Of course, the answer could not be "the quality of the science is not related to the source of funding"
It is widely understood in the scientific community that funding for a study is an important, relevant factor is considering its merits. Disclosure is considered essential, and scandals erupt regularly when a researcher conceals connections, including study funding, from a party that has a financial interest in the result.
You aren't going to post one (not a credible scientific publication for sure) since this is entirely made up.
We do not have centuries of data about the extent of Martian ice caps, which vary considerably seasonally. Visual observations of planet from the Earth's surface are extremely difficult and give low resolution fuzzy images, and until well into the 20th century had to be sketched by hand. Remember those non-existent canals on Mars? That was typical for attempts at interpreting blurry indistinct features on the tiny visible orb.
To have any hope of estimating Martian ice cap coverage at even one point in time you need at least sufficient accurate observational data to draw up a map of Mars. The first such was not prepared until 1840, and one with sufficiently quality for any hope of a quantitative estimate of ice cap coverage was not until the opposition of 1887-1891. In fact good data about Martian ice caps only became available in the age of space probes.
The extent of nano-tube regulation in California was passing a bill (AB289) that authorizes the Department of Toxic Substances Control to request information on environmental and health impacts from nanotube manufacturers and importers. It was authorized to collect information from the industry to use in evaluating hazards and risks (a process completed in 2009).
That's it.
No ban. Not even any regulation at all, whatsoever.
And it seems perfectly reasonable for the DTSC to collect such information. It is not as if completely novel materials, to which humans and other living things have never before been exposed, have never shown any harmful effects.
The California hating automatic reflex - much easier than taking the trouble to actually learn things.
You have to take standard resource reserve estimates with a grain of salt. Unless they specifically analyze unconventional resources, and all resources at multiple price points above the present market price, you are getting an extremely conservative lower bound estimate on the real resources.
It would be remarkable if the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust (8.2%) would be so "limited in distribution". Bauxite is around 40% aluminum, a modest 5-fold enrichment over the crustal average, there are vast quantities of material (e.g. aluminum clays like kaolin) that are nearly as high, and a commercial production process is already being brought to market: http://www.ammg.com.au/download/IndMin%20-%20Meckering%20making%20alumina%20from%20kaolin%20-%20Sept%2012.pdf . In two hundred years exploiting other aluminum resources won't be a problem.
Spectra would be better (check your own link), and it costs about the same. But the bulk cost of the cable is not a significant cost in this project, any more than the fuel cost is in space launches (a fact that often surprises people to learn). Raw material costs will be effectively zero compared to the flight systems that must be built and operated. Use carbon fiber - it is the best material we have that we know how to actually make in quantity (and it is actually not much more expensive than Kevlar or Spectra).
... If we ever figure out how to control the structure of materials so that the strength of individual chemical bonds is preserved in bulk materials, then we would not only have stronger carbon fibers, but we would also have stronger steel.
It is a special case, but we do have well know examples of how to do this. They are crystals, which are atomically ordered on the macroscale. The manifestation of the strength inherent in the carbon-carbon bond on the macroscale is what bestows upon diamonds their remarkable properties. Single crystal macroscopic parts are manufactured in metallurgy also (turbine blades).
They are selling off all of their stockpiles except for just three materials: chromium, manganese, and tin.
Becoming a guaranteed buyer for a portion of the Mountain Pass production to get it into production and keep it there would see to be strategically desirable. Any rare earth stockpile could be used to prevent Chinese price warfare - either trying to shut down other producers again, or trying to strangle competing industries overseas that use rare earths (like now).
Appealing to the WTC is all very well, but being able to defeat economic warfare in the field is better.
Rebels didn't stop the US military in Vietnam. Ok, well they did
No they didn't. The actual rebels (armed and directed by North Vietnam) were essentially wiped out in their defeat at the Tet Offensive. After that insurgent activity dropped drastically and never recovered, and North Vietnam had to infiltrate North Vietnamese soldiers as "insurgents". The majority of U.S. casualties were in the northern provinces fighting North Vietnamese regulars and infiltrators. South Vietnam was defeated by a straight-up invasion by the North (the Easter Offensive). Note that the Viet Cong always had good supply lines from North Vietnam (and through them, from the Soviet Union).
but the US military rolled right over the "civvies" in Iraq, right?
