bearing in mind you guys haven't finished the 'war on drugs' yet and it's been, what, 20+ years?
Technically more like 120. The first anti-narcotics ordinance was against opium parlors in San Francisco shortly after the civil war.
I for one can't see why anyone would think declaring war on some social problem can possibly be a good idea. I mean, war is all about killing your enemy to achieve some goal. While the implementation has been atrocious, having a War on Terrorist is actually logical, if rather redundant, since terrorists are by definition already in a state of war against you. But a War on Drugs? Who's the enemy? Are we actually declaring war on chemicals? Or instead on dealers and manufacturers? In which case wouldn't users then be 'traitors' and subject to execution?
As long as no congresscritters are violating the 1st Ammendment, then everything is good. Congress can take the ideal approach of being religiously blind, so to speak. But when, say, Maryland passes a law barring atheists like you and I from holding public office, then the SCotUS has to (well, ought to, anyway) step in and say, "No, that's a totally religious requirement on behalf of the government and cannot be allowed". And once they do that, then it follows that they have to apply that same logic to pretty much everything tho state & federal governments do. Judge Moore cannot use his authority as a government employee to promote his faith for the exact same reason that nobody can tell me that I can't burn a piece of cloth of a certain pattern. It's not about what we are allowed to do, it's about what we cannot be told we can't do. But governments legitimately tell us things we can't do all the time, so we have to depend on courts to determine if said prohibition was based on a religion or censorship. To do that, they are put in the unenviable position of having to make judgement calls about the freedom to speak one's mind, especially for those with official power over the citizenry. Remember, a prohibition on Christmas trees would only apply to government employees at their jobs. I've worked at private companies with harsher restrictions than that.
John Q. Govemployee can say whatever he wants, but when he's on the job at the State, he has to be able to justify it. I have no problems restricting the actions of government workers at their jobs in order to safeguard the freedoms of everyone else the rest of the time.
You see, the thing that worries me about the "Under God" on money and in the pledge, or the 10 Suggestions in a courtroom is not their effects on atheists or other religions, but on the Christians who put it there in the first place. I'll ignore it, not say it, use credit cards, whatever. Intelligent people of all creeds can live without being morally outraged by it. It makes no difference to me. But I am constantly hearing crap from Christians about how "This nation was founded by good God-fearing Christians on Christian ideals and all non-Christians should get the hell out", and I think to myself, where on earth did they get such an insane notion? The only answer that comes to mind is that they've spent their childhood years being told not only by their parents, but by their teachers and by staidum announcers and by judges, just about every day, that "This is a country based on God". How many times does one have to repeat something before it becomes true?
Yet we find all sorts of laws defining what religious expressions are and are not allowed backed by the ACLU.
Only when it's to stop government employees using government resources to do religious things in the government's name. It becomes a choice of "de facto government support of _this_ religion" vs "no government support of any religion". The ACLU doesn't care what you worship, if anything, so long as it is not inflicted without recourse on those around you. Administration-led prayer in schools, rulings from judges using the bible as a legal source, giving money to charities because they are of a particular religion, claiming that atheists ought to be stripped of their citizenship, things like that. You can always toss the Jehova's Witnesses from your doorstep, but it's a bit more problematic when public officials start harassing you because you don't attend their church.
Minor nitpick. Hard drives are measured in 1KB=1000 bytes but CDRs are measured in 1KB=1024 bytes. In fact, every 700MB disc I've seen was actually 703MB ~ 737,000,000 bytes. Applying the rest of your calculations... 2826 days. A good 5 months less!
Indeed. The same though occurred to me at the end of the first movie. They made a trenchcoat Superman, now where's the kryptonite? But he was still weak in the Real World and even in the matrix could still be beaten by overwhelming numbers or distracted by being sent off to the mountains, so it's not all bad. The deus ex machina on the freeway was really about the worst application thereof.
Absolutely. Trinity should have died because Newton's Laws say she should have been turned into pink jelly, right? And what do we know happens to physical laws in the Matrix, especially where Neo is concerned?
The only place for nitpicking in that movie would be in the Real World parts.
Ahh, but what else was the car videophone capable of doing? Could he play games, do word processing, watch porn? Could he call anyone up on it, or was it directly linked to a British Intelligence video switchboard or just to his boss in particular? Could he send written schematics or photos over it? How much power & space under the hood did it need? The laptop, OTOH, can run for hours, be carried under your arm into your hotel room, and was likely using standard wireless and video compression protocols and could connect to anyone on the net with compatible equipment & software.
