Google says 25 nmn = 46.3 km, so you may be right. I just looked up 16" and grabbed the range for the mod 8. There's also a number of different ranges listed for the Harpoon, which makes some sense when you have booster/no booster, different warheads, submarine vs surface launch, and even have to consider wind patterns and weather when you actually launch it. That's BEFORE deliberate confustication on the part of the military as to it's exact abilities in order to mislead the enemy.
Anyways, if enemy forces start armoring their missiles there's a number of solutions - more powerful lasers or even more of them.
Oh yeah, and especially when you start introducing multiple lasers(possibly on different ships), consider that the laser might be hitting the side of the missile, not the front. Puncture the side of it and there's several possibilities at first glance: 1. Fuel tank ruptured - loss of fuel may deny it the ability to reach the target ship. 2. Solid fuel hit - you now have an uncontrolled jet out the side. Missile rendered uncontrollable, loss of stability(and range), missile no longer a concern. 3. Electronic/mechanical component hit - Results may vary. Loss of sensor capability means it can't aim to hit, mission kill. Loss of power kills the missile. Loss of control surface means the missile can't aim itself anymore either. The engine might be disabled(some of these are more like a small jet than a rocket). Etc... 4. Explosives hit - while they're unlikely to explode outside of the detonator going off, they might catch fire and have much the same effect as the solid fuel hit.
Don't forget that while the electronics are armored and there's a lot of air flow to help keep it cool, that's still a very big laser and the components do have a maximum operating temperature. They can fail from heat alone.
Anyways, armor on the SIDE of the missile wouldn't be helping much with penetration, it'd be lighter and more effective to make it ablative, which really wouldn't help with penetration. Well, other than helping to make sure it actually reaches the target in a laser equipped environment.
And he allegedly harassed someone online -- that's all I've heard. Maybe he had a nip before bed and was just a little frustrated, we have no context -- who cares? Lots of people say a lot of things online that are far worse.
Considering that he retired a few years ago, then retired from even giving online classes, he's obviously getting on in age. Dementia is a possible problem.
I know my grandfather, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, has been making increasingly racist comments without any real reason to do so. Was he originally racist(before I was old enough to remember)? Was he always racist and just hid it from me(and now his ability to hide is declining)? Is it something new?
I don't know, and it makes me sad.
I wonder if a similar thing could be happening here. If it is indeed the cause, shouldn't we celebrate his rising above that past, even as we mourn his fall due to mental illness?
MIT's enrollment is biased in favor of female applicants. They have to make a show of being tough on harassment to maintain the image of a female friendly school.
If it wasn't MIT, they wouldn't have to worry. Today women outnumber men in college 1.4:1 nationally.
I know that the ratio was even worse the other way around even a century ago, but to me this indicates that we really need to stop pushing college in female-centric ways, even concentrate on drawing more men.
So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.
Given that 'fuck' generally means intercourse, he didn't even go that far from what I'm reading.
Also, are we talking about online courses, as in Mr Lewin taking the place of an in-class teacher, or online courses ala Khan Academy, where his presence is no longer required? Because the press release mentions that he was no longer teaching anyways.
While not as big of a deal as kicking out a student in a star court, there's currently a big over-correction against anything that looks like sexual assault/harassment in the universities, which is perverting justice.
At least with an online course the evidence should be there, reducing the amount of 'he said she said'. But there's also every possibility that the professor wasn't even given an opportunity to defend himself.
The real question is will they go back and demand that lawmakers "fix" this by forcing Google to aggregate and pay or realize their basic assumption is wrong and abolish the law? I'd bet on some variant of the former.
Consider what google is doing in Spain. It'd be like demanding a general store carry bicycles after it decided to get out of the bicycle business because it was unprofitable.
Google is getting out of the news aggregation business in the country completely. Well, unless they fold like Germany did.
Google's not willing to compromise, because the moment they're sending the news companies a $2 check/year, they've established that they'll pay.
