We've been hearing announcements of cleaner vehicles for years and years. Even Lada demonstrated one last century! And what do we have? A handful of hybrids... Why is it taking so long?
Why haven't you bought a Zap Xebra yet?
why do the two hybrid cars I can buy here have gasoline engines and a fuel economy comparable to a diesel in the same price class, when they could (1) burn diesel, which has a much better fuel economy
Diesel cars in the US were practically banned for several years, as they have to meet the emission regulations as gasoline fueled cars (trucks don't), but emissions controls generally won't work with the sulfur in US diesel fuel. Only in the past year has this changed.
In addition, hybrids only give a big improvement in fuel consumption because they are strategically used in scenarios where gasoline engines are horribly inefficient. Diesel engines don't have those same problems to a tiny fraction of the same degree, so you add weight, complexity, and expense of a hybrid for a fraction as much of an improvement... Hybrids are just BARELY economic tacked onto gasoline cars, and wouldn't come close to breaking even on diesels.
(2) use the combustion engine _only_ for electricity generation, so that it can run at its optimum efficiency?
Converting mechanical motion into electricity, back to motion, is terribly inefficient, and would waste fuel, not save it.
why not a more efficient engine (e.g. Sterling or Wankel instead of Otto)?
Hybrids do have more-efficient engine designs than the Otto cycle.
And why do we have cars that can run on up to 85% ethanol (the rest being gasoline) instead of 100%?
Exceeding 85% Ethanol changes the characteristics of the fuel too much, so the engine must be redesigned to burn it. Who cares, really? We can't get enough of a supply of ethanol to give everyone in the world a 5% mixture, let alone 85%+. Everyone would be ecstatic if global oil demand was reduced by 80% overnight, and oil prices would positively plummet.
And why do diesel cars not run on straight vegetable oil right out of the factory, even though you can get them converted for about 2 thousand euros,
Because hundreds of millions of people paying 10% more for their vehicle, just so a fraction of 1% of their customers can use up the limited supply of cheap vegetable oil, is economically INSANE.
Come on, people! It's not like there are unsolved technical problems here! The solutions are known, they are just not in mass-manufactured cars.
None of the things you listed would solve any problems. Supplying enough ethanol or biodiesel is the problem, NOT using it... any vehicle can run on 20% mixtures of ethanol and biodiesel. Until everyone in the world can be supplied with that, no vehicle changes are needed. And your plan for hybrids won't help, and merely shows you have no idea of the actual problems.
If it wasn't for that, straight vegetable oil would be cheaper than diesel here.
Yes, destroying tropical rain forests to get clear land to grow vegetable oil crops is very inexpensive.
Ravaging the topsoil that has been build up over centuries of sustainable farming certainly will allow the production of lots of fuel... for about decade or so.
Well, not if you use crops that don't, or algae, which grow in deserts and on salt water and have a much higher yield anyway. And on and on.
Huge amounts of money have been spent trying to get algae farms to work, and nobody has ever come close to making it even stay alive, let alone becoming economically competitive.
And what magical crops do you have in mind that will grow better in the desert sand than fertilized soil, and don't need any water?
An extra bonus is that the more you absorb the sun's energy as electricity, the less of it is converted to heat which dissipates around the planet, and that in and of itself reduces the effect global warming. So you are being twice as productive - not rely on heat-trapping coal, and reduce the amount of heat that saturates on the planet in the first place.
Low efficiency solar cells will dramatically increase global warming. Instead of 90% of the sun's rays being reflected back off into space by nice light sand or white roofing materials, 90% will be absorbed by photovoltaic panels, and turned into heat either immediate (solar cells are inefficient) or after being used in the form of electricity.
Contact your President, your Prime Minister, all of your representatives and demand investigations into alternative time resources. Perhaps something corn-based.
Rumor has it President GW Bush has already looked into altering time. Though his solution was based not on corn but coca leaves.
I thought x86 is something we want to eventually move away from
You were wrong. x86 isn't particularly impressive, but it's just a CPU, not a war crime.