Do you mean the 300,000 Iraqi army soldiers that went underground, with 250,000 tons of looted weapons from Army depots, when the Iraqi Army was disbanded? Not many "civvies" there.
Well no, but Russia sure made short work of the local resistance in Afghanistan, didn't they?
Indeed they did, until the U.S. started sending in billions of dollars in weapons through Pakistan, including the world's most advanced portable anti-aircraft missile.
None of your examples remotely resemble U.S. civilians trying to defeat the U.S. military.
I am sure glad you can account for homocie numbers by the drop in guns...
What I'd like to see is the overall homocide rate... Because when people get angry enough to kill they often switch weapons to those available like knives and such.
But you don't like to see it enough to type "australia homicide rate" into Google? Because if you do this very informative page is link number one: http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
Answer the overall homicide rate dropped to the lowest level on record: "The 253 murder and 29 manslaughter victims recorded in 2007 were the lowest annual number yet recorded." (The data ends in 2007.)
I'd like to point you at the difficulties out Armed Forces have had dominating unruly indigenous populations in the Middle East lately, when all the locals have are crappy beat decades-old AK-47 and home-made IEDs. With the weapons and training that a large fraction of the population has access to in the US, suppressing a rebellion here would be nearly impossible, even for the US Armed Forces.
Are you talking about Iraq? Where the entire Iraqi Army of 300,000 men was disbanded and vanished overnight with their weapons, and the weapons of looted depots (totaling 250,000 tons) across the country? Where the U.S. government lost track of 190,000 brand-new sparkly AK-47s intended for the new Iraqi Army? Where RPGs are so common that teenagers use them to guard grocery stores? Where the insurgents used mortars of all calibers (including very heavy ones) to attack U.S. forces even when in camp or in the Green Zone? Where those home-made IEDs were made of military plastic explosives?
Pray tell, where do U.S. citizens buy their superior weapons that out-class those Iraqi machine guns - light to heavy, mortars, RPGs, plastic explosive, etc.? Got a link?
Possession is nine tenths of the law. I don't care about the Palestinians if they're too weak or stupid to figure out how to take the land back either with themselves, or with the aid of the mighty Muslim ummah.
So you are actively encouraging the Palestinians to take up violence against Israel! Interesting position...
NB: If Israel wants to take possession of the West Bank, they need to give full citizenship rights to all of the Palestinians, otherwise they are not a democratic state but an apartheid regime.
the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls
Pray tell, where did you pull that one out of? Do you know how much prisoners earn per hour, and what is it that they do? Substantial proportion of GDP, my ass.
Although the GDP from prison labor is not great (the number of employed prisoners is small relative to the whole U.S. labor force), you should realize that your question is nonsensical. The contribution to the GDP is the value of what the prisoners produce. That value would be the same no matter how little they were paid. And in fact the average value of an hour of a prisoner's labor in 1998 was almost $15 (over $20 in today's money), despite prisoners being poorly motivated and compensated.
BTW: that a prisoner in a workshop produces on average $20 of wealth per hour, suggests how grotesquely inadequate the current minimum wage law of $7.50 really is.
There will come a time when robots and computers can handle all of our needs, and many of our wants without us needing to do the work. Eventually there is no reason why any person will need to work. Unfortunately, the way things are set up now when something is done more efficiently due to technology, the added profit goes to the top, and the no longer required worker gets a pink slip and no income.
Unfortunately my suspicion is that it will be managed "not going to be so great" until it gets so bad that we end up with outright revolution and war.
Indeed. We already see how corporate America, the American Second Estate (the plutocrats who substitute for the nobility of pre-revolutionary France), and their political agents are dealing with this developing scenario.
A decent share of the growth in worker productivity over the last 40 years has been, for the first time in American history, withheld from the workers so that their real wages are unchanged over an entire working lifetime, while health care and education costs have exploded, leaving average Americans with less living and disposable income than a generation ago. The worker's declining share of the GDP, which has naturally enough led to a declining relative contribution to some Federal tax revenues, has been met with a vicious cultural and political attack by the plutocracy denouncing the people who actually produce the nation's wealth as "parasites" (and worse), and efforts to accelerate the stripping away of social protections, even as they become more urgently needed.