As the saying goes, the next step is to negotiate the prices. Google doesn't want that precedent, especially since it could/would spread to other countries. The German companies, for example, spent millions getting a similar ruling, only to fold and allow Google to do it's thing for free when they found out that their own page hits dropped like a rock when Google proved that it was ready and willing to de-index them rather than pay. By turning it into a commercial transaction they can't even claim discrimination - choosing NOT to buy something is perfectly legal.
They realized too late that while news is their entire business, it's only a fraction of google's.
How can they know for certain the moon came from an earth impact vs just a passing proto-planet without a well defined orbit that got caught in our gravity?
Well, the wiki really explains it better than I could. I'm not an expert, I just know it's the currently favored theory, IE it's the best match for observations, not that it's a perfect match.
It's also possible that at least 'some' water remained after the impact, and the return of 'enough' water was via various methods.
You miss my point. Shielding on a missile isn't wasted mass.
I did get it. I repeat: "most missiles aren't bunker-buster/armor penetrating". Most missiles are proximity, not impact fused. They get through armor either through size of warhead or the use of a shaped charge.
Also, extra shrapnel is a complicated affair, because if you make the casing too thick it doesn't fragment properly.
'Most' Missiles are a hell of a lot lighter than a 16" shell. I'm looking at antishipping missiles because they're the primary target for this laser, ability to take aircraft is a 'happy bonus'. 16" shells: 2200-2700 pounds, 500-150 pounds HE, per you. Wiki lists max range as 38 km.
Harpoon anti-shipping missile: Loadings vary, but 1,523 pounds(with booster), 488 pound warhead*. range 280 km(it's what's in the wiki). Warhead 32% of weight DOES have a impact mode though. Exocet: 1,480 pounds, 364 pounds warhead, 180 km, 25% of weight The heaviest current anti-shipping missile wiki mentions: P-270 Moskit: 9,900#, 710# warhead. 120 km, 7% of weight.
I'll note that while most of the non-explosive weight of a 16" shell is obviously metal, most of the non-explosive weight on a missile is fuel.
If a missile is already designed to penetrate, and you're removing explosives to add more metal to protect it from a laser(and it has to already deal with existing amounts of armor), it might or might not penetrate further, but it's going to explode with less force afterwards, and whether or not this is better depends on how close the original designers were to optimum, you know? If they went too light(unlikely, ships were actually more armored when many of these were first designed), then maybe. Otherwise they now have more armor/weight than ideal under the old system, ergo performance reduced.
*Which will have varying amounts of explosives, it's a modular system.
The NSA already has a problem with collecting way more data than it could ever analyze. What do you think it could data-mine from medical records that wouldn't be duplicated elsewhere that would actually be useful?
The NSA currently deletes something like 99.999% of the data it collects without ever looking at it.
The theory is that the protoearth lost all its water when the impact that formed the moon happened. That impact reliquified the planet, driving off the lighter elements. Ergo we had to be reseeded somehow.
What remains to be seen is whether jets and missiles can shrug off (either through brute-force thickening or more sophisticated ablative armor or actively deployed particulates that effectively scatter incoming light) the relatively tepid amounts of energy that lasers (especially anything that dodges the rather nasty requirements of chemical lasers) are good for, particularly at range, under optically sub-optimal conditions (never have those at sea!).
Current missiles ride pretty close to the edge, it doesn't take much of a hole or even for thermal forces to screw them up. Plus, any armor or countermeasures aren't fuel to increase range, warhead to increase damage, or guidance packages to make it hit the target.
Heck, the laser getting the guidance and blinding the missile would normally be a mission kill for the missile.
Working from personal experience: The DoD is a surprisingly huge healthcare provider. I think their need for access to the records should be fairly obvious. "Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison" - same deal.
DoA, DoE, DoL, NASA, probably research. OPM, NIST, FTC - management, figuring out costs and such.
Most of the organizations should have no need for non-anonymized data.