It's pretty much inevitable that x86 will move into new areas, as embedded systems need more and more processing power for multimedia, x86 vendors spend more and more of money reducing power consumption, and the economies of software development more and more favor reusing x86 software, rather than spending time on optimizations for the other architectures you use.
Since Intel can't seem to make money on any architecture other than x86, they've eliminated their StrongArm/XScale line, and are replacing it with ultra-low-powered (sub-1watt) x86-based CPUs. VIA has long be trying to make inroads in the high-power, higher-performance embedded market with their own CPUs as well.
The notion of an "intrinsically safe" reactor is naive in the extreme.
No, it only seems that way to those who know nothing of nuclear physics. For a start, go look-up RTGs, as used in spacecraft... not nuclear reactors per-se, but extremely safe, and if they weren't being shot into space, would be completely foolproof.
No, the problem with distributed nuclear power is the lethality of the interior, and the potential for access by criminals/terrorists.
Nuclear material doesn't have to be lethal in the slightest. And the nuclear material used in current reactors isn't weapons grade anyhow, so terrorists won't get any use out of it, and as such, it isn't significantly more valuable than conventional items that can be more easily stolen.
Not only that, but if the user is doing something "wrong", why did the software ALLOW that to happen?
Software can't be entirely fault tolerant, unless you're going to have development slow to a snail's pace, and make it perform terribly and be very, very inflexible.
"Doing something wrong" usually amounts to changing some advanced setting that may be useful in some specific cases, but may cause problems in others. Or it may be the user (or the distribution) setting insane C/CPP/CXX flags before compilations, or applying unofficial patches, which the program can't possibly prevent. Often times, the problems fall to linked libraries that the user simply decided to remove. How could a program conceivably check all possible contingencies? Obviously, we could do everything the proprietary way, and make every program a few monolitic binaries that nobody can change, and keeping configuration to a minimum, but being error-proof isn't an end, or even a means to one.
I remember the excitement when people first started using the trimmed down Firefox versions. Lean, mean, secure, and eventually the amazing array of extensions people have grown to no longer be able to do without.
I remember the widespread public excitement, too. In fact, I was absolutely dumbfounded by it, running benchmark after benchmark, only to find that Phoenix (0.7 IIRC) was only just trivially smaller and faster than the standard (full) Mozilla suite.
These days, I use Firefox rather than Seamonkey for one reason... Per-user extensions. Other than that, it makes no difference to me. In fact, Seamonkey might be a step-up, as they don't COMPLETELY reorganize the Preferences dialog in each release, as well as not hiding several options I frequently use, and having to frequently use the horendous about:config in Firefox.
When users complain about bugs, they are met with [...] demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug,
Yes, to get a bug fixed, the developers have to be able to reproduce it. With open source software, the user is expected to do a few things to help. This is diametrically opposed to proprietary software where, as you've pointed out, it's much simpler...
With a company producing proprietary software, you (the user) report the problem, the company sends you a form letter explaining that their software is flawless but thanking you for wasting their time anyways, and proceeding to ignore your report. If it happens to gets fixed in the next revision, it's entirely a coincidence.
and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong.
Yes, well, when dealing with the public on a regular basis, you will find that 90%+ of the time, the user is, in fact, doing something wrong, and assuming otherwise will waste absolutely all of your time.
Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail.
Not really. It might be closer to a windmill than a sail... The idea of using the wind for power might be millions of years old, but new ways that do it several orders of magnitude more efficiently, and in significantly different ways, aren't the same tech by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a lot closer to a kite or a parachute. The ONLY similarity is has with a sail is that it happens to be powering a boat in this case. Far more differences than similarities, and I don't hear anyone complaining that sailing ships were just rip-offs of kites...
Eliminating the huge weight, manpower, and most of the wear that was inherent with sails makes this a vastly different product that could well have been a revolution in naval technology (exploration, trade, warfare, etc.) if it was around in the 16th century.
With wind turbines and electric cars you have a point that they aren't really new inventions, but they certainly have been VASTLY refined. In other words, a rocket that can fly to the moon and back isn't an over-sized bit of fireworks, but it's easy to oversimplify anything until it sounds trivial... Hey, a 3GHz dual-core computer is just a bunch of electric switches, and they had those in the 1800s.
