Y'know, you're making my brain hurt. Let's do this in order.
1: *ALL* States have a constitution of their own, that defines the powers that the persons of the state endowed their government with. I do believe that all 50 states (or, 48 states and 2 commonwealths) currently have constitutions that were based on the federal constitution, and whose current form was adopted after Washington took office. (Some many times; NY's current Constitution, for example, is, IIRC, less than 100 years old.)
2: The states, while seperate, are *NOT* sovereign. Each state is subject to the law of the US Constitution, which explicity notes certian things that can be done only by the states or that cannot be done by any state.
3: The current "Real ID" law is, to my understanding, based in the twin areas of interstate trade and national security, both firmly vested in the federal government. If you don't mind never getting a passport and never taking the plane, you can probably avoid entering into this database--although there will be a fair bit of hardship on your part.
4: You are *already* required to identify yourself when you board a plane, when you get a passport, and when you do any of the other things that you would use RealID for. The federal government *already* can track and aggregate all of the information that it or any government in the United States collects on you. And, ALL of this information is protected by the same kind of legal protection that your yearly tax forms are protected by--and trust me, the government knows FAR more about you from your taxes than they can get from your driver's license.
5: It's worth noting that, if there's only one place where all of your information is stored by the government, then realistically you will be able to use this to much more effectively defeat identity theft. Prove to one federal judge (or even a state judge...) that you are the real CygnusXII and that other guy in Pittsfield is a fraud, and it's a done deal.
The fundamental philosophy of the most vocal group of "environmentalists" is that I should treat the planet (or something) as being more important than human life.
Kindly name them. I'd LOVE to see an official quote where PETA says that we should kill humans to make room for wolves.
Political Environmentalists hold the historically shocking assertion that preventing damage to the biosphere* is more important than human profit. If you take even the most outrageous environmentalist group large enough to be counted as a "vocal group", you can see what they're opposed to as the profit of some other humans.
Against fossil fuels? Because they damage the biosphere for human profit.
Against medical testing? Because they harm animals for human profit.
(About that word, "biosphere." While you can go ahead and look it up if you don't know what it means, it's probably fair to say that some "environmetnalists" have some odd ideas about what counts as "life" and what counts as "profit.")
Note: some very specialized printers are designed to allow page-flipping; so make sure that the printer documentation explicitly states so.
Read "some very specialized printers" as "almost any laser printer sold in the last ten years."
To be blunt, the way to tell if your manufacturer supports it is to ask them. Some very cheap, commercial-quality printers do this just fine. (The $150 Brother HL-1440 I use not only doesn't have a problem, but includeds a duplex printing mode in its drivers.)
Oh, and it's not @#$!ing "ink". It's "toner." Ink is a liquid, that, in "inkjets", permeates quite a bit deeper into the paper than tonor-flakes.
Of course (TANGENT ALERT!), the remaining reference to "natural phenomena" still precludes even the question "is computer science a science?"
CompSci, as it is practiced by most of those who read/. or who were in a "Computer Science" program at college, is no more a science than politics or history are sciences.
Now, there is science that relates to each of these fields, and there really is a "computing science" area of study, but however much the rest of it may be parsimonious and community-based, it isn't science.
I expect that would cross the line of States Rights.
ONLY if the Federal goverment tried to require it. A state could as easily upgrade their driver's license as issue new "travel permits" or simply not change their current system.
And let's not forget that the feds will probably allot some funding for states who want to upgrade their driver's licensing systems, or the fact that a universal ID is a good thing for the state.
FWIW, though, if you think that being easily identified is an encroachment on your civil liberties, you've likely lived your entire life enjoying the freedoms that others fought and died for. Having to say who you are is hardly an onerous restriction.
I strongly suspect that's bullshit Americans tell themselves to feel better about having killed so many civilians.
You'd suspect wrong.
Us Americans don't feel bad about having whiped out Nagasaki or Hiroshima with a single bomb. After all, it was just a quicker way of the same thing we did to Tokyo and Berlin.
But if the USA didn't have the Manhattan project, or if we didn't think the Germans had one, we might not have had such fierce opposition to them. We may have sued for peace with Germany rather than invade--and if we had done that, at the right time, there'd likely still be a cold war going on.
Clarify of political vision does not equate with political effectiveness.
More to the point, by showing that Einstein *was* concerned with poltics you only prove my point--that if he had devoted himself to politics, he would not have had that much more of an effect than he did.