If we assume the same delivery charge for the new board as for the U2* and that it still ships from outside the EU on a regular courier service**, and that they tell the truth on the customs form then the final price will be about $35 (board) + $30 (shipping) + ~£10.5 (brokerage) + ~£9.5 VAT = ~£68.
Maybe you should canvas the UK and EU to see what the potential market is.
If it's large enough, you could go into business as an online shop, have a big crate of them brought in on a barge, reducing that shipping and brokerage charge, but you're on your own for the VAT. Then you sell at a price between your cost and what it would cost to buy from the states(or wherever).
Opportunity is limited though, I'd expect chinese versions to be available for much less fairly quickly.
Despite the tone, remember that it's not just doctors and nurses that receive licenses.
There's a constant battle for just how far to go with licensing drugs - wait too long and people die without it, wait too little and people die from a drug that shouldn't have been released.
Medical equipment can be big - the cost is so huge that medical devices often seriously lag in IT updates. The FDA is just starting to come around that yes, these devices need regular security patches and even OS updates.
You also get incidents where the development schedule is so slowed that the iPhone comes along and somebody releases an app for that does what a $10k medical device would do(provide assistance to somebody blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled), for a total that rounds to $500.
Yet because it's not licensed they'll happily buy the crappy $10k device that is and absolute won't pay for the device that's almost 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.
r_naked really went off the reservation. Such an old account as well.
Still, I support drug legalization and fewer restrictions on arms, such that the illegal drug smugglers and arms salesmen would have a hard time making a living even without government intervention.
It's that thing where you have more control over a market when it's legal than illegal. I believe it would lead to less violence and better ability to help the addicts.
The paedophilic video distributors are encouraging the harm of children, so they'd still get strung up.
Back on the subject of Taxis, my libertarian impulse is to ask whether the regulations they're violating are really necessary. Note that I'm not an anarchist, it's perfectly possible to convince me that they are in the best interest, but you have to provide some level of cost-benefit analysis. Not only that, but periodically review them to make sure they're still accomplishing the intended purpose.
Well, to be fair that multiple people, even in the same organization or party, hold different views shouldn't be a surprise at all. But in this particular case I think you've nailed it on the head.
We're supporting government regulations to restrict the actions of monopolies and oligopolies in regards to the internet. Even if they can't be considered so on a national level, the fact that you normally only have 1-2 choices locally matters.
Taxi companies are the same, except their monopoly/oligopoly is assisted by government regulation.
But it seems like a kind of superficial gimmick. And most SF doesn't deliver any culture at all - art, music, religion, politics, etc - unless it directly relates to the plot.
So if it doesn't relate to the plot it's a superficial gimmick, but most SF doesn't do anything on it unless it's plot-relevant? Doesn't that make you hard to please?
Also, going through the series it DOES become important to the plot many times. Sure, it's often more for explaining somebody's motivations, but it's not completely gimmick. It makes for good character interaction at times.
The earrings in the example actually display a number of different signals. Not having them on would probably effectively remove you from the dating pool because it's like making your profile private.
A summery of the basic 'signals': I am male/female/herm* I seek male/female/herm/bi/all I am currently: not seeking/committed(closed)/committed(open)/seeking(fling)/seeking(long-term)/either
It's still more complex than this, but it's a start.
So at a glance, if you know the codings, you can tell whether you'd be in for a surprise in the bedroom*, whether they'd be interested in you, whether they're actually looking, and how serious of a relationship you should expect from them.
That's a LOT more information than a wedding or engagement ring.
Basically, assume Beta was settled by a bunch of Hippies, where they(and their children) ended up growing up, but a lot of the honesty/free love stuff remained.
*Hermaphrodites are a thing on Beta due to genetic engineering, and some trend male/female in dress and appearance. Plus unisex dress is pretty common.
And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?