This 'kite', however, is decidedly new, by any reasonable metric, and I look forward to seeing if it's actually practical for commercial use on a large scale.
There is one single immutable fact of US politics. NOBODY EVER WANTS SMALLER GOVERNMENT.
You can go all the way back to the first few presidents when the idea that presidential power had expanded too much and the government was too big was brought out for the first time, by some of the very founding fathers of the country like Thomas Jefferson. No doubt he believed it too, right up until he was elected, and it became HIS government, and he decided to expand the government, and expand Presidential power. In fact it has expanded at a pretty constant rate through the years, no matter who is in office.
And when Republicans say it, they don't believe it for a second... Small Government is just a euphemism for deregulation, and senselessly cutting taxes and driving the country into massive debt (no, it's not just Bush, that's what they've all done, for the past 3 decades, he just happened to be better at it, having a rubber-stamp Congress). It's the same way that "state's rights" was just a euphemism for segregation, and NEVER meant to apply to any other rights, especially anything the party's base might disagree with.
Democrats want immunity for big business.
The Democrats went completely haywire when they lost the senate to Republicans. Now the entire Democrat strategy is to out-republican the Republicans. In 2004 we had Kerry trying to explain why he's just not quite exactly like George Bush, even though he voted in support of everything Bush wanted, and would continue the exact same policies, but of course he would do it in a different way. Then we have all the senators like Clinton voting for absolutely everything Bush wants, lest they be seen as not quite overzealous enough in mindlessly voting for anything that might eventually result in the death of an arab who may have made sandwiches for a terrorist organization. Even though they campaigned on being in opposition to Bush, and won an overwhelming victory, they're still fearful that he'll suddenly become vastly popular again, up from his 15%, days before they're up for reelection, and suddenly every NO vote will be used against them...
Democrats have their own code as well. When they talk about women's rights, it tends to mean the right to chose to have an abortion or not, with no input from the other half of the pair that was involved, even though they can then demand child support and (p)alimony, even if they chose artificial insemination. When democrats talk about minorities or equal rights, they simply mean MORE rights and government subsidies/programs for women and non-whites, even in cases where the minorities may have already been treated as or more fairly than the (small) majority.
you would be hard pressed to argue that the UN has had a very productive impact in most of the activities they have undertaken.
Actually, you'd be hard pressed to argue the opposite.
Just going down the list of major US wars since the formation of the UN:
Korea - UN backed Vietnam - Not UN backed Desert Storm - UN backed Kosovo - UN backed Afganistan - NATO backed Iraqi Freedom - Not UN backed
The message seems pretty clearly that the UN has quite a positive impact, even where the US is providing the vast majority of force and resources.
And as for the rest of the world, since the formation of the UN there haven't been any more world wars, Western Europe has been unbelievably stable, etc. The UN does innumerable other things as well. Now, you could easily argue that the UN isn't mostly responsible for that, but they most certainly partially are.
Last time I checked a woman's right to choose was protected by a Supreme Court decision, not the Constitution.
The Supreme court can't overturn federal laws unless they find it is directly in violation of the intended meaning of the constitution, so it has to be in there somewhere, and it'll take an amendment to change it.
and our schools are failing anyway. Plus, our students did better comparatively against other nations before the US Dept of Education was instituted.
K-12 schools may not be doing as well as they once were, but that's most definitely not the fault of the federal government in any way. And just because the few private schools can find ways to cut corners and get good numbers doesn't mean they would actually be a better, or even as good of a replacement when forced to include the rest of the population who couldn't normally afford it, and might not be as interested in being educated. There is a lot of self-selection there.
And K-12 isn't all there is to public education. Few people complain about the education offered by publicly supported Universities, yet they would necessarily be cut as well.
Or do you really think it was the Constitution that resolved Bush v. Gore in 2004? No, it was the Supreme Court, under the convenient fiction of "interpreting the Constitution".
Interpreting the constitution is only one of the powers of the SCOTUS. They are first a foremost a federal court of law, interpreting and upholding US laws, so long as the don't contradict the constitution. Lower courts really do exactly the same thing, they just simply don't have final say in the matter, so it's always debatable until the SCOTUS rules.