The fact of the matter is that we *had* a means by which to prevent war. And then it failed, and so we tried it again--and while the UN has prevented WWIII, it hasn't "prevented war" by anyone's measure.
Neither Einstein nor Freud had sufficient understanding of the human species to do this. I'm not sure that anyone did, but I am rather sure that if both of these men had spent their entire lives working towards this one direct end, we wouldn't be any closer than we are today.
(And while I'm on that point, Einstein's involvement in the atom bomb *did* help end war...)
Soyuz puts the shuttle to shame in the reliability department for example.
Not unless they're using them in some fashion I'm not aware of.
A Soyuz--or any other similar design--is used once. Then the car-sized bit that you have left is either given to a museum or sold for scrap, and you make yourself a new one.
The Shuttle isn't less reliable than the Soyuz--it's just far more usable, and hell of a lot bigger.
(FWIW, the way of the future is amazingly like what the shuttle should have been--a resuable person-lifter, not a heavy-lifter that lets folk sit in the cabin.)
With all the miraculous things he did for the world in the realm of science, one wonders what we'd have if he'd devoted his mind to politics, or computers.
Politics: Not that much. At best, we'd have no nuclear bombs and another dead jew in Germany. (Or, at most, we might have entered WWII earlier, but with no A-bomb we'd still be fighting it...)
Computers: Diddly. Einstein's genius was seeing the correlation between things, not the minutae of math. He would have sucked at the personnal computer.
For example, window title bars consume too way much real estate, which really interferes with MDI applications like Paint Shop Pro.
Wait for it--not everyone uses MDI.
Oh, and not everyone uses their PC in the same way. For the same thing.
And there are some folk who have bad eyesight, and for these folk having a 100-pixel title bar *is* a good thing.
Most major companies I've seen gold-disk their XP Pro boxes with crayola turned OFF.
That may be for the simple reason that it speeds up their machines. Nothing more, nothing less. Well, that and the fact that it looks like Win2k, which lowers their "yes, X is now at Y" calls.
Actually, IT is exactly where people like that belong. I think your opinion of IT might be a little out of touch with reality.
Just because they're there doesn't mean that they should be.
An IT person--that is, not a sequestered back-end code monkey, but someone who provides an IT service to someone who has to actually use their computer for a job that would get done by hand if not for the PC--needs to be able to evaluate productivity and utility based on what the user actually does and actually needs.
While I have not read the paper you mention completely enough yet to understand its argument, let me point out the obvious fact that nature, by definition, "simulates itself," i.e. is its own computer.
You're misusing that first word.
A "simulation" is a testable model of something, usually created for a specific kind of testing, that specifically is NOT the thing itself. By way of example, consider "simulating" adding numbers on a computer chip. Most of the time you wouldn't bother doing it, because it's easier just to actually add them.
But you could "simulate", oh, a computer chip running a very-complex program, just by having it do something that's needlessly complex. (Like, oh, performing random operations on a random number of a random size.)
When you start dealing with Quantum Mechanics, it's important to stop every now and again, and remember that what we have for QM is a *simulation* -- i.e., in certain fundamental ways it's simply wrong, but the wrongness is OK because we don't need to know everything about how a process works for that process to work, or even to come up with a new process.
Can Open Source software be copywrited or have patents?
Yes. In fact, OSS operates on copyright law--the GPL has no effect if no copyright is exerted. (And a Public-Domain OSS project that uses GPL'd code would be, well, in violation of the GPL...)
Patents, OTOH, require a sizable investment to procure. So most OSS projects don't bother.
It seems like AOL is stealing a feature of an Open Source product. With all the big companies suing smaller ones for the same thing, who is going to protect the open source software?
There is a very, VERY limited area in which you can claim IP protection for the design of a computer program.
Apple and Microsoft waged a lawsuit battle way back in the early 1980s about exactly this matter, and Apple lost--seeing someone else's work and then copying it is perfectly OK, unless they have an eforceable patent on it.
Both OSS and non-OSS have been copying broad designs and layouts from each other for years. If this weren't possible, we'd all still be using ICQ for instant messaging. (Well, *I* still am, but that's a whole different story.)
So, what's to prevent the engaging ship from detonating weapons in six to eight positions relative to where they think the target is, so that if the target moves they still end up destroying it?
The same thing that prevents them from doing that now, only moreso.
That is, too much time and energy spent wasting shots--each of which gives a real clear fix on your position.
