that Crocker can have a chance for gold. Give me a friggin break. If you want to talk about cocky, how about Gary Hall? How about Jason Wariner, the U.S. 400m runner? And those two were just from tonight!
Examples please? Phelps CERTAINLY does NOT celebrate his victories as much as some of the other competitors in these Olympics. Usually he's VERY restrained. The only asshole-ish thing I've seen him do was when he said something to the effect of "I can win as many medals as I want"; unless there's a lot more than this incident your branding him a raving asshole is unjustified.
I also haven't seen him do anything but talk about that damn picture of Ian Crocker on his wall
Well, I don't know what you've been watching, but I've seen him win seven medals so far, five of them gold, and it's looking very likely that he'll add another gold before the end of the week. I think that counts for something.
And I don't think him talking about a picture on his wall really supports your assertion of him as an asshole. Maybe if every time he brought up the picture he added "and that's the guy whose ass I'm gonna kick in the butterfly!", but I haven't seen him say that yet.
I don't think Spitz walked around with that smug attitude when he was a part of 7 Golds and 7 WR's.
Well, given that Spitz's heroics took place in 1972, and it's currently 2004... 32 years ago... I hope you're at least 50 years old to be making assertions about Spitz's attitude in the '72 games.
Phelps is just riding his hype.
Given that the fame of the average Olympian lasts about as long as ice cream left outside in the Saraha desert, I can't fault him for soaking it up for the month that it will be available to him, because it'll be another four years (if ever) before he gets it again.
My last name is Smith, and you would not believe the number of people who look at me incredulously when I tell them this. For being the most common last name in the U.S., I don't understand why people seem so surprised by it. Doe I could understand, but Smith?
Olympic marmots, as well as a variety of other species, are only found on the Olympic peninsula. The peninsula at one point was completely separated from the mainland, so any species that were already there were not inter-breeding with animals from outside the peninsula. Even today, if you look at the peninsula on a map, it's really quite isolated, being surrounded mostly by water. Evidence of isolation is that a number of animals that are present elsewhere in Washington state are not found in Olympic: grizzly bears, wolverines, etc, despite the peninsula being a suitable habitat for them. Anyways, as a result of this isolation, there are a number of plants and animals that are endemic to the region, including the Olympic Marmot, which is related to but is a different species than the hoary and yellow-bellied marmots found elsewhere in Washington.
Similarly, the Vancouver Island Marmot is only found on (you guessed it) Vancouver Island, which is another very isolated part of the world.
Ok, perhaps Olympic marmots aren't "proof" per se. Fairly strong evidence would be more appropriate, though I agree, it would be quite easy to argue that God just put them only on the Olympic peninsula.
Ahh.. but the thread started on that particular topic
So? Let me repeat: *I* never advocated any specific creation story. Specifically, *I* did not advocate the Judeo-Christian version.
Creationism isn't the idea that some thing or other created the universe.
Uhhh, it's not? That's news to me.
It specifically believes that the earth is ~ 7000 years old and that everything was created exactly as it is now.
No, the Christian story of creation believes this. The Navajo story, for example, does not.
"How it all began" isn't an issue for science.
Oh? Tell that to all the scientists that are researching the topic.
You're just playing a whole lot of semantic games here...
No, it's just as objectionable.
And I agree. If you're going to be offended by the AG doing it, then you must be just as offended by the individual libraries doing it. Which is the point I was trying to make. It sounded as if a lot of people around here only had a problem with what the AG did because he was the AG, but they wouldn't have had any problem with it had the individual libraries taken the initiative, which doesn't make any sense to me...
Real science doesn't prove anything.
I'm aware of this; that's why I've tried to use the phrase "proven beyond a reasonable doubt", which I did not use in that part of my post. I apologize for the confusion.
Creationism says the universe is only ~7000 years old.
I never advocated any specific creation story. Specifically, I did not advocate the Judeo-Christian version. Also, as far as I am aware, the Bible never comes right out and says the universe is only ~7000 years old. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe that number was reached by adding up the ages of all the people mentioned in the Bible, which makes it suspect at best. (Disclaimer: I am not a Christian, so I'm not trying to defend my beliefs here or anything)
I've read some interesting pieces about experiments done where some of this primordial soup is zapped with electricity (a la lightning), and amino acids are formed, which eventually combine into proteins. Fascinating stuff. I just sometimes have a hard time convincing my brain of the concept that all the marvelous adaptations in all the plants, animals, etc around the world could possibly be the result of nothing more than random genetic mutations. But hey, anything can happen given a few billion years, right?