Hmm... Having read the series: 1. It's not restricted to 'young girls'. It's the cultural more that everybody wears the sign(in the form of earrings). First period-ish is when girls start though. Don't remember when the boys start. 2. Bujold makes no bones that Beta is, in many ways, MORE controlling that the 'right wing' traditionalist Barrayar. They may not control sex as much, but you need a government permit to have the sterility implant removed(and if I remember right, both boys and girls get them). Oh yeah, and their response to STDs are downright draconian. They probably won't let you on the planet if you have one. 3. It's the person's choice as to what they advertise - the system isn't broken down in the books that I remember, but there's over 40 signs, showing things like what you are, what you're interested in(straight, bi, gay, herm), what you're looking for in a relationship such as: not interested, don't bother: committed, flings only please, dedicated relationship, procreative, etc... 4. There isn't any penalty for 'false advertising', other than you will probably create a lot of confusion and may have people hitting on you that you don't want to be, or if you're displaying 'not interested' tags, not being propositioned when you'd actually want to be.
Despite this, I think you missed the point - things will likely be different in the future, not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but very much different.
Ah, I suggest you have a talk with somebody if you think that responsibility only grows out of participation in the military, and or at the direction of the government.
It's probably shocking to you, but I think you should have demonstrated enough responsibility for a firearm by the time you're graduating high school, instilled by your parents, the schools, community, and life in general.
The military can only do so much, and has gotten out of most of the 'teaching responsibility' game. It's no longer big enough or funded enough to serve that purpose.
Carry on then, maybe cut that flag into strips to clean your guns since it's not doing anything useful.
Man, you're just full of non-sequiturs, aren't you?
I think you passed 'strawman' several miles ago have have progressed to attacking a wicker-man.
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Google says 25 nmn = 46.3 km, so you may be right. I just looked up 16" and grabbed the range for the mod 8. There's also a number of different ranges listed for the Harpoon, which makes some sense when you have booster/no booster, different warheads, submarine vs surface launch, and even have to consider wind patterns and weather when you actually launch it. That's BEFORE deliberate confustication on the part of the military as to it's exact abilities in order to mislead the enemy.
Anyways, if enemy forces start armoring their missiles there's a number of solutions - more powerful lasers or even more of them.
Oh yeah, and especially when you start introducing multiple lasers(possibly on different ships), consider that the laser might be hitting the side of the missile, not the front. Puncture the side of it and there's several possibilities at first glance:
1. Fuel tank ruptured - loss of fuel may deny it the ability to reach the target ship.
2. Solid fuel hit - you now have an uncontrolled jet out the side. Missile rendered uncontrollable, loss of stability(and range), missile no longer a concern.
3. Electronic/mechanical component hit - Results may vary. Loss of sensor capability means it can't aim to hit, mission kill. Loss of power kills the missile. Loss of control surface means the missile can't aim itself anymore either. The engine might be disabled(some of these are more like a small jet than a rocket). Etc...
4. Explosives hit - while they're unlikely to explode outside of the detonator going off, they might catch fire and have much the same effect as the solid fuel hit.
Don't forget that while the electronics are armored and there's a lot of air flow to help keep it cool, that's still a very big laser and the components do have a maximum operating temperature. They can fail from heat alone.
Anyways, armor on the SIDE of the missile wouldn't be helping much with penetration, it'd be lighter and more effective to make it ablative, which really wouldn't help with penetration. Well, other than helping to make sure it actually reaches the target in a laser equipped environment.
And he allegedly harassed someone online -- that's all I've heard. Maybe he had a nip before bed and was just a little frustrated, we have no context -- who cares? Lots of people say a lot of things online that are far worse.
Considering that he retired a few years ago, then retired from even giving online classes, he's obviously getting on in age. Dementia is a possible problem.
I know my grandfather, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, has been making increasingly racist comments without any real reason to do so. Was he originally racist(before I was old enough to remember)? Was he always racist and just hid it from me(and now his ability to hide is declining)? Is it something new?
I don't know, and it makes me sad.
I wonder if a similar thing could be happening here. If it is indeed the cause, shouldn't we celebrate his rising above that past, even as we mourn his fall due to mental illness?