Somehow, I doubt that. A tactical spacecraft--at the current, only an ICBM or slimiar missle--will be nothing but manuvering, with an unusually high allotment of its weight given over to course correction.
It won't be Star Wars, but it won't be interplanetary pool, either.
Even if all 10^7 lines of code could be thoroughly stabilitized today, it could get completely broken tomorrow because MS would come out with a new version of.doc.
Except that MS cannot do that.
If Word 2005 had a brand-new format, they would lose their biggest selling point to have everyone who uses Word 2000, XP, or 2003--the constant.DOC format
And MS *did* introduce a new format in 2003. WordML, an ugly XML format, that OOo *already* has an importer for. MS breaking DOC isn't just an urban legend--it's a straw-man argument akin to saying that MS might move to an all-new language for their UI, and everyone who speaks English will be out of luck.
I can't comment on the complexity of OOo, but since there isn't an OSS alternative that even gets the Word-Processing part in the same leauge, I'd say that an argument that "OOo is big because of DOC" is a bit premaure. Maybe they're just big because doing all of the things that folk expect a word processor to do requires a LOT of code.
I've bashed OOo in the past, but you're wrong on two of three points.
Monolithic Design
The OSS world *needs* a consistent set of office-suite apps. Preferrably as many as necessary, sharing as much as they care to. There are lots of word processors, and spreadsheets, and all that, but if you can't take your extant intermingled data and toss it to and fro, or teach your entire bundle in a single one-week course to a bunch of users, your application is needlessly expansive.
Would it be good if OOo was more modular in its implementation? Sure. Would it be better if it was more eglitarian in design? No.
Formats
OOo is not "designed" to run.DOCs. It happens to run them, because it has spent a goodly ammount of time on understanding the format and implementing all of the features that DOC was hacked to use.
But OOo doesn't need to use DOCs, it doesn't natively use DOCs, and it sure as heck isn't going to die suddenly if MS changes DOC. The OOo native format *was* a neat compressed XML folder, and now it's an open-standard format that a whole bunch of other OSS programs said they're going to support.
the fact is, I would be using OOo and singing its praises, if not for two things that are so far out of their project's scope that it's unrealistic to expect them to support it. (The first is a palm format, the second is a bunch of MS-office macros that make my writing easier.)
Seems to me it's a very inefficient interface...requiring large arm-waving motions to do menial tasks like moving windows
it is. But it wasn't designed to be a computer UI. It was designed to work with the thought-process of the user.
Have you ever stood up and walked to think? Ever wanted to guesture and put something on the wall?
It's a useful technology. Not one that you'd use next to your keyboard, but one that you'd use to direct a media stream or command a hundred distinct fire-teams.
And when we drill all the way down to the mantle, it's more likely that we'll have a hole that itself is pressurized (and thus able to, y'know, fit drilling equipment) than a hole that fills up with rock and dirt as we drill down.
and opening a hole will relieve that pressure and cause a large amount of it to flow out?
Why, yes, that can happen. Mind you, "large" is only on the human scale, and this is hardly an unusual circumstance.
What is essetnially (but not actually) mantle-juice flows out onto the crust on a somewhat irregular basis. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's quite specatcular when molten rock et al flow out.
As for a "large ammount" -- us drilling into the mantle is like us sticking a very large straw into the ocean. Sure, the water down at the bottom is under pressure, and it will shoot up the straw if we let it. But the ocean certainly isn't going anywhere.
Any fool can bolt together an 80 mpg vehicle, the third world is full of the damn things. I have no objection to hybrids or non-petroleum engines per se, its just that this pretence that they are somehow cool irritates me.
I find it shocking, not that you think that maximizing fuel economy requires less skill than making a car as fast as you can, but that you hold this idea and you're reading Slashdot.
There's nothing unbelievable about the technology needed to get a car to 300, 400, or 500 miles per hour. A high school education and a sufficient budget will let you compete within 10% of the best in the world.
"Unbelievable" is cars that travel for hundreds of miles on a gallon of gasoline, vechicles that break the sound barrier, or the technology that lets you ignite ten stories of fuel and stay in a straight line.
And as for drag racing--it's a mock test that is about a good a means to drive advances in automotive technology as testing by engine noise. And, ethically speaking, they're the equivalent of spectacle rape. (The massive crowds that go to drag racing or NASCAR don't go to see finely tuned machines. They go because they hope to see a high-speed crash.)
I was under the impression cops need evidence before arresting you.