We are already well into the "let them eat cake" phase.
The shrinking worker wage share of the GDP is principally due to two factors that came about at about the same time (1970 or soon after) and are related.
1. Gaming the system by corporate governance and the financial sector so that a tiny group at the top of the economic pyramid can, in effect, dictate their own compensation, and (surprise, surprise) are always adjusting their share upward.
2. The collapse of worker bargaining power - led by a concerted and sustained attack on unions, and emasculating most other worker protections by government (e.g the minimum wage in real terms has fallen by a third since 1968, even while the real per capita GDP has doubled).
3. Marijuana causes psychosis in healthy people...
Link please?
4. Marijuana is addictive. It's a hotly debated point but the fact is that many people really struggle to stop using it and relapse.
Meaning... you know there is no real support for this, but you want to throw it out there as a claim anyway. You do know that by this same standard tanning is addictive too, right?
Marijuana advocates reject all criticism, and assume all scientific studies are somehow flawed or are the result of anti-marijuana conspiracies. To them marijuana _has_ to be the perfect drug, even if reality contradicts that viewpoint. Sounds crazy, but it's roughly what you'd expect from people who are no longer living in our reality.
Looking glass time. You are describing your own rejection of scientific evidence.
The myth would be the claim that it is very different.
If you look at the charts two things stand out - that the most potent commonly consumed cannabis, sensimilla, has not changed in potency since 1990, that is more than twenty years. So this product is exactly the same as it has been for a couple of decades or more.
The second is that the generic "marijuana" has over the same time inched up by 80% over the same time, less than a single doubling, and is still half that of sensimilla of 20+ years ago.
Let me put this question to you: is a Sam Adams Boston Lager very different in its health and drug abuse risks than a Sam Adams Double Bock? The latter has 80% more alcohol than the former. You will not find anyone in the alcohol abuse treatment community claiming that alcoholic proof has the slightest bit of difference in the risk and harm of alcohol consumption.
A Bushmaster 223 isn't an exceptionally powerful rifle. Many prefer it because it is lightweight and very accurate. You may be thinking that it is fully automatic, but it's actually only semi-automatic rifle.
The most you need for any serious hunting is a bolt-action rifle.
Which probably weighs twice as much, so you can see why the Bushmaster is preferable.
Medium power cartridge - inadequate for long range shots against deer-sized game both in energy and accuracy, but very deadly at short range. Gas auto operation for rapid fire (as fast as you can pull the trigger), which also reduces recoil, again allowing rapid fire. Lightweight, yet with a heavy large capacity magazine.
This is a terrible choice for real hunting, where accurate, powerful long range shots are needed to bring down game with a clean kill, and you only need a couple of shots since your prey will flee if you have a couple of near misses.
It is great for its intended purpose - killing a room full of people (originally soldiers in a bunker) in a matter of seconds.
Assault rifles are pretty much illegal to own, and have been since before WW2.
Unlikley, since they were introduced during WWII. The first weapon to bear this designation was the German StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44, "storm" or "assault rifle" ) introduced in 1944.*
The characteristics of an assault rifle are: medium power cartridge (between a handgun and traditional rifle), semi-automatic operation, which both autoloads for rapid fire and (due to the gas or recoil operation) reduces recoil forces, and carries a large capacity magazine. These features create a weapon that can accurately fire a large volume of highly lethal rounds (at medium to short range) as fast the trigger can be pulled. In other words it is optimized for killing a large number of people in a very short time who are not far away. An optimized, purpose designed massacre weapon.
It doesn't matter what they look like, any weapon matching these characteristics is an assault rifle. They are a poor choice for hunting, the cartridges are not powerful enough for clean kills of large game, they are not accurate enough for long range shots, and any hunter that can't take his target in 2-3 rounds shouldn't be hunting.
* The very first rifle ever made that fit this description was the Russian Avtomat, after it was modified to use the lower power Arisue cartridge captured in quantity during the Russo-Japanese War. It is little more than an historical footnote however. Assault rifles were developed independently in Germany and then copied by the rest of the world after WWII.