I would "correct" what the teacher said [...] I should have gotten my ass beat for this.
The difference between a very good and a very bad teacher is that the good ones will encourage you to correct them, while the bad ones will discourage corrections.
In High School, I was kicked out of a class for simply changing a screen saver. I was technically breaking the rules, in that everyone was supposed to do EXACTLY what the teacher said, and NOTHING ELSE but sit and drool. Ironically, at the same time, I was completely maintaining the lab in my another computer class, so the teacher didn't have to bother with it. Would you care to guess which was the brainless, incompetent technophobe, and which was the skilled and highly knowledgeable pro? I'm just thankful the 90% idiot vs 10% intelligent teacher ratio was completely reversed, when I went from High School to College.
Intelligent people may not be strong, but they aren't so sickly as to require constant care or they'll die.
Some have been. And more to the point, it's not binary, it's a continuous scale. What's the arbitrary cut-off where you let someone die, where you're sure they couldn't have contributed anything to society?
Stephen Hawking wasn't born with a genetic disease, he back ill late in life, after he started showing how intelligent he was.
Completely and totally irrelevant. The technology to keep him alive, somewhat independent, and communicating with the outside world wouldn't exist in the world you describe, as there would be no motivation to create it.
Fine, the let's stop helping MS kids and severely retarded people and see what happens to them. If they are fit as you claim, they'll live in our environment without unusual help.
I have no idea what you're talking about. It certainly doesn't relate to anything I've said in any way.
When we interfere and artificially keep people alive and allow them to reproduce then we artificially introduce weaker genes to the human gene pool.
"Weaker" is highly subjective. Allowing everyone who is not PERFECTLY physically fit to die off will result in something like large-scale in-breeding, and genetic homogeneity. That tends to lead to a genetically feeble population, which dies out with the first environmental or biological challenge.
Honestly, what is the benefit to our species as a whole to continue to create genetically wrong humans, that can't survive without depending on society the rest of their life?
I have noticed, throughout history, the most intelligent individuals are very often physically unfit, to varying extremes. Possibly the best contemporary example is Stephen Hawking.
Do you believe Stephen Hawking is a leech on society, or do you believe he has contributed significantly to society's collective knowledge? Without the technology and the empathic desire to keep the "unfittest" (sic) alive, he wouldn't have had the chance to contribute a fraction as much.
Natural selection works on immediacy, and intelligence on on a small scale... If your intelligence is such that it only applies to devices you can't build yourself in your youth, that form of intelligence will not be encouraged by natural selection... often quite the opposite, really.
I wonder if Scramjets would increase or decrease condensation trails, which are known to have a dimming and cooling effect on everything below them. Decreasing would mean more sunlight hitting the ground, but also more heat, which would only heat up the Earth at ground level that much more. If it increases, it means more cooling, but also more dimming.
Studies on contrails have gotten much more sophisticated.
It has been determined that, although commercial flights after dark only make up about 25% of all commercial flights, the warming effects of those few nighttime contrails more than exceed the cooling effects of the daytime contrails.
No. That's my point. The statements WITHOUT the modifiers ARE NOT factually accurate. That is the entire point I was making and I'm surprised you could have missed it.
I didn't miss it. You're just, simply, wrong.
The statements WITHOUT the modifiers ARE NOT factually accurate
Complete bullshit. POINT OUT ONE, and PROVE IT. Your personal assertions are worthless.
Edit #1 Removes necessary modifiers to make links between al Qaeda appear to be a fact, when they were actually just "alleged". It also removes a citation critical of such a statement, and adds a rather baseless and un-cited criticism of the press.
Edit #2 Denies facts: "Curveball" recanted his statements, and as such his previous claims were in fact literally misinformation.
Edit #3 Denies fact: "Mohamed Mansour Shahab" is factually, provably, not credible. The following sentences with references prove it quite well.
Edit #4 Denies fact: See the BBC article linked. It clearly says "There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network" For the added modifier to be accurate, there have to be reliable contemporary sources that reasonably claim the opposite... none is cited, and I seriously doubt any exist.
