Yields are per-warhead, so when I speak of the Peacekeeper missiles with ten W87 warheads, each warhead is a 300kT yield, for a total yield of 3MT. This would likely be split over several targets, though.
Concerning the actual warhead designs, even the smallest available are fission-fusion designs (possibly fission-fusion-fission). These allow smaller amounts of uranium or plutonium to be used, decreasing the weight of the warheads, though possibly adding complexity (it's a lot harder to get critical mass with smaller masses).
China's warheads tend to be larger, and I can think of a couple of reasons for this. One would be limited testing; as a signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, China has a certain duty to abide by its terms even though it has not formally ratified it. Doing so gives them some leverage in international affairs, while ignoring it on the technicality of it not being ratified would cause them to lose face and thus status internationally. This is a very undesirable outcome when one is trying to clamber up as a world power.
The other would be the limited availability of ICBM/SLBM testing. China's space program is much more limited than those of the US and the USSR at the same point in the development of their respective nuclear programs, and as such Beijing may be hesitant to use production bodies in testing when it feels that it can do so effectively enough using simulations. It's a risk analysis -- they want as many missiles available as possible as a deterrent, and are willing to use larger warheads for now to compensate for lack of certainty over accuracy.
And no one has ever actually built this. I was talking about a hypothetical scenario using actual weapons, while you're talking about a hypothetical scenario using a fantasy weapon. Russia thought about something similar as a doomsday device, but it never entered even serious design because no one thought that it would be feasible.
And if it's so easy to get down a few thousand kilometers to the radioactive materials at the core, why have we not gone partway just to get the geothermal energy?
They also vastly overestimate the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. They envisage a terrorist with a 20kT yield weapon vaporizing things out to a radius of ten miles, when the third-degree burn radius for an airburst of such a device is a mere 2.3km, and significantly less than that for a ground burst. Yes, death tolls would be enormous, but it would be difficult to get that toll up into the millions, as many fear.
Secondary effects are not factored in, no. But recent news has shown us that Chernobyl's effects are two to three orders of magnitude lower than the experts had expected (56 deaths attributable to radiation, rather than the tens of thousands expected, with no statistically significant change in cancer rates other than thyroid for the affected region). The effects of a nuclear winter are also in debate; while the TTAPS study in 1983 suggested some very dire effects, more recent work has suggested that it may have overestimated some of the effects.
We can cover 1.4% of the world's land mass with direct nuclear effects, but urban populations cover about 3%. There are 24,000 cities with populations of 5000 or more. The death toll would be staggering if such a war happened, but it would not mean the end of even human life.
Bombs of that yield are heavy and impractical. They were built that big because guidance systems lacked the necessary accuracy to ensure that the target was hit. Modern US, Russian, French, and British systems have accuracies of 90m or less, allowing smaller warheads with smaller yields.
China has about two dozen single-warhead missiles that can reach the US. That's hardly obliteration, though they're the old, heavy kind that are 2MT or more yield.
I did some research on this a while back. The original context was where someone asserted that a mutual exchange could destroy everything on the planet. The numbers for warheads are about two years out of date, so stats for certain weapons like the Peacekeepers are outdated (there are fewer deployed, possibly none by this point).
Along the lines of killing off all life on earth, no, we don't have that many. Virtually the entire planet is covered in life, and it's dealth with far greater catastrophes than we've been able to come up with.
From a strategic perspective, let's look at the numbers.
The US Navy has 16 Ohio-class subs available right now (two of those are scheduled for retrofitting to carry Tomahawks and two others are already undergoing or prepping to undergo this conversion). Twelve of those carry the Polaris D5 missile, and the remaining four carry the Polaris C4 missile. The D5 is capable of handling up to eight warheads, while the C4 can handle six. Of the 2880 warheads thus deployable (assuming all Ohios sailed at the same time), 2496 are W76 warheads with yields of 100kT, while the remaining 384 are W88 warheads with yields of 475kT.