They may have thought it was a joke, but I saw it as a perfect example of a single general-purpose device (the PC) gradually becoming able to compete with a vast number of single-purpose widgets (telephone, videophone, copier, fax, TV, VCR, tape recorder/CD player, typewriter, encyclopedia/dictionary/thesaurus/phone book/generic office library stuff, etc, etc) in some respects and far surpass them in others.
And put together, they form a chemical compound that can cause serious health problems in people! One that 'Evul Terrists' have been known to distill from nothing more than seawater! Oh the humanity!
It's been estimated that gifted students are 6 times as likely to drop out of high school
Have you got anything even remotely resembling support for that statement? Because every magnet program in the county around here has dropout rates far less than normal. And that's just dropping out of the advanced programs, not high school in general.
E.g., the Center for Advanced Technologies (CAT) program I attended started off with ~170 freshmen, compared to ~350 regular ed students. 4 years later, there were 120 graduating CAT seniors and 140 graduating regular ed students. And I believe almost every one of the 50 CAT dropouts still graduated.
Oh for cryin' out loud. I am sick and tired of having to deal with you nutty screwballs. Where you get these fantasy delusions about FDR being a robot from the future is beyond me. Really, grow up already.
Everybody knows he was a cyborg from the year 1620 at an uptime colony of the robotic civilization in 2620!
Actually, we can do _really_ cold fusion already, at around 3 K. You can use muons (sort of a very heavy electron) as a fusion catalyst and get fusion going. Problem is, muons are consumed in the process (even if they didn't decay in microseconds) and it takes about 5 times as much energy to produce them as you get from the reaction.
(length of time it takes to start Falling after having run off a cliff) = (Matter particulate density in the surrounding air) * (Amount of preparation put into the latest trap)
And oddly enough, they usually get ground-level nuclear explosions right. A blinding flash, followed by earth-borne shockwave, then thunderclap, and then high-velocity winds. Wierd.
Actually a very good question. Each had a big gaping hole in it. Terminator had a couple of nicely resolved paradoxes in it (the origins of John Connor and Skynet), implying that attempts to change history were really only part of it (my personal favorite means of resolving the immutability of the past), but then blew that all to hell along with Cyberdyne and thus "postponing Judgement Day". Back to the Future avoided the paradoxes, but in one part left Doc & Marty in a future that no longer existed; i.e., after Biff changed the past while the heroes were in the future sans Delorian, they should have been snuffed out like a candle flame.
Overall best time travel physics of any movie ever? I'd have to think about it. Most of the time you only get the good stuff in books.
Diebold isn't really that incompetent. Remember, they're one of the largest suppliers of ATMs in the world. Accurately moving billions of dollars of their cash is not the sort of thing a bank would take lightly, right? So choosing Diebold for this job was not actually totally stupid.
What _was_ stupid was to continue to use them even after their fuckups had come to light. Their stupdity and related coverups were more than enough grounds to cancel the contract and demand money back, so Diebold had no incentive to do a decent job. If they did this to a major bank's line of ATMs, they'd get their asses reamed. But from Diebold's perspective, the US government is, as roystgnr put it, a "big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what". So while I blame Diebold for being cheap sleazebags, I blame their customer even more for letting them get away with it more than once.
I have seen you bitching and moaning about this all over this thread. I have yet to hear you counter the claim that the chemical is similar to rocket fuel and thermite in that it has a high ignition point and so is normally quite safe but once ignited (by, say, a momentary high-energy electrical discharge) creates a high temperature flame which cannot be quenched because it has its own oxidizer. These are also ESSENTIAL characteristics of rocket fuel and thermite and aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate apparently shares it with them. So in this respect, it is very much like rocket fuel and thermite. These are chemical reactions most people intuitively understand to be spectacularly destructive and totally unstoppable and so the comparison, while perhaps not 100% chemically accurate, is not without merit. The merit, of course, being to point out that H2 in the Hindenburg was about as safe as gasoline in a car with spark plugs inside the gas tank.
If it'll help you sleep better at night, whenever you see someone say, "The Hindenburg was painted with rocket fuel", just pretend they actually said, "The Hindenburg was painted with a chemical that had a number of combustive properties similar to that of rocket fuel".