Edit #5 Is pure spin: The Bush Administration clearly did suggest and imply there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and had related it to lowly reporters (off the record) even if they didn't publicly state it as fact, or "officially" use it as a justification for the war.
But to call the edits partisan or manipulative just because they gave the benefit of the doubt to Bush is going too far.
They don't just give the benefit of the doubt to Bush, they are clearly designed to undermine the facts.
See the edit about Ahmed Chalabi/Curveball. Even though he has indisputably "recanted his story" the edit makes that paragraph say "It is claimed that some of the recent evidence [...] turns out to have been misinformation" when it is clearly, provably, true.
See the edit about Mohamed Mansour Shahab. The edit changes the statement to "Some claim his story is not considered credible", even though it was (and is) followed by a quote clearly proving the man is either lying or simply insane.
I suppose the same guy should go through the scientific articles on Wikipedia, and make sure it says "It is claimed" before every single fact, so that they also give the benefit of the doubt to those who don't believe proven facts. For example, "It is claimed the earth isn't flat."
In fact, every single edit I see on that page, save for perhaps the one in the first paragraph which is a little over the top, makes the article more factually accurate, if that's what we're interested in.
Sounds like you're showing your own bias.
That editor repeatedly adds modifiers onto factually accurate statements, to make them seem debatable.
See: "Some of the evidence for a connection between the two turns out to have been misinformation coming from [...] Curveball" is changed into "It is claimed that..."
See: "His story is not considered credible" followed by a damming quote that firmly supports the assertion, changed into "Some claim..."
Repeat, ad nauseum. In every single edit, factual assertions that undermine the rationale for the Iraq war are issued modifiers that make them seem uncertain.
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Why haven't you bought a Zap Xebra yet?
Diesel cars in the US were practically banned for several years, as they have to meet the emission regulations as gasoline fueled cars (trucks don't), but emissions controls generally won't work with the sulfur in US diesel fuel. Only in the past year has this changed.
In addition, hybrids only give a big improvement in fuel consumption because they are strategically used in scenarios where gasoline engines are horribly inefficient. Diesel engines don't have those same problems to a tiny fraction of the same degree, so you add weight, complexity, and expense of a hybrid for a fraction as much of an improvement... Hybrids are just BARELY economic tacked onto gasoline cars, and wouldn't come close to breaking even on diesels.
Converting mechanical motion into electricity, back to motion, is terribly inefficient, and would waste fuel, not save it.
Hybrids do have more-efficient engine designs than the Otto cycle.
Exceeding 85% Ethanol changes the characteristics of the fuel too much, so the engine must be redesigned to burn it. Who cares, really? We can't get enough of a supply of ethanol to give everyone in the world a 5% mixture, let alone 85%+. Everyone would be ecstatic if global oil demand was reduced by 80% overnight, and oil prices would positively plummet.
Because hundreds of millions of people paying 10% more for their vehicle, just so a fraction of 1% of their customers can use up the limited supply of cheap vegetable oil, is economically INSANE.
None of the things you listed would solve any problems. Supplying enough ethanol or biodiesel is the problem, NOT using it... any vehicle can run on 20% mixtures of ethanol and biodiesel. Until everyone in the world can be supplied with that, no vehicle changes are needed. And your plan for hybrids won't help, and merely shows you have no idea of the actual problems.
Yes, destroying tropical rain forests to get clear land to grow vegetable oil crops is very inexpensive.
Ravaging the topsoil that has been build up over centuries of sustainable farming certainly will allow the production of lots of fuel... for about decade or so.
Huge amounts of money have been spent trying to get algae farms to work, and nobody has ever come close to making it even stay alive, let alone becoming economically competitive.
And what magical crops do you have in mind that will grow better in the desert sand than fertilized soil, and don't need any water?
Low efficiency solar cells will dramatically increase global warming. Instead of 90% of the sun's rays being reflected back off into space by nice light sand or white roofing materials, 90% will be absorbed by photovoltaic panels, and turned into heat either immediate (solar cells are inefficient) or after being used in the form of electricity.
Rumor has it President GW Bush has already looked into altering time. Though his solution was based not on corn but coca leaves.