The Navy also has 320 nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles in its inventory, though none are deployed. Each of these carries a W80-0 warhead (150kT yield).
The Air Force's ICBM inventory includes 150 Minuteman III with single W62 warheads (170kT yield), 50 with three W62 warheads, and 300 with three W78 warheads (335kT yield). There are fewer than 40 Peacekeeper MX missiles, each with 10 W87 warheads (300kT yield).
The Air Force's inventory also includes 430 ALCM (Air-Launched Cruise Missile) and 430 ACM (Advanced Cruise Missile), each capable of carrying a single W80-1 warhead (150kT yield). There are also 800 B61 (variable yield, from 0.3kT to 170kT) and 650 B83 gravity bombs (variable yield, from 30kT to 1200kT). There are other weapons scattered about for various reasons, mostly semi-deployed, but scheduled for collection and dismantling, so we'll leave those out of our calculations.
So, we have the following warheads/weapons, their counts/maximum yields/radius for near-certain death/radius for widespread destruction of buildings/radius of third-degree burns/area of widespread damage:
B61 series -- 800/170kT/1500m/4000m/5600m/98.5 sq km
B83 -- 650/1200kT/2900m/7700m/12,600m/498 sq km
W62 -- 300/170kT/1500m/4000m/5600m/98.5 sq km
W76 -- 2496/100kT/1300m/3400m/4500m/63.6 sq km
W78 -- 900/335kT/1900m/5000m/7400m/172 sq km
W80-0 -- 320/150kT/1500m/3900m/5400m/91.6 sq km
W80-1 -- 860/150kT/1500m/3900m/5400m/91.6 sq km
W87 -- 400/300kT/1800m/4900m/7100m/158 sq km
W88 -- 384/475kT/2100m/5600m/8600m/232 sq km
For conversion purposes, 1000m = 0.6214 miles, and 1 sq. km. = 0.3861 sq. mi.
So we get a total area of near-certain death, assuming optimal air burst altitude and flat terrain conditions, of 1,006,854 square kilometers. The Russian arsenal is probably about the same, so we can call it, for sake of convenience, 2 million square kilometers. The world's land surface area is about 149 million square kilometers, and the total area is 510 million square kilometers. Thus, we have the capability to have 1.4% of the world's land mass fall into the 'wide-spread third-degree burns' category, but only 0.39% of the total world's area including oceans. We could have some effect, but it would not kill everything.
Throw it into the US and Russia, and the percentages jump to significant levels -- about 5.8% of Russia, and about 11% of the US. It doesn't factor in fallout, either, but as the numbers were intended to reflect airbursts, that wouldn't be as much of a probl
this is a bit wrong, because water never turns into gas, water can be heated up in air to turn into steam, but it never turns into a *gas*. so it can't be a greenhouse gas.
You're really not helping yourself. When water boils, it goes from a liquid form to a gaseous form. Steam is just vaporized water. But just in case you don't believe me, you're welcome to checkthesesources for validation.
ofcourse it's responsible for the heating effect in the sunlight, we wouldn't be chatting here in slashdot if we had no air with water around us, we'd freeze to death. If it's a gas that captures and holds the heat from the sun, warming the ambient temperature above that which it would be without an atmosphere, then it's acting like a greenhouse, and such is a greenhouse gas.
but if you define water as a responsible material for heating up earth in the sun, you should add oxygen and nitrogen too and every other thing that you see.