Lastly, just because two chemicals are not equally applicable for the same purpose, (i.e., they do not share all ESSENTIAL USEFUL PROPERTIES) it does not automatically follow that their other properties are disimilar.
They have three legs. Like a tripod, two in front, one in back. A Puppeteer's idea of melee involves turning their back to the enemy and lashing out with the rear leg before skedaddling away with the cowardice they are known for.
Indeed it is. But the application thereof is barely in its infancy. Rockets have been shown for 50 years to be usable for LEO launches, but just barely. They are too fuel hungry, too heavy, too inefficient, requiring systems that are too large and too unwieldy to be reliable and cheap. So much of the thing is given over to the fuel and the rockets that payload capacity is practically a minor side bonus. At best, rocket launches have never been less than one or two thousand dollars per pound to LEO. With expenses like that, the entirety of space, the universe as a whole, is basically a pork project for various congress-criters.
Honestly, I have no particular affinity for scramjets. What I want, what we all _need_, is a decent means of LEO entry. Rockets don't quite cut it. Scramjets might. As might laser launches, or beanstalks, or whatever. Considering the rewards the human race could reap from opening up space, it's worth trying the more promising avenues.
Remember, the US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars (inflation adjusted) on projects which, though they may have been nifty, even awe inspriring, did not really let anyone _do_ anything in space (Apollo & ISS come to mind). IIRC, NASA has put 3 orders of magnitude less than that into this particular approach; less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch.
You may be right. Scramjets may not work at all, or function but be even less economical than rockets. But so far They've spent (relatively speaking) chump change on finding out, and what we stand to gain from cheap LEO access is worth it.
A scram jet could be used for part of an orbital flight from about 7 to 10 times the speed of sound
Why only to mach 10? Scramjets have no theoretical upper limit on speed, only lack of air would force the switch to a vacuum-capable system. Orbital velocity is in the mach 20-25 range.
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Technically more like 120. The first anti-narcotics ordinance was against opium parlors in San Francisco shortly after the civil war.
I for one can't see why anyone would think declaring war on some social problem can possibly be a good idea. I mean, war is all about killing your enemy to achieve some goal. While the implementation has been atrocious, having a War on Terrorist is actually logical, if rather redundant, since terrorists are by definition already in a state of war against you. But a War on Drugs? Who's the enemy? Are we actually declaring war on chemicals? Or instead on dealers and manufacturers? In which case wouldn't users then be 'traitors' and subject to execution?
Tomatoes _are_ fruit. But how a judgement call like that required the US Supreme Court, I will never know.
John Q. Govemployee can say whatever he wants, but when he's on the job at the State, he has to be able to justify it. I have no problems restricting the actions of government workers at their jobs in order to safeguard the freedoms of everyone else the rest of the time.
You see, the thing that worries me about the "Under God" on money and in the pledge, or the 10 Suggestions in a courtroom is not their effects on atheists or other religions, but on the Christians who put it there in the first place. I'll ignore it, not say it, use credit cards, whatever. Intelligent people of all creeds can live without being morally outraged by it. It makes no difference to me. But I am constantly hearing crap from Christians about how "This nation was founded by good God-fearing Christians on Christian ideals and all non-Christians should get the hell out", and I think to myself, where on earth did they get such an insane notion? The only answer that comes to mind is that they've spent their childhood years being told not only by their parents, but by their teachers and by staidum announcers and by judges, just about every day, that "This is a country based on God". How many times does one have to repeat something before it becomes true?
Only when it's to stop government employees using government resources to do religious things in the government's name. It becomes a choice of "de facto government support of _this_ religion" vs "no government support of any religion". The ACLU doesn't care what you worship, if anything, so long as it is not inflicted without recourse on those around you. Administration-led prayer in schools, rulings from judges using the bible as a legal source, giving money to charities because they are of a particular religion, claiming that atheists ought to be stripped of their citizenship, things like that. You can always toss the Jehova's Witnesses from your doorstep, but it's a bit more problematic when public officials start harassing you because you don't attend their church.
Do you realize how disgusted that makes me feel, as I sit here at home and struggle to get this 8-drive 1TB RAID5 array running right?
Minor nitpick. Hard drives are measured in 1KB=1000 bytes but CDRs are measured in 1KB=1024 bytes. In fact, every 700MB disc I've seen was actually 703MB ~ 737,000,000 bytes. Applying the rest of your calculations... 2826 days. A good 5 months less!