No, they need to charge you with something. And if they do it without reasonable procedure and belief, you can often sue the individual police offficer for harassment (and, in some cases, even apply a claim against the government he or she works for.)
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, you're making my brain hurt. Let's do this in order.
1: *ALL* States have a constitution of their own, that defines the powers that the persons of the state endowed their government with. I do believe that all 50 states (or, 48 states and 2 commonwealths) currently have constitutions that were based on the federal constitution, and whose current form was adopted after Washington took office. (Some many times; NY's current Constitution, for example, is, IIRC, less than 100 years old.)
2: The states, while seperate, are *NOT* sovereign. Each state is subject to the law of the US Constitution, which explicity notes certian things that can be done only by the states or that cannot be done by any state.
3: The current "Real ID" law is, to my understanding, based in the twin areas of interstate trade and national security, both firmly vested in the federal government. If you don't mind never getting a passport and never taking the plane, you can probably avoid entering into this database--although there will be a fair bit of hardship on your part.
4: You are *already* required to identify yourself when you board a plane, when you get a passport, and when you do any of the other things that you would use RealID for. The federal government *already* can track and aggregate all of the information that it or any government in the United States collects on you. And, ALL of this information is protected by the same kind of legal protection that your yearly tax forms are protected by--and trust me, the government knows FAR more about you from your taxes than they can get from your driver's license.
5: It's worth noting that, if there's only one place where all of your information is stored by the government, then realistically you will be able to use this to much more effectively defeat identity theft. Prove to one federal judge (or even a state judge...) that you are the real CygnusXII and that other guy in Pittsfield is a fraud, and it's a done deal.
The fundamental philosophy of the most vocal group of "environmentalists" is that I should treat the planet (or something) as being more important than human life.
Kindly name them. I'd LOVE to see an official quote where PETA says that we should kill humans to make room for wolves.
Political Environmentalists hold the historically shocking assertion that preventing damage to the biosphere* is more important than human profit. If you take even the most outrageous environmentalist group large enough to be counted as a "vocal group", you can see what they're opposed to as the profit of some other humans.
Against fossil fuels? Because they damage the biosphere for human profit.
Against medical testing? Because they harm animals for human profit.
(About that word, "biosphere." While you can go ahead and look it up if you don't know what it means, it's probably fair to say that some "environmetnalists" have some odd ideas about what counts as "life" and what counts as "profit.")
Note: some very specialized printers are designed to allow page-flipping; so make sure that the printer documentation explicitly states so.
Read "some very specialized printers" as "almost any laser printer sold in the last ten years."
To be blunt, the way to tell if your manufacturer supports it is to ask them. Some very cheap, commercial-quality printers do this just fine. (The $150 Brother HL-1440 I use not only doesn't have a problem, but includeds a duplex printing mode in its drivers.)
Oh, and it's not @#$!ing "ink". It's "toner." Ink is a liquid, that, in "inkjets", permeates quite a bit deeper into the paper than tonor-flakes.
Of course (TANGENT ALERT!), the remaining reference to "natural phenomena" still precludes even the question "is computer science a science?"
/. or who were in a "Computer Science" program at college, is no more a science than politics or history are sciences.
CompSci, as it is practiced by most of those who read
Now, there is science that relates to each of these fields, and there really is a "computing science" area of study, but however much the rest of it may be parsimonious and community-based, it isn't science.
I expect that would cross the line of States Rights.
ONLY if the Federal goverment tried to require it. A state could as easily upgrade their driver's license as issue new "travel permits" or simply not change their current system.
And let's not forget that the feds will probably allot some funding for states who want to upgrade their driver's licensing systems, or the fact that a universal ID is a good thing for the state.
FWIW, though, if you think that being easily identified is an encroachment on your civil liberties, you've likely lived your entire life enjoying the freedoms that others fought and died for. Having to say who you are is hardly an onerous restriction.
I strongly suspect that's bullshit Americans tell themselves to feel better about having killed so many civilians.
You'd suspect wrong.
Us Americans don't feel bad about having whiped out Nagasaki or Hiroshima with a single bomb. After all, it was just a quicker way of the same thing we did to Tokyo and Berlin.
But if the USA didn't have the Manhattan project, or if we didn't think the Germans had one, we might not have had such fierce opposition to them. We may have sued for peace with Germany rather than invade--and if we had done that, at the right time, there'd likely still be a cold war going on.
"Not that much" is really lowballing it.