I'm sure they contribute to some extent, but not nearly to that which water, methane, and carbon dioxide do.
but you should try to look over the border of your "great" country and see that other people use cars that need 6 litres of gas for 100km
Not sure where you are, but that's 39 miles per gallon, and while it is higher than the average car mileage, we have plenty of vehicles that get that kind of mileage and higher. One of my cars (the one I use for leisure) gets about half of that, and the one (the one I drive to work and which is now about 12 years old) gets 75% of that. Not too terrible.
a local heat station running 9 months a year produces far more co2 than cars over here for example Judging by your e-mail address, you live in Estonia, which has a much colder climate than the average US resident has to protect against, so it's not surprising that you put more into heating than you do into transportation. That does not negate my position that a significant fraction of emitted CO2 is released by vehicles. It may not be that way for you, or for Lithuania, or Finland, but it is that way for many other nations.
power stations may be more effective, but the still shoot out massive amounts of co2, even the electricity that is used to make me type here is produced by burning the old goold coal.
Yes, they do, which is why I am far more comfortable with nuclear power. In fact, some of the electricity I'm using comes from a nuclear power plant, which means that there is zero CO2 being released. During the day, some of the power comes from a solar plant, and perhaps some from wind. Most of the rest for me comes from methane-fired power plants, which are even more efficient than coal.
You question rben's education, and then post that?
First of all, water is the major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Equilibrium is kept in the atmosphere by precipitation of the vapor into rain, snow, etc. Water added through evaporation or fuel burning goes through the same cycle.
Second, in terms of energy efficiency, the power stations are FAR more efficient than automobiles. If we're able to tap the energy from those stations for use in vehicles through electric cars, hydrogen cells, or some other method, it will be better than the localized burning of fuels in cars and trucks.
You might also want to check into your CO2 sources; according to the DoE, about 56% of the CO2 generated by the US comes from coal and natural gas, and last time I checked, there weren't too many people lining up their cars for lumps of carbon. Petroleum counts for almost all of the rest, and most of that is used in transportation.
Thirdly, you clearly are years out of date on population growth. While energy growth is continuing to grow, population growth is slowing, and significantly so. Ten years ago, a population of twelve billion was predicted for 2050, with little end in sight. Now the world population is expected to peak at about nine billion between 2050 and 2070, and then to start falling. In 1990, the total fertility rate of the world was 3.4 children per woman; today it's about 2.6, and in 2025 it's predicted to decline to 2.3. Measure that against a replacement rate of about 2.1. Japan and several European nations are already facing potential crises over their population rates, which have reached replacement rate or lower, and are continuing to drop.
You should check your own facts before you go criticizing others.
Considering how often I get 503 errors, it may not make much difference. At least with a redesign, outages will be attributable to them visibly working on one of Slashdot's biggest flaws.
The tar sands are more expensive than conventional oil deposits, but they're still economically viable at $40 per barrel, and possibly at lower prices now as well.
Grah. Typing too fast and not checking. I was actually looking at a list of appointments, complete with who appointed them, and Reagan's name was clearly listed three times. Point still stands, though -- it's not uncommon for a president to have at least one appointment per term served.
I'm not sure that Roberts will be up for Chief Justice, though. I don't know that even a Republican Senate would be so interested in that. Roberts does not have a long history as a sitting judge, and Republicans are still wary of having one of their 'conservative' appointments turn on them. If anyone is appointed as both a new member of the Court and also as its Chief Justice, I think that person would have to be someone with a fairly lengthy history to keep the conservatives happy that the trend will continue.
OTOH, there is some wisdom in elevating Scalia. He's well-respected and well-liked. He's experienced how Rehnquist kept things running smoothly, and may well emulate him. An outsider might throw much of that into confusion by bringing in his or her own ideas. (The 'her' reference makes me wonder about a female Chief Justice nomination -- that would be really hard for some people to turn down, even if she were conservative.)
Three nominations at one time, though, would be hard to handle. I would not be surprised to see O'Connor slightly delay her departure, allowing Roberts to fill Rehnquist's empty seat. Stevens automatically takes the role of Acting Chief Justice anyway, and then a new process to fill O'Connor's seat begins on a rapid basis, followed by elevating one of the then-sitting justices to the presiding role.