MIT's enrollment is biased in favor of female applicants. They have to make a show of being tough on harassment to maintain the image of a female friendly school.
If it wasn't MIT, they wouldn't have to worry. Today women outnumber men in college 1.4:1 nationally.
I know that the ratio was even worse the other way around even a century ago, but to me this indicates that we really need to stop pushing college in female-centric ways, even concentrate on drawing more men.
Thus giving students reason to pay attention ala NASCAR? :)
So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.
Given that 'fuck' generally means intercourse, he didn't even go that far from what I'm reading.
Also, are we talking about online courses, as in Mr Lewin taking the place of an in-class teacher, or online courses ala Khan Academy, where his presence is no longer required? Because the press release mentions that he was no longer teaching anyways.
While not as big of a deal as kicking out a student in a star court, there's currently a big over-correction against anything that looks like sexual assault/harassment in the universities, which is perverting justice.
At least with an online course the evidence should be there, reducing the amount of 'he said she said'. But there's also every possibility that the professor wasn't even given an opportunity to defend himself.
The real question is will they go back and demand that lawmakers "fix" this by forcing Google to aggregate and pay or realize their basic assumption is wrong and abolish the law? I'd bet on some variant of the former.
Consider what google is doing in Spain. It'd be like demanding a general store carry bicycles after it decided to get out of the bicycle business because it was unprofitable.
Google is getting out of the news aggregation business in the country completely. Well, unless they fold like Germany did.
Google's not willing to compromise, because the moment they're sending the news companies a $2 check/year, they've established that they'll pay.
As the saying goes, the next step is to negotiate the prices. Google doesn't want that precedent, especially since it could/would spread to other countries. The German companies, for example, spent millions getting a similar ruling, only to fold and allow Google to do it's thing for free when they found out that their own page hits dropped like a rock when Google proved that it was ready and willing to de-index them rather than pay. By turning it into a commercial transaction they can't even claim discrimination - choosing NOT to buy something is perfectly legal.
They realized too late that while news is their entire business, it's only a fraction of google's.
How can they know for certain the moon came from an earth impact vs just a passing proto-planet without a well defined orbit that got caught in our gravity?
Well, the wiki really explains it better than I could. I'm not an expert, I just know it's the currently favored theory, IE it's the best match for observations, not that it's a perfect match.
It's also possible that at least 'some' water remained after the impact, and the return of 'enough' water was via various methods.
You miss my point. Shielding on a missile isn't wasted mass.
I did get it. I repeat: "most missiles aren't bunker-buster/armor penetrating". Most missiles are proximity, not impact fused. They get through armor either through size of warhead or the use of a shaped charge.
Also, extra shrapnel is a complicated affair, because if you make the casing too thick it doesn't fragment properly.
'Most' Missiles are a hell of a lot lighter than a 16" shell. I'm looking at antishipping missiles because they're the primary target for this laser, ability to take aircraft is a 'happy bonus'.
16" shells: 2200-2700 pounds, 500-150 pounds HE, per you. Wiki lists max range as 38 km.
Harpoon anti-shipping missile: Loadings vary, but 1,523 pounds(with booster), 488 pound warhead*. range 280 km(it's what's in the wiki). Warhead 32% of weight DOES have a impact mode though.
Exocet: 1,480 pounds, 364 pounds warhead, 180 km, 25% of weight
The heaviest current anti-shipping missile wiki mentions:
P-270 Moskit: 9,900#, 710# warhead. 120 km, 7% of weight.
I'll note that while most of the non-explosive weight of a 16" shell is obviously metal, most of the non-explosive weight on a missile is fuel.
If a missile is already designed to penetrate, and you're removing explosives to add more metal to protect it from a laser(and it has to already deal with existing amounts of armor), it might or might not penetrate further, but it's going to explode with less force afterwards, and whether or not this is better depends on how close the original designers were to optimum, you know? If they went too light(unlikely, ships were actually more armored when many of these were first designed), then maybe. Otherwise they now have more armor/weight than ideal under the old system, ergo performance reduced.