Indeed. The same though occurred to me at the end of the first movie. They made a trenchcoat Superman, now where's the kryptonite? But he was still weak in the Real World and even in the matrix could still be beaten by overwhelming numbers or distracted by being sent off to the mountains, so it's not all bad. The deus ex machina on the freeway was really about the worst application thereof.
The only place for nitpicking in that movie would be in the Real World parts.
They may have thought it was a joke, but I saw it as a perfect example of a single general-purpose device (the PC) gradually becoming able to compete with a vast number of single-purpose widgets (telephone, videophone, copier, fax, TV, VCR, tape recorder/CD player, typewriter, encyclopedia/dictionary/thesaurus/phone book/generic office library stuff, etc, etc) in some respects and far surpass them in others.
And put together, they form a chemical compound that can cause serious health problems in people! One that 'Evul Terrists' have been known to distill from nothing more than seawater! Oh the humanity!
Have you got anything even remotely resembling support for that statement? Because every magnet program in the county around here has dropout rates far less than normal. And that's just dropping out of the advanced programs, not high school in general.
E.g., the Center for Advanced Technologies (CAT) program I attended started off with ~170 freshmen, compared to ~350 regular ed students. 4 years later, there were 120 graduating CAT seniors and 140 graduating regular ed students. And I believe almost every one of the 50 CAT dropouts still graduated.
If I had to guess? Motion Tax, aka speeding tickets.
Everybody knows he was a cyborg from the year 1620 at an uptime colony of the robotic civilization in 2620!
Good point. I should say it's a catalyst that has ~1% chance of being a reactant per reaction.
Actually, we can do _really_ cold fusion already, at around 3 K. You can use muons (sort of a very heavy electron) as a fusion catalyst and get fusion going. Problem is, muons are consumed in the process (even if they didn't decay in microseconds) and it takes about 5 times as much energy to produce them as you get from the reaction.
(length of time it takes to start Falling after having run off a cliff) = (Matter particulate density in the surrounding air) * (Amount of preparation put into the latest trap)
And oddly enough, they usually get ground-level nuclear explosions right. A blinding flash, followed by earth-borne shockwave, then thunderclap, and then high-velocity winds. Wierd.
Honestly, if someone is willing to try that, I say let em. Evolution in action.
Overall best time travel physics of any movie ever? I'd have to think about it. Most of the time you only get the good stuff in books.
What _was_ stupid was to continue to use them even after their fuckups had come to light. Their stupdity and related coverups were more than enough grounds to cancel the contract and demand money back, so Diebold had no incentive to do a decent job. If they did this to a major bank's line of ATMs, they'd get their asses reamed. But from Diebold's perspective, the US government is, as roystgnr put it, a "big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what". So while I blame Diebold for being cheap sleazebags, I blame their customer even more for letting them get away with it more than once.
If it'll help you sleep better at night, whenever you see someone say, "The Hindenburg was painted with rocket fuel", just pretend they actually said, "The Hindenburg was painted with a chemical that had a number of combustive properties similar to that of rocket fuel".
Lastly, just because two chemicals are not equally applicable for the same purpose, (i.e., they do not share all ESSENTIAL USEFUL PROPERTIES) it does not automatically follow that their other properties are disimilar.
They might as well, IBM's already got the Dyson Spheres, right?
They have three legs. Like a tripod, two in front, one in back. A Puppeteer's idea of melee involves turning their back to the enemy and lashing out with the rear leg before skedaddling away with the cowardice they are known for.
Honestly, I have no particular affinity for scramjets. What I want, what we all _need_, is a decent means of LEO entry. Rockets don't quite cut it. Scramjets might. As might laser launches, or beanstalks, or whatever. Considering the rewards the human race could reap from opening up space, it's worth trying the more promising avenues.
Remember, the US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars (inflation adjusted) on projects which, though they may have been nifty, even awe inspriring, did not really let anyone _do_ anything in space (Apollo & ISS come to mind). IIRC, NASA has put 3 orders of magnitude less than that into this particular approach; less than the cost of a single Shuttle launch.
You may be right. Scramjets may not work at all, or function but be even less economical than rockets. But so far They've spent (relatively speaking) chump change on finding out, and what we stand to gain from cheap LEO access is worth it.
Why only to mach 10? Scramjets have no theoretical upper limit on speed, only lack of air would force the switch to a vacuum-capable system. Orbital velocity is in the mach 20-25 range.