...Pull that sucker out of her desk drawer, or handbag...
Because we just can't imagine how keeping loaded handguns in desk drawers and purses in a First Grade class could ever be a source of other problems....
Finally, and this is not a question of factual rightness or wrongness, attempting to negotiate an individual contract on your terms with Ebay, Comcast, Verizon, the electric company, the gas company, etc, etc, etc, is almost 100% guaranteed to be a failure. Your position with respect to the mega-corporation's position is so uneven as to be farcical.
Ah the fantasy world of Libertarians, where every prospective employee of Walmart negotiates their employment contract on an equal footing with the $250 billion corporation. There is a very good reason that some of the richest, most powerful Plutocrats in the world are ardent Libertarians and have spent billions on "think tank" fronts (like the Cato Institute, originally named the Koch Institute) pushing this bizarrely implausible imaginary world.
NB: Few people seem to realize just how rich and powerful the primary pushers of the Libertarian philosophy - the Koch brothers - really are. Forbes gives them a low-ball valuation of $25 billion each, entirely excluding their ownership shares of Koch Industries (42% each). Since Koch Industries has an annual revenue of $100 billion, and the normal market valuation of an diversified petroleum industrial corporation like this when traded is at least twice its revenue, between them they own assets worth at least $135 billion.
The reason I say this is because they have operations in which to work out of already in this area. I'd bet if the law was not such a bitch there would be more competition. If not from these companies then from startups.
Don't blame "the law" (though the corporations are delighted that you do). Blame the natural tendency of large corporations to form de facto cartels, unless "the law" prevents it. The big boys aren't competing because they can charge exorbitant rates for mediocre service by unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" dividing up the service areas. And only a group of really deep-pocket backers can hope to form any sort of "start-up" against the competition of the likes of Verizon, Comcast, Charter, etc.
You didn't even read the Nature abstract on the DNA degradation story. Not everywhere on Earth is like a New Zealand swamp. The researchers estimated that a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C would be readable out to 1.5 million years. And this is in the "almost ubiquitous" presence of ground water. On a very dry planet which has dry ice glaciers (average Martian surface temp -63 C) DNA and an oxygen-free atmosphere DNA should be preservable for very long times. And if there is still biological activity, however rare, it should leave behind very lingering DNA traces, if DNA based.
First, there are actually caves on Mars, some of which look like subsidence craters (caused by subsurface erosion). A life seeking probe (or a sample gathering minion) would likely be dispatched into one of these natural tunnels where the environment is perpetually sheltered from the sun and wind erosion. Drilling into the wall of the subsurface tunnel seems feasible and is getting rather deep into the Martian soil.
I am pretty sure that the most sensitive test in existence for the presence of life is the detection of DNA. A DNA sequencer is basically our best sensor for detecting life-as-we-know-it. It is light-years more advanced that the flask-culture experiment attempt on the Viking Probes back in the 1970s. If we are going to send probes to Mars to see if it has/ever had life sending our best life-detector only makes sense.
That all being said, however, Venter is once again vastly overambitious. 'Booting up' synthetic chromosomes only works in sufficiently similar chassis...
If you dig into this story just a little bit (look at the short piece from the Los Angeles Times linked in the summary, and follow its link to Technology Review's article), you will find what you should have suspected in the first place - this stuff about recreating Martian life on Earth is just the most sensationalistic footnote in a story that is really about detecting DNA on Mars.
The purpose of the sequencer is to find out if there is any DNA on Mars, the only way to do that in a convincing, scientifically useful way is to try to sequence it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the answer could not be "the quality of the science is not related to the source of funding"
It is widely understood in the scientific community that funding for a study is an important, relevant factor is considering its merits. Disclosure is considered essential, and scandals erupt regularly when a researcher conceals connections, including study funding, from a party that has a financial interest in the result.
Link to a supporting source please?
You aren't going to post one (not a credible scientific publication for sure) since this is entirely made up.