*Which will have varying amounts of explosives, it's a modular system.
The NSA already has a problem with collecting way more data than it could ever analyze. What do you think it could data-mine from medical records that wouldn't be duplicated elsewhere that would actually be useful?
The NSA currently deletes something like 99.999% of the data it collects without ever looking at it.
If it misses because the guidance systems are blinded of fried, all the momentum doesn't matter.
And most missiles aren't bunker-buster/armor penetrating either.
The theory is that the protoearth lost all its water when the impact that formed the moon happened. That impact reliquified the planet, driving off the lighter elements. Ergo we had to be reseeded somehow.
What remains to be seen is whether jets and missiles can shrug off (either through brute-force thickening or more sophisticated ablative armor or actively deployed particulates that effectively scatter incoming light) the relatively tepid amounts of energy that lasers (especially anything that dodges the rather nasty requirements of chemical lasers) are good for, particularly at range, under optically sub-optimal conditions (never have those at sea!).
Current missiles ride pretty close to the edge, it doesn't take much of a hole or even for thermal forces to screw them up. Plus, any armor or countermeasures aren't fuel to increase range, warhead to increase damage, or guidance packages to make it hit the target.
Heck, the laser getting the guidance and blinding the missile would normally be a mission kill for the missile.
Working from personal experience: The DoD is a surprisingly huge healthcare provider. I think their need for access to the records should be fairly obvious.
"Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison" - same deal.
DoA, DoE, DoL, NASA, probably research.
OPM, NIST, FTC - management, figuring out costs and such.
Most of the organizations should have no need for non-anonymized data.
If we assume the same delivery charge for the new board as for the U2* and that it still ships from outside the EU on a regular courier service**, and that they tell the truth on the customs form then the final price will be about $35 (board) + $30 (shipping) + ~£10.5 (brokerage) + ~£9.5 VAT = ~£68.
Maybe you should canvas the UK and EU to see what the potential market is.
If it's large enough, you could go into business as an online shop, have a big crate of them brought in on a barge, reducing that shipping and brokerage charge, but you're on your own for the VAT. Then you sell at a price between your cost and what it would cost to buy from the states(or wherever).
Opportunity is limited though, I'd expect chinese versions to be available for much less fairly quickly.
As for cooling, remember that we're talking about room temperature superconductors here. :)
Is it still room temperature if you're putting them 'out in the desert' next to the solar system without cooling?
Despite the tone, remember that it's not just doctors and nurses that receive licenses.
There's a constant battle for just how far to go with licensing drugs - wait too long and people die without it, wait too little and people die from a drug that shouldn't have been released.
Medical equipment can be big - the cost is so huge that medical devices often seriously lag in IT updates. The FDA is just starting to come around that yes, these devices need regular security patches and even OS updates.
You also get incidents where the development schedule is so slowed that the iPhone comes along and somebody releases an app for that does what a $10k medical device would do(provide assistance to somebody blind, deaf, or otherwise disabled), for a total that rounds to $500.
Yet because it's not licensed they'll happily buy the crappy $10k device that is and absolute won't pay for the device that's almost 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.
r_naked really went off the reservation. Such an old account as well.
Still, I support drug legalization and fewer restrictions on arms, such that the illegal drug smugglers and arms salesmen would have a hard time making a living even without government intervention.
It's that thing where you have more control over a market when it's legal than illegal. I believe it would lead to less violence and better ability to help the addicts.
The paedophilic video distributors are encouraging the harm of children, so they'd still get strung up.
Back on the subject of Taxis, my libertarian impulse is to ask whether the regulations they're violating are really necessary. Note that I'm not an anarchist, it's perfectly possible to convince me that they are in the best interest, but you have to provide some level of cost-benefit analysis. Not only that, but periodically review them to make sure they're still accomplishing the intended purpose.