Then again, the president will probably announce replacement nominations for both open spots in short order, whether in one or two people, and just watch everyone bat about the possibilities. All the what-ifs flying around should be fun.
It's a pretty common number. Clinton got two, the elder Bush got two, Reagan got two. Even Ford got one. Nixon got three, and Johnson and Kennedy each got two. Ike got four.
Carter seems to have been the only president in the last century that hasn't appointed anyone to the Supreme Court.
Without official requests, there's no coordination on where to send them, and you end up exacerbating the chaos. You end up with situations like the Convention Center (and someone at FEMA and/or DHS needs to be fired over that -- watch the news once in a while, people -- open source information at its clearest) because no one is in charge.
How far away should they have been taken? Lets say 30 miles -- it's short. Chances are, a round-trip for that bus, factoring in traffic, loading and unloading times, refueling, and so forth, would have averaged two hours, so they could have moved 24,000 people in a day. If they had started at midnight on Friday morning and kept going until midnight Saturday (well after the airport had closed), they could have moved 48,000 people.
How many people stayed behind? I've heard estimates of up to 200,000, meaning 2000 buses would have been needed to move all of the people -- if that many could even be found and deployed.
People just are not grasping the logistical challenges here.
You mention that the project was approved in 1965. It was supposed to take ten years to complete, and it's still not done. That's a lot of people on both sides of the aisle over the years to smack around.
Still, it wouldn't have helped much. Katrina hit as a Cat4, and the approved design was only rated for a Cat3. Further, the USACE said yesterday that the project had actually already been completed in the areas of the two breaks.
Theft is one of the simplest crimes, satisfying a need without physical harm to someone else. The reason that looting is being suppressed is that as the social order degrades, instances where violations of societal norms are seen to occur without punishment become more acceptable. This furthers the breakdown of order, and the level of the crimes will increase as time goes by and nothing is done. Desperation and fear feed the chaos, and eventually it becomes impossible to control without drastic measures.
Enforcing order in a situation such as this is critical in saving lives, because it provides a sense of returning structure to the lives of the affected people. Without that, further restoration efforts, including returning electricity to the area, become impossible, and more people suffer because food and water remain unavailable and hospitals cannot function.
Presidents do not ever take vacations the way that you or I might take them. When we go on vacation, we can end up out of contact entirely by leaving our phones behind, not providing information on where we're going, or simply ignoring the outside world.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they get a briefing of the state of the nation and the world.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they are in contact with their advisors to keep the nation running.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they have to make decisions that affect, directly or indirectly, the lives of the people in this country.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they are within a few minutes of being able to contact virtually every single federal official, member of Congress, and senior judiciary.
Whether in Kennebunkport, Martha's Vineyard, California, Camp David, Crawford, or whatever other place a president chooses to spend some time away from the office, he is always, at every moment, the president, responsible to the American people, and in contact with the rest of the government. This president, Clinton, Bush Senior, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower at least were all subject to this. Truman may have been the last president with any capacity to "get away from it all" for a short time, if even he was able to do so.
Do you think EULAs should not be enforceable? If not, then the GPL becomes unenforceable. If the courts see EULAs as enforceable contracts, this strengthens the GPL (and similar licenses) significantly.
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I was not aware of that factoring. Do you know where I can find more details on this?
Yields are per-warhead, so when I speak of the Peacekeeper missiles with ten W87 warheads, each warhead is a 300kT yield, for a total yield of 3MT. This would likely be split over several targets, though.
Concerning the actual warhead designs, even the smallest available are fission-fusion designs (possibly fission-fusion-fission). These allow smaller amounts of uranium or plutonium to be used, decreasing the weight of the warheads, though possibly adding complexity (it's a lot harder to get critical mass with smaller masses).
China's warheads tend to be larger, and I can think of a couple of reasons for this. One would be limited testing; as a signatory to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, China has a certain duty to abide by its terms even though it has not formally ratified it. Doing so gives them some leverage in international affairs, while ignoring it on the technicality of it not being ratified would cause them to lose face and thus status internationally. This is a very undesirable outcome when one is trying to clamber up as a world power.