We do not have centuries of data about the extent of Martian ice caps, which vary considerably seasonally. Visual observations of planet from the Earth's surface are extremely difficult and give low resolution fuzzy images, and until well into the 20th century had to be sketched by hand. Remember those non-existent canals on Mars? That was typical for attempts at interpreting blurry indistinct features on the tiny visible orb.
To have any hope of estimating Martian ice cap coverage at even one point in time you need at least sufficient accurate observational data to draw up a map of Mars. The first such was not prepared until 1840, and one with sufficiently quality for any hope of a quantitative estimate of ice cap coverage was not until the opposition of 1887-1891. In fact good data about Martian ice caps only became available in the age of space probes.
The extent of nano-tube regulation in California was passing a bill (AB289) that authorizes the Department of Toxic Substances Control to request information on environmental and health impacts from nanotube manufacturers and importers. It was authorized to collect information from the industry to use in evaluating hazards and risks (a process completed in 2009).
That's it.
No ban. Not even any regulation at all, whatsoever.
And it seems perfectly reasonable for the DTSC to collect such information. It is not as if completely novel materials, to which humans and other living things have never before been exposed, have never shown any harmful effects.
The California hating automatic reflex - much easier than taking the trouble to actually learn things.
You have to take standard resource reserve estimates with a grain of salt. Unless they specifically analyze unconventional resources, and all resources at multiple price points above the present market price, you are getting an extremely conservative lower bound estimate on the real resources.
It would be remarkable if the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust (8.2%) would be so "limited in distribution". Bauxite is around 40% aluminum, a modest 5-fold enrichment over the crustal average, there are vast quantities of material (e.g. aluminum clays like kaolin) that are nearly as high, and a commercial production process is already being brought to market: http://www.ammg.com.au/download/IndMin%20-%20Meckering%20making%20alumina%20from%20kaolin%20-%20Sept%2012.pdf . In two hundred years exploiting other aluminum resources won't be a problem.
Spectra would be better (check your own link), and it costs about the same. But the bulk cost of the cable is not a significant cost in this project, any more than the fuel cost is in space launches (a fact that often surprises people to learn). Raw material costs will be effectively zero compared to the flight systems that must be built and operated. Use carbon fiber - it is the best material we have that we know how to actually make in quantity (and it is actually not much more expensive than Kevlar or Spectra).
... If we ever figure out how to control the structure of materials so that the strength of individual chemical bonds is preserved in bulk materials, then we would not only have stronger carbon fibers, but we would also have stronger steel.
It is a special case, but we do have well know examples of how to do this. They are crystals, which are atomically ordered on the macroscale. The manifestation of the strength inherent in the carbon-carbon bond on the macroscale is what bestows upon diamonds their remarkable properties. Single crystal macroscopic parts are manufactured in metallurgy also (turbine blades).
Well, not a lot of different materials any more.
If you look at their latest planning document: https://www.dnsc.dla.mil/Uploads/Materials/FY11%20Operations%20Report%20-%20Signed%2002-23-2012.pdf you will see they are in a "going out of business sale" mode for the most part.
They are selling off all of their stockpiles except for just three materials: chromium, manganese, and tin.
Becoming a guaranteed buyer for a portion of the Mountain Pass production to get it into production and keep it there would see to be strategically desirable. Any rare earth stockpile could be used to prevent Chinese price warfare - either trying to shut down other producers again, or trying to strangle competing industries overseas that use rare earths (like now).
Appealing to the WTC is all very well, but being able to defeat economic warfare in the field is better.
Rebels didn't stop the US military in Vietnam. Ok, well they did
No they didn't. The actual rebels (armed and directed by North Vietnam) were essentially wiped out in their defeat at the Tet Offensive. After that insurgent activity dropped drastically and never recovered, and North Vietnam had to infiltrate North Vietnamese soldiers as "insurgents". The majority of U.S. casualties were in the northern provinces fighting North Vietnamese regulars and infiltrators. South Vietnam was defeated by a straight-up invasion by the North (the Easter Offensive). Note that the Viet Cong always had good supply lines from North Vietnam (and through them, from the Soviet Union).
but the US military rolled right over the "civvies" in Iraq, right?
Do you mean the 300,000 Iraqi army soldiers that went underground, with 250,000 tons of looted weapons from Army depots, when the Iraqi Army was disbanded? Not many "civvies" there.