Well, to be fair that multiple people, even in the same organization or party, hold different views shouldn't be a surprise at all. But in this particular case I think you've nailed it on the head.
We're supporting government regulations to restrict the actions of monopolies and oligopolies in regards to the internet. Even if they can't be considered so on a national level, the fact that you normally only have 1-2 choices locally matters.
Taxi companies are the same, except their monopoly/oligopoly is assisted by government regulation.
fullerenes, aromatic hydrocarbons and graphane
Oh Carbon, is there anything you can't do?
Seriously. Superconductors, batteries, capacitors, bullet proof vests, orbital cables, etc...?
But it seems like a kind of superficial gimmick. And most SF doesn't deliver any culture at all - art, music, religion, politics, etc - unless it directly relates to the plot.
So if it doesn't relate to the plot it's a superficial gimmick, but most SF doesn't do anything on it unless it's plot-relevant? Doesn't that make you hard to please?
Also, going through the series it DOES become important to the plot many times. Sure, it's often more for explaining somebody's motivations, but it's not completely gimmick. It makes for good character interaction at times.
The earrings in the example actually display a number of different signals. Not having them on would probably effectively remove you from the dating pool because it's like making your profile private.
A summery of the basic 'signals':
I am male/female/herm*
I seek male/female/herm/bi/all
I am currently: not seeking/committed(closed)/committed(open)/seeking(fling)/seeking(long-term)/either
It's still more complex than this, but it's a start.
So at a glance, if you know the codings, you can tell whether you'd be in for a surprise in the bedroom*, whether they'd be interested in you, whether they're actually looking, and how serious of a relationship you should expect from them.
That's a LOT more information than a wedding or engagement ring.
Basically, assume Beta was settled by a bunch of Hippies, where they(and their children) ended up growing up, but a lot of the honesty/free love stuff remained.
*Hermaphrodites are a thing on Beta due to genetic engineering, and some trend male/female in dress and appearance. Plus unisex dress is pretty common.
And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?
Hmm... Having read the series:
1. It's not restricted to 'young girls'. It's the cultural more that everybody wears the sign(in the form of earrings). First period-ish is when girls start though. Don't remember when the boys start.
2. Bujold makes no bones that Beta is, in many ways, MORE controlling that the 'right wing' traditionalist Barrayar. They may not control sex as much, but you need a government permit to have the sterility implant removed(and if I remember right, both boys and girls get them). Oh yeah, and their response to STDs are downright draconian. They probably won't let you on the planet if you have one.
3. It's the person's choice as to what they advertise - the system isn't broken down in the books that I remember, but there's over 40 signs, showing things like what you are, what you're interested in(straight, bi, gay, herm), what you're looking for in a relationship such as: not interested, don't bother: committed, flings only please, dedicated relationship, procreative, etc...
4. There isn't any penalty for 'false advertising', other than you will probably create a lot of confusion and may have people hitting on you that you don't want to be, or if you're displaying 'not interested' tags, not being propositioned when you'd actually want to be.
Despite this, I think you missed the point - things will likely be different in the future, not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but very much different.
The only thing I want to point out about Hanford is that it was a nuclear weapons facility, not a nuclear power one.
Sadly, this shows that when it comes to weapons, the USA wasn't that much better than the USSR in keeping it's activities clean.
How convenient. No responsibility required.
Ah, I suggest you have a talk with somebody if you think that responsibility only grows out of participation in the military, and or at the direction of the government.
It's probably shocking to you, but I think you should have demonstrated enough responsibility for a firearm by the time you're graduating high school, instilled by your parents, the schools, community, and life in general.
The military can only do so much, and has gotten out of most of the 'teaching responsibility' game. It's no longer big enough or funded enough to serve that purpose.
Carry on then, maybe cut that flag into strips to clean your guns since it's not doing anything useful.
Man, you're just full of non-sequiturs, aren't you?
I think you passed 'strawman' several miles ago have have progressed to attacking a wicker-man.