The other would be the limited availability of ICBM/SLBM testing. China's space program is much more limited than those of the US and the USSR at the same point in the development of their respective nuclear programs, and as such Beijing may be hesitant to use production bodies in testing when it feels that it can do so effectively enough using simulations. It's a risk analysis -- they want as many missiles available as possible as a deterrent, and are willing to use larger warheads for now to compensate for lack of certainty over accuracy.
And no one has ever actually built this. I was talking about a hypothetical scenario using actual weapons, while you're talking about a hypothetical scenario using a fantasy weapon. Russia thought about something similar as a doomsday device, but it never entered even serious design because no one thought that it would be feasible.
And if it's so easy to get down a few thousand kilometers to the radioactive materials at the core, why have we not gone partway just to get the geothermal energy?
They also vastly overestimate the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. They envisage a terrorist with a 20kT yield weapon vaporizing things out to a radius of ten miles, when the third-degree burn radius for an airburst of such a device is a mere 2.3km, and significantly less than that for a ground burst. Yes, death tolls would be enormous, but it would be difficult to get that toll up into the millions, as many fear.
Secondary effects are not factored in, no. But recent news has shown us that Chernobyl's effects are two to three orders of magnitude lower than the experts had expected (56 deaths attributable to radiation, rather than the tens of thousands expected, with no statistically significant change in cancer rates other than thyroid for the affected region). The effects of a nuclear winter are also in debate; while the TTAPS study in 1983 suggested some very dire effects, more recent work has suggested that it may have overestimated some of the effects.
We can cover 1.4% of the world's land mass with direct nuclear effects, but urban populations cover about 3%. There are 24,000 cities with populations of 5000 or more. The death toll would be staggering if such a war happened, but it would not mean the end of even human life.
Bombs of that yield are heavy and impractical. They were built that big because guidance systems lacked the necessary accuracy to ensure that the target was hit. Modern US, Russian, French, and British systems have accuracies of 90m or less, allowing smaller warheads with smaller yields.
China has about two dozen single-warhead missiles that can reach the US. That's hardly obliteration, though they're the old, heavy kind that are 2MT or more yield.
I did some research on this a while back. The original context was where someone asserted that a mutual exchange could destroy everything on the planet. The numbers for warheads are about two years out of date, so stats for certain weapons like the Peacekeepers are outdated (there are fewer deployed, possibly none by this point).
Throw it into the US and Russia, and the percentages jump to significant levels -- about 5.8% of Russia, and about 11% of the US. It doesn't factor in fallout, either, but as the numbers were intended to reflect airbursts, that wouldn't be as much of a probl
this is a bit wrong, because water never turns into gas, water can be heated up in air to turn into steam, but it never turns into a *gas*. so it can't be a greenhouse gas.
You're really not helping yourself. When water boils, it goes from a liquid form to a gaseous form. Steam is just vaporized water. But just in case you don't believe me, you're welcome to check these sources for validation.
ofcourse it's responsible for the heating effect in the sunlight, we wouldn't be chatting here in slashdot if we had no air with water around us, we'd freeze to death.
If it's a gas that captures and holds the heat from the sun, warming the ambient temperature above that which it would be without an atmosphere, then it's acting like a greenhouse, and such is a greenhouse gas.
but if you define water as a responsible material for heating up earth in the sun, you should add oxygen and nitrogen too and every other thing that you see.