You were wrong. x86 isn't particularly impressive, but it's just a CPU, not a war crime.
It's pretty much inevitable that x86 will move into new areas, as embedded systems need more and more processing power for multimedia, x86 vendors spend more and more of money reducing power consumption, and the economies of software development more and more favor reusing x86 software, rather than spending time on optimizations for the other architectures you use.
Since Intel can't seem to make money on any architecture other than x86, they've eliminated their StrongArm/XScale line, and are replacing it with ultra-low-powered (sub-1watt) x86-based CPUs. VIA has long be trying to make inroads in the high-power, higher-performance embedded market with their own CPUs as well.
No, it only seems that way to those who know nothing of nuclear physics. For a start, go look-up RTGs, as used in spacecraft... not nuclear reactors per-se, but extremely safe, and if they weren't being shot into space, would be completely foolproof.
Nuclear material doesn't have to be lethal in the slightest. And the nuclear material used in current reactors isn't weapons grade anyhow, so terrorists won't get any use out of it, and as such, it isn't significantly more valuable than conventional items that can be more easily stolen.
Software can't be entirely fault tolerant, unless you're going to have development slow to a snail's pace, and make it perform terribly and be very, very inflexible.
"Doing something wrong" usually amounts to changing some advanced setting that may be useful in some specific cases, but may cause problems in others. Or it may be the user (or the distribution) setting insane C/CPP/CXX flags before compilations, or applying unofficial patches, which the program can't possibly prevent. Often times, the problems fall to linked libraries that the user simply decided to remove. How could a program conceivably check all possible contingencies? Obviously, we could do everything the proprietary way, and make every program a few monolitic binaries that nobody can change, and keeping configuration to a minimum, but being error-proof isn't an end, or even a means to one.
I remember the widespread public excitement, too. In fact, I was absolutely dumbfounded by it, running benchmark after benchmark, only to find that Phoenix (0.7 IIRC) was only just trivially smaller and faster than the standard (full) Mozilla suite.
These days, I use Firefox rather than Seamonkey for one reason... Per-user extensions. Other than that, it makes no difference to me. In fact, Seamonkey might be a step-up, as they don't COMPLETELY reorganize the Preferences dialog in each release, as well as not hiding several options I frequently use, and having to frequently use the horendous about:config in Firefox.
Yes, to get a bug fixed, the developers have to be able to reproduce it. With open source software, the user is expected to do a few things to help. This is diametrically opposed to proprietary software where, as you've pointed out, it's much simpler...
With a company producing proprietary software, you (the user) report the problem, the company sends you a form letter explaining that their software is flawless but thanking you for wasting their time anyways, and proceeding to ignore your report. If it happens to gets fixed in the next revision, it's entirely a coincidence.
Yes, well, when dealing with the public on a regular basis, you will find that 90%+ of the time, the user is, in fact, doing something wrong, and assuming otherwise will waste absolutely all of your time.
Notepad in Windows XP forces you to chose between 3 different text formats (with useless names), and there really are many, many more.
Not really. It might be closer to a windmill than a sail... The idea of using the wind for power might be millions of years old, but new ways that do it several orders of magnitude more efficiently, and in significantly different ways, aren't the same tech by any stretch of the imagination.
This is a lot closer to a kite or a parachute. The ONLY similarity is has with a sail is that it happens to be powering a boat in this case. Far more differences than similarities, and I don't hear anyone complaining that sailing ships were just rip-offs of kites...
Eliminating the huge weight, manpower, and most of the wear that was inherent with sails makes this a vastly different product that could well have been a revolution in naval technology (exploration, trade, warfare, etc.) if it was around in the 16th century.
With wind turbines and electric cars you have a point that they aren't really new inventions, but they certainly have been VASTLY refined. In other words, a rocket that can fly to the moon and back isn't an over-sized bit of fireworks, but it's easy to oversimplify anything until it sounds trivial... Hey, a 3GHz dual-core computer is just a bunch of electric switches, and they had those in the 1800s.
This 'kite', however, is decidedly new, by any reasonable metric, and I look forward to seeing if it's actually practical for commercial use on a large scale.