Well no, but Russia sure made short work of the local resistance in Afghanistan, didn't they?
Indeed they did, until the U.S. started sending in billions of dollars in weapons through Pakistan, including the world's most advanced portable anti-aircraft missile.
None of your examples remotely resemble U.S. civilians trying to defeat the U.S. military.
I am sure glad you can account for homocie numbers by the drop in guns...
What I'd like to see is the overall homocide rate... Because when people get angry enough to kill they often switch weapons to those available like knives and such.
But you don't like to see it enough to type "australia homicide rate" into Google? Because if you do this very informative page is link number one: http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
Answer the overall homicide rate dropped to the lowest level on record: "The 253 murder and 29 manslaughter victims recorded in 2007 were the lowest annual number yet recorded." (The data ends in 2007.)
Question: When, in American history has freedom ever been secured by privately-owned firearms?
Never. The Revolution was not secured until Congress bought a whole bunch of guns for the Continental Army....
And loaded them with gunpowder provided by the French government in a large scale smuggling operation through the Caribbean.
I'd like to point you at the difficulties out Armed Forces have had dominating unruly indigenous populations in the Middle East lately, when all the locals have are crappy beat decades-old AK-47 and home-made IEDs. With the weapons and training that a large fraction of the population has access to in the US, suppressing a rebellion here would be nearly impossible, even for the US Armed Forces.
Are you talking about Iraq? Where the entire Iraqi Army of 300,000 men was disbanded and vanished overnight with their weapons, and the weapons of looted depots (totaling 250,000 tons) across the country? Where the U.S. government lost track of 190,000 brand-new sparkly AK-47s intended for the new Iraqi Army? Where RPGs are so common that teenagers use them to guard grocery stores? Where the insurgents used mortars of all calibers (including very heavy ones) to attack U.S. forces even when in camp or in the Green Zone? Where those home-made IEDs were made of military plastic explosives?
Pray tell, where do U.S. citizens buy their superior weapons that out-class those Iraqi machine guns - light to heavy, mortars, RPGs, plastic explosive, etc.? Got a link?
Possession is nine tenths of the law. I don't care about the Palestinians if they're too weak or stupid to figure out how to take the land back either with themselves, or with the aid of the mighty Muslim ummah.
So you are actively encouraging the Palestinians to take up violence against Israel! Interesting position...
NB: If Israel wants to take possession of the West Bank, they need to give full citizenship rights to all of the Palestinians, otherwise they are not a democratic state but an apartheid regime.
the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls
Pray tell, where did you pull that one out of? Do you know how much prisoners earn per hour, and what is it that they do? Substantial proportion of GDP, my ass.
Although the GDP from prison labor is not great (the number of employed prisoners is small relative to the whole U.S. labor force), you should realize that your question is nonsensical. The contribution to the GDP is the value of what the prisoners produce. That value would be the same no matter how little they were paid. And in fact the average value of an hour of a prisoner's labor in 1998 was almost $15 (over $20 in today's money), despite prisoners being poorly motivated and compensated.
See The Economics of Inmate Labor Participation.
BTW: that a prisoner in a workshop produces on average $20 of wealth per hour, suggests how grotesquely inadequate the current minimum wage law of $7.50 really is.
There will come a time when robots and computers can handle all of our needs, and many of our wants without us needing to do the work. Eventually there is no reason why any person will need to work. Unfortunately, the way things are set up now when something is done more efficiently due to technology, the added profit goes to the top, and the no longer required worker gets a pink slip and no income.
Unfortunately my suspicion is that it will be managed "not going to be so great" until it gets so bad that we end up with outright revolution and war.
Indeed. We already see how corporate America, the American Second Estate (the plutocrats who substitute for the nobility of pre-revolutionary France), and their political agents are dealing with this developing scenario.
A decent share of the growth in worker productivity over the last 40 years has been, for the first time in American history, withheld from the workers so that their real wages are unchanged over an entire working lifetime, while health care and education costs have exploded, leaving average Americans with less living and disposable income than a generation ago. The worker's declining share of the GDP, which has naturally enough led to a declining relative contribution to some Federal tax revenues, has been met with a vicious cultural and political attack by the plutocracy denouncing the people who actually produce the nation's wealth as "parasites" (and worse), and efforts to accelerate the stripping away of social protections, even as they become more urgently needed.