I'm sure they contribute to some extent, but not nearly to that which water, methane, and carbon dioxide do.
but you should try to look over the border of your "great" country and see that other people use cars that need 6 litres of gas for 100km
Not sure where you are, but that's 39 miles per gallon, and while it is higher than the average car mileage, we have plenty of vehicles that get that kind of mileage and higher. One of my cars (the one I use for leisure) gets about half of that, and the one (the one I drive to work and which is now about 12 years old) gets 75% of that. Not too terrible.
a local heat station running 9 months a year produces far more co2 than cars over here for example
Judging by your e-mail address, you live in Estonia, which has a much colder climate than the average US resident has to protect against, so it's not surprising that you put more into heating than you do into transportation. That does not negate my position that a significant fraction of emitted CO2 is released by vehicles. It may not be that way for you, or for Lithuania, or Finland, but it is that way for many other nations.
power stations may be more effective, but the still shoot out massive amounts of co2, even the electricity that is used to make me type here is produced by burning the old goold coal.
Yes, they do, which is why I am far more comfortable with nuclear power. In fact, some of the electricity I'm using comes from a nuclear power plant, which means that there is zero CO2 being released. During the day, some of the power comes from a solar plant, and perhaps some from wind. Most of the rest for me comes from methane-fired power plants, which are even more efficient than coal.
This doesn't look like the kind of thing that would scale well into a power plant. I was thinking more of mid-scale electricity generation.
I wonder how possible it will be to get geothermal energy from this if that is the case.
You question rben's education, and then post that?
First of all, water is the major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Equilibrium is kept in the atmosphere by precipitation of the vapor into rain, snow, etc. Water added through evaporation or fuel burning goes through the same cycle.
Second, in terms of energy efficiency, the power stations are FAR more efficient than automobiles. If we're able to tap the energy from those stations for use in vehicles through electric cars, hydrogen cells, or some other method, it will be better than the localized burning of fuels in cars and trucks.
You might also want to check into your CO2 sources; according to the DoE, about 56% of the CO2 generated by the US comes from coal and natural gas, and last time I checked, there weren't too many people lining up their cars for lumps of carbon. Petroleum counts for almost all of the rest, and most of that is used in transportation.
Thirdly, you clearly are years out of date on population growth. While energy growth is continuing to grow, population growth is slowing, and significantly so. Ten years ago, a population of twelve billion was predicted for 2050, with little end in sight. Now the world population is expected to peak at about nine billion between 2050 and 2070, and then to start falling. In 1990, the total fertility rate of the world was 3.4 children per woman; today it's about 2.6, and in 2025 it's predicted to decline to 2.3. Measure that against a replacement rate of about 2.1. Japan and several European nations are already facing potential crises over their population rates, which have reached replacement rate or lower, and are continuing to drop.
You should check your own facts before you go criticizing others.
Will the beta bring the site down?
Considering how often I get 503 errors, it may not make much difference. At least with a redesign, outages will be attributable to them visibly working on one of Slashdot's biggest flaws.
The tar sands are more expensive than conventional oil deposits, but they're still economically viable at $40 per barrel, and possibly at lower prices now as well.
I'm not sure that Roberts will be up for Chief Justice, though.
And a few hours later, I'm shown to be wrong, as Bush has nominated him for the Chief Justice position.
Grah. Typing too fast and not checking. I was actually looking at a list of appointments, complete with who appointed them, and Reagan's name was clearly listed three times. Point still stands, though -- it's not uncommon for a president to have at least one appointment per term served.
I'm not sure that Roberts will be up for Chief Justice, though. I don't know that even a Republican Senate would be so interested in that. Roberts does not have a long history as a sitting judge, and Republicans are still wary of having one of their 'conservative' appointments turn on them. If anyone is appointed as both a new member of the Court and also as its Chief Justice, I think that person would have to be someone with a fairly lengthy history to keep the conservatives happy that the trend will continue.
OTOH, there is some wisdom in elevating Scalia. He's well-respected and well-liked. He's experienced how Rehnquist kept things running smoothly, and may well emulate him. An outsider might throw much of that into confusion by bringing in his or her own ideas. (The 'her' reference makes me wonder about a female Chief Justice nomination -- that would be really hard for some people to turn down, even if she were conservative.)