There is one single immutable fact of US politics. NOBODY EVER WANTS SMALLER GOVERNMENT.
You can go all the way back to the first few presidents when the idea that presidential power had expanded too much and the government was too big was brought out for the first time, by some of the very founding fathers of the country like Thomas Jefferson. No doubt he believed it too, right up until he was elected, and it became HIS government, and he decided to expand the government, and expand Presidential power. In fact it has expanded at a pretty constant rate through the years, no matter who is in office.
And when Republicans say it, they don't believe it for a second... Small Government is just a euphemism for deregulation, and senselessly cutting taxes and driving the country into massive debt (no, it's not just Bush, that's what they've all done, for the past 3 decades, he just happened to be better at it, having a rubber-stamp Congress). It's the same way that "state's rights" was just a euphemism for segregation, and NEVER meant to apply to any other rights, especially anything the party's base might disagree with.
The Democrats went completely haywire when they lost the senate to Republicans. Now the entire Democrat strategy is to out-republican the Republicans. In 2004 we had Kerry trying to explain why he's just not quite exactly like George Bush, even though he voted in support of everything Bush wanted, and would continue the exact same policies, but of course he would do it in a different way. Then we have all the senators like Clinton voting for absolutely everything Bush wants, lest they be seen as not quite overzealous enough in mindlessly voting for anything that might eventually result in the death of an arab who may have made sandwiches for a terrorist organization. Even though they campaigned on being in opposition to Bush, and won an overwhelming victory, they're still fearful that he'll suddenly become vastly popular again, up from his 15%, days before they're up for reelection, and suddenly every NO vote will be used against them...
Democrats have their own code as well. When they talk about women's rights, it tends to mean the right to chose to have an abortion or not, with no input from the other half of the pair that was involved, even though they can then demand child support and (p)alimony, even if they chose artificial insemination. When democrats talk about minorities or equal rights, they simply mean MORE rights and government subsidies/programs for women and non-whites, even in cases where the minorities may have already been treated as or more fairly than the (small) majority.
Actually, you'd be hard pressed to argue the opposite.
Just going down the list of major US wars since the formation of the UN:
Korea - UN backed
Vietnam - Not UN backed
Desert Storm - UN backed
Kosovo - UN backed
Afganistan - NATO backed
Iraqi Freedom - Not UN backed
The message seems pretty clearly that the UN has quite a positive impact, even where the US is providing the vast majority of force and resources.
And as for the rest of the world, since the formation of the UN there haven't been any more world wars, Western Europe has been unbelievably stable, etc. The UN does innumerable other things as well. Now, you could easily argue that the UN isn't mostly responsible for that, but they most certainly partially are.
The Supreme court can't overturn federal laws unless they find it is directly in violation of the intended meaning of the constitution, so it has to be in there somewhere, and it'll take an amendment to change it.
K-12 schools may not be doing as well as they once were, but that's most definitely not the fault of the federal government in any way. And just because the few private schools can find ways to cut corners and get good numbers doesn't mean they would actually be a better, or even as good of a replacement when forced to include the rest of the population who couldn't normally afford it, and might not be as interested in being educated. There is a lot of self-selection there.
And K-12 isn't all there is to public education. Few people complain about the education offered by publicly supported Universities, yet they would necessarily be cut as well.
Interpreting the constitution is only one of the powers of the SCOTUS. They are first a foremost a federal court of law, interpreting and upholding US laws, so long as the don't contradict the constitution. Lower courts really do exactly the same thing, they just simply don't have final say in the matter, so it's always debatable until the SCOTUS rules.
The difference between a very good and a very bad teacher is that the good ones will encourage you to correct them, while the bad ones will discourage corrections.
In High School, I was kicked out of a class for simply changing a screen saver. I was technically breaking the rules, in that everyone was supposed to do EXACTLY what the teacher said, and NOTHING ELSE but sit and drool. Ironically, at the same time, I was completely maintaining the lab in my another computer class, so the teacher didn't have to bother with it. Would you care to guess which was the brainless, incompetent technophobe, and which was the skilled and highly knowledgeable pro? I'm just thankful the 90% idiot vs 10% intelligent teacher ratio was completely reversed, when I went from High School to College.