We are already well into the "let them eat cake" phase.
The shrinking worker wage share of the GDP is principally due to two factors that came about at about the same time (1970 or soon after) and are related.
1. Gaming the system by corporate governance and the financial sector so that a tiny group at the top of the economic pyramid can, in effect, dictate their own compensation, and (surprise, surprise) are always adjusting their share upward.
2. The collapse of worker bargaining power - led by a concerted and sustained attack on unions, and emasculating most other worker protections by government (e.g the minimum wage in real terms has fallen by a third since 1968, even while the real per capita GDP has doubled).
There are many existing studies that have already proven several things about marijuana use:
1. Smoking (anything) raises your risk of oral and lung cancers, including marijuana.
In fact studies show the opposite for marijuana.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=large-study-finds-no-link
Cannabis smoking appears to protect against lung cancer. This study is now seven years old, and an even larger one fifteen years ago found the same thing:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1018427320658
Can't be cannabis interfering with your ability to process information. I guess we will just have to chalk it up to prejudice and willful ignorance.
3. Marijuana causes psychosis in healthy people...
Link please?
4. Marijuana is addictive. It's a hotly debated point but the fact is that many people really struggle to stop using it and relapse.
Meaning... you know there is no real support for this, but you want to throw it out there as a claim anyway. You do know that by this same standard tanning is addictive too, right?
Marijuana advocates reject all criticism, and assume all scientific studies are somehow flawed or are the result of anti-marijuana conspiracies. To them marijuana _has_ to be the perfect drug, even if reality contradicts that viewpoint. Sounds crazy, but it's roughly what you'd expect from people who are no longer living in our reality.
Looking glass time. You are describing your own rejection of scientific evidence.
The myth would be the claim that it is very different.
If you look at the charts two things stand out - that the most potent commonly consumed cannabis, sensimilla, has not changed in potency since 1990, that is more than twenty years. So this product is exactly the same as it has been for a couple of decades or more.
The second is that the generic "marijuana" has over the same time inched up by 80% over the same time, less than a single doubling, and is still half that of sensimilla of 20+ years ago.
Let me put this question to you: is a Sam Adams Boston Lager very different in its health and drug abuse risks than a Sam Adams Double Bock? The latter has 80% more alcohol than the former. You will not find anyone in the alcohol abuse treatment community claiming that alcoholic proof has the slightest bit of difference in the risk and harm of alcohol consumption.
A Bushmaster 223 isn't an exceptionally powerful rifle. Many prefer it because it is lightweight and very accurate. You may be thinking that it is fully automatic, but it's actually only semi-automatic rifle.
Which probably weighs twice as much, so you can see why the Bushmaster is preferable.
Medium power cartridge - inadequate for long range shots against deer-sized game both in energy and accuracy, but very deadly at short range. Gas auto operation for rapid fire (as fast as you can pull the trigger), which also reduces recoil, again allowing rapid fire. Lightweight, yet with a heavy large capacity magazine.
This is a terrible choice for real hunting, where accurate, powerful long range shots are needed to bring down game with a clean kill, and you only need a couple of shots since your prey will flee if you have a couple of near misses.
It is great for its intended purpose - killing a room full of people (originally soldiers in a bunker) in a matter of seconds.
Assault rifles are pretty much illegal to own, and have been since before WW2.
Unlikley, since they were introduced during WWII. The first weapon to bear this designation was the German StG 44 (Sturmgewehr 44, "storm" or "assault rifle" ) introduced in 1944.*
The characteristics of an assault rifle are: medium power cartridge (between a handgun and traditional rifle), semi-automatic operation, which both autoloads for rapid fire and (due to the gas or recoil operation) reduces recoil forces, and carries a large capacity magazine. These features create a weapon that can accurately fire a large volume of highly lethal rounds (at medium to short range) as fast the trigger can be pulled. In other words it is optimized for killing a large number of people in a very short time who are not far away. An optimized, purpose designed massacre weapon.