Three nominations at one time, though, would be hard to handle. I would not be surprised to see O'Connor slightly delay her departure, allowing Roberts to fill Rehnquist's empty seat. Stevens automatically takes the role of Acting Chief Justice anyway, and then a new process to fill O'Connor's seat begins on a rapid basis, followed by elevating one of the then-sitting justices to the presiding role.
Then again, the president will probably announce replacement nominations for both open spots in short order, whether in one or two people, and just watch everyone bat about the possibilities. All the what-ifs flying around should be fun.
It's a pretty common number. Clinton got two, the elder Bush got two, Reagan got two. Even Ford got one. Nixon got three, and Johnson and Kennedy each got two. Ike got four.
Carter seems to have been the only president in the last century that hasn't appointed anyone to the Supreme Court.
Well, I did say back of the envelope, and being a computer person, I'm rather stuck without a calculator. :)
Without official requests, there's no coordination on where to send them, and you end up exacerbating the chaos. You end up with situations like the Convention Center (and someone at FEMA and/or DHS needs to be fired over that -- watch the news once in a while, people -- open source information at its clearest) because no one is in charge.
Quick bit of back-of-the-envelope math:
500 buses * 40 people per bus = 2000 people
How far away should they have been taken? Lets say 30 miles -- it's short. Chances are, a round-trip for that bus, factoring in traffic, loading and unloading times, refueling, and so forth, would have averaged two hours, so they could have moved 24,000 people in a day. If they had started at midnight on Friday morning and kept going until midnight Saturday (well after the airport had closed), they could have moved 48,000 people.
How many people stayed behind? I've heard estimates of up to 200,000, meaning 2000 buses would have been needed to move all of the people -- if that many could even be found and deployed.
People just are not grasping the logistical challenges here.
You mention that the project was approved in 1965. It was supposed to take ten years to complete, and it's still not done. That's a lot of people on both sides of the aisle over the years to smack around.
Still, it wouldn't have helped much. Katrina hit as a Cat4, and the approved design was only rated for a Cat3. Further, the USACE said yesterday that the project had actually already been completed in the areas of the two breaks.
Theft is one of the simplest crimes, satisfying a need without physical harm to someone else. The reason that looting is being suppressed is that as the social order degrades, instances where violations of societal norms are seen to occur without punishment become more acceptable. This furthers the breakdown of order, and the level of the crimes will increase as time goes by and nothing is done. Desperation and fear feed the chaos, and eventually it becomes impossible to control without drastic measures.
Enforcing order in a situation such as this is critical in saving lives, because it provides a sense of returning structure to the lives of the affected people. Without that, further restoration efforts, including returning electricity to the area, become impossible, and more people suffer because food and water remain unavailable and hospitals cannot function.
Presidents do not ever take vacations the way that you or I might take them. When we go on vacation, we can end up out of contact entirely by leaving our phones behind, not providing information on where we're going, or simply ignoring the outside world.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they get a briefing of the state of the nation and the world.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they are in contact with their advisors to keep the nation running.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they have to make decisions that affect, directly or indirectly, the lives of the people in this country.
Every single day of the week, no matter where they are, what holiday it is, or how tired they are, they are within a few minutes of being able to contact virtually every single federal official, member of Congress, and senior judiciary.
Whether in Kennebunkport, Martha's Vineyard, California, Camp David, Crawford, or whatever other place a president chooses to spend some time away from the office, he is always, at every moment, the president, responsible to the American people, and in contact with the rest of the government. This president, Clinton, Bush Senior, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower at least were all subject to this. Truman may have been the last president with any capacity to "get away from it all" for a short time, if even he was able to do so.
You've got a lot of courage showing up here, Mr. Valenti.
Do you think EULAs should not be enforceable? If not, then the GPL becomes unenforceable. If the courts see EULAs as enforceable contracts, this strengthens the GPL (and similar licenses) significantly.