Considering the current economy of Michigan and the cost of Energy, a reasonably large lump of coal might be worth more than serving the state.
Traffic encryption... Huge address space... et al.
You've vastly underestimated bureaucratic inertia.
I've said nothing of the sort. I suggest you go read my original post again.
Some have been. And more to the point, it's not binary, it's a continuous scale. What's the arbitrary cut-off where you let someone die, where you're sure they couldn't have contributed anything to society?
Completely and totally irrelevant. The technology to keep him alive, somewhat independent, and communicating with the outside world wouldn't exist in the world you describe, as there would be no motivation to create it.
I have no idea what you're talking about. It certainly doesn't relate to anything I've said in any way.
"Weaker" is highly subjective. Allowing everyone who is not PERFECTLY physically fit to die off will result in something like large-scale in-breeding, and genetic homogeneity. That tends to lead to a genetically feeble population, which dies out with the first environmental or biological challenge.
I have noticed, throughout history, the most intelligent individuals are very often physically unfit, to varying extremes. Possibly the best contemporary example is Stephen Hawking.
Do you believe Stephen Hawking is a leech on society, or do you believe he has contributed significantly to society's collective knowledge? Without the technology and the empathic desire to keep the "unfittest" (sic) alive, he wouldn't have had the chance to contribute a fraction as much.
Natural selection works on immediacy, and intelligence on on a small scale... If your intelligence is such that it only applies to devices you can't build yourself in your youth, that form of intelligence will not be encouraged by natural selection... often quite the opposite, really.
Studies on contrails have gotten much more sophisticated.
It has been determined that, although commercial flights after dark only make up about 25% of all commercial flights, the warming effects of those few nighttime contrails more than exceed the cooling effects of the daytime contrails.
You don't build an airplane's skin from asbestos if your major concerns are fuel consumption and/or strength...
I didn't miss it. You're just, simply, wrong.
Complete bullshit. POINT OUT ONE, and PROVE IT. Your personal assertions are worthless.
Edit #1 Removes necessary modifiers to make links between al Qaeda appear to be a fact, when they were actually just "alleged". It also removes a citation critical of such a statement, and adds a rather baseless and un-cited criticism of the press.
Edit #2 Denies facts: "Curveball" recanted his statements, and as such his previous claims were in fact literally misinformation.
Edit #3 Denies fact: "Mohamed Mansour Shahab" is factually, provably, not credible. The following sentences with references prove it quite well.
Edit #4 Denies fact: See the BBC article linked. It clearly says "There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network" For the added modifier to be accurate, there have to be reliable contemporary sources that reasonably claim the opposite... none is cited, and I seriously doubt any exist.
Edit #5 Is pure spin: The Bush Administration clearly did suggest and imply there was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, and had related it to lowly reporters (off the record) even if they didn't publicly state it as fact, or "officially" use it as a justification for the war.
They don't just give the benefit of the doubt to Bush, they are clearly designed to undermine the facts.
See the edit about Ahmed Chalabi/Curveball. Even though he has indisputably "recanted his story" the edit makes that paragraph say "It is claimed that some of the recent evidence [...] turns out to have been misinformation" when it is clearly, provably, true.
See the edit about Mohamed Mansour Shahab. The edit changes the statement to "Some claim his story is not considered credible", even though it was (and is) followed by a quote clearly proving the man is either lying or simply insane.
I suppose the same guy should go through the scientific articles on Wikipedia, and make sure it says "It is claimed" before every single fact, so that they also give the benefit of the doubt to those who don't believe proven facts. For example, "It is claimed the earth isn't flat."
Sounds like you're showing your own bias.
That editor repeatedly adds modifiers onto factually accurate statements, to make them seem debatable.
See: "Some of the evidence for a connection between the two turns out to have been misinformation coming from [...] Curveball" is changed into "It is claimed that..."
See: "His story is not considered credible" followed by a damming quote that firmly supports the assertion, changed into "Some claim..."
Repeat, ad nauseum. In every single edit, factual assertions that undermine the rationale for the Iraq war are issued modifiers that make them seem uncertain.