It doesn't matter what they look like, any weapon matching these characteristics is an assault rifle. They are a poor choice for hunting, the cartridges are not powerful enough for clean kills of large game, they are not accurate enough for long range shots, and any hunter that can't take his target in 2-3 rounds shouldn't be hunting.
* The very first rifle ever made that fit this description was the Russian Avtomat, after it was modified to use the lower power Arisue cartridge captured in quantity during the Russo-Japanese War. It is little more than an historical footnote however. Assault rifles were developed independently in Germany and then copied by the rest of the world after WWII.
...Pull that sucker out of her desk drawer, or handbag...
Because we just can't imagine how keeping loaded handguns in desk drawers and purses in a First Grade class could ever be a source of other problems....
Finally, and this is not a question of factual rightness or wrongness, attempting to negotiate an individual contract on your terms with Ebay, Comcast, Verizon, the electric company, the gas company, etc, etc, etc, is almost 100% guaranteed to be a failure. Your position with respect to the mega-corporation's position is so uneven as to be farcical.
Ah the fantasy world of Libertarians, where every prospective employee of Walmart negotiates their employment contract on an equal footing with the $250 billion corporation. There is a very good reason that some of the richest, most powerful Plutocrats in the world are ardent Libertarians and have spent billions on "think tank" fronts (like the Cato Institute, originally named the Koch Institute) pushing this bizarrely implausible imaginary world.
NB: Few people seem to realize just how rich and powerful the primary pushers of the Libertarian philosophy - the Koch brothers - really are. Forbes gives them a low-ball valuation of $25 billion each, entirely excluding their ownership shares of Koch Industries (42% each). Since Koch Industries has an annual revenue of $100 billion, and the normal market valuation of an diversified petroleum industrial corporation like this when traded is at least twice its revenue, between them they own assets worth at least $135 billion.
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The reason I say this is because they have operations in which to work out of already in this area. I'd bet if the law was not such a bitch there would be more competition. If not from these companies then from startups.
Don't blame "the law" (though the corporations are delighted that you do). Blame the natural tendency of large corporations to form de facto cartels, unless "the law" prevents it. The big boys aren't competing because they can charge exorbitant rates for mediocre service by unwritten "gentlemen's agreements" dividing up the service areas. And only a group of really deep-pocket backers can hope to form any sort of "start-up" against the competition of the likes of Verizon, Comcast, Charter, etc.
You didn't even read the Nature abstract on the DNA degradation story. Not everywhere on Earth is like a New Zealand swamp. The researchers estimated that a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of 5 C would be readable out to 1.5 million years. And this is in the "almost ubiquitous" presence of ground water. On a very dry planet which has dry ice glaciers (average Martian surface temp -63 C) DNA and an oxygen-free atmosphere DNA should be preservable for very long times. And if there is still biological activity, however rare, it should leave behind very lingering DNA traces, if DNA based.
Two points.
First, there are actually caves on Mars, some of which look like subsidence craters (caused by subsurface erosion). A life seeking probe (or a sample gathering minion) would likely be dispatched into one of these natural tunnels where the environment is perpetually sheltered from the sun and wind erosion. Drilling into the wall of the subsurface tunnel seems feasible and is getting rather deep into the Martian soil.
I am pretty sure that the most sensitive test in existence for the presence of life is the detection of DNA. A DNA sequencer is basically our best sensor for detecting life-as-we-know-it. It is light-years more advanced that the flask-culture experiment attempt on the Viking Probes back in the 1970s. If we are going to send probes to Mars to see if it has/ever had life sending our best life-detector only makes sense.
That all being said, however, Venter is once again vastly overambitious. 'Booting up' synthetic chromosomes only works in sufficiently similar chassis...
If you dig into this story just a little bit (look at the short piece from the Los Angeles Times linked in the summary, and follow its link to Technology Review's article), you will find what you should have suspected in the first place - this stuff about recreating Martian life on Earth is just the most sensationalistic footnote in a story that is really about detecting DNA on Mars.
The purpose of the sequencer is to find out if there is any DNA on Mars, the only way to do that in a convincing, scientifically useful way is to try to sequence it.