Clarify of political vision does not equate with political effectiveness.
More to the point, by showing that Einstein *was* concerned with poltics you only prove my point--that if he had devoted himself to politics, he would not have had that much more of an effect than he did.
The fact of the matter is that we *had* a means by which to prevent war. And then it failed, and so we tried it again--and while the UN has prevented WWIII, it hasn't "prevented war" by anyone's measure.
Neither Einstein nor Freud had sufficient understanding of the human species to do this. I'm not sure that anyone did, but I am rather sure that if both of these men had spent their entire lives working towards this one direct end, we wouldn't be any closer than we are today.
(And while I'm on that point, Einstein's involvement in the atom bomb *did* help end war...)
Soyuz puts the shuttle to shame in the reliability department for example.
Not unless they're using them in some fashion I'm not aware of.
A Soyuz--or any other similar design--is used once. Then the car-sized bit that you have left is either given to a museum or sold for scrap, and you make yourself a new one.
The Shuttle isn't less reliable than the Soyuz--it's just far more usable, and hell of a lot bigger.
(FWIW, the way of the future is amazingly like what the shuttle should have been--a resuable person-lifter, not a heavy-lifter that lets folk sit in the cabin.)
With all the miraculous things he did for the world in the realm of science, one wonders what we'd have if he'd devoted his mind to politics, or computers.
Politics: Not that much. At best, we'd have no nuclear bombs and another dead jew in Germany. (Or, at most, we might have entered WWII earlier, but with no A-bomb we'd still be fighting it...)
Computers: Diddly. Einstein's genius was seeing the correlation between things, not the minutae of math. He would have sucked at the personnal computer.
For example, window title bars consume too way much real estate, which really interferes with MDI applications like Paint Shop Pro.
Wait for it--not everyone uses MDI.
Oh, and not everyone uses their PC in the same way. For the same thing.
And there are some folk who have bad eyesight, and for these folk having a 100-pixel title bar *is* a good thing.
Most major companies I've seen gold-disk their XP Pro boxes with crayola turned OFF.
That may be for the simple reason that it speeds up their machines. Nothing more, nothing less. Well, that and the fact that it looks like Win2k, which lowers their "yes, X is now at Y" calls.
Actually, IT is exactly where people like that belong. I think your opinion of IT might be a little out of touch with reality.
Just because they're there doesn't mean that they should be.
An IT person--that is, not a sequestered back-end code monkey, but someone who provides an IT service to someone who has to actually use their computer for a job that would get done by hand if not for the PC--needs to be able to evaluate productivity and utility based on what the user actually does and actually needs.
BOFH may be funny, but he shouldn't be in IT.
By, oh, ignoring the theme and focusing on the work?
If you judge someone by their theme, then you really shouldn't be in IT.
While I have not read the paper you mention completely enough yet to understand its argument, let me point out the obvious fact that nature, by definition, "simulates itself," i.e. is its own computer.
You're misusing that first word.
A "simulation" is a testable model of something, usually created for a specific kind of testing, that specifically is NOT the thing itself. By way of example, consider "simulating" adding numbers on a computer chip. Most of the time you wouldn't bother doing it, because it's easier just to actually add them.
But you could "simulate", oh, a computer chip running a very-complex program, just by having it do something that's needlessly complex. (Like, oh, performing random operations on a random number of a random size.)
When you start dealing with Quantum Mechanics, it's important to stop every now and again, and remember that what we have for QM is a *simulation* -- i.e., in certain fundamental ways it's simply wrong, but the wrongness is OK because we don't need to know everything about how a process works for that process to work, or even to come up with a new process.
Can Open Source software be copywrited or have patents?
Yes. In fact, OSS operates on copyright law--the GPL has no effect if no copyright is exerted. (And a Public-Domain OSS project that uses GPL'd code would be, well, in violation of the GPL...)
Patents, OTOH, require a sizable investment to procure. So most OSS projects don't bother.
It seems like AOL is stealing a feature of an Open Source product. With all the big companies suing smaller ones for the same thing, who is going to protect the open source software?
There is a very, VERY limited area in which you can claim IP protection for the design of a computer program.
Apple and Microsoft waged a lawsuit battle way back in the early 1980s about exactly this matter, and Apple lost--seeing someone else's work and then copying it is perfectly OK, unless they have an eforceable patent on it.
Both OSS and non-OSS have been copying broad designs and layouts from each other for years. If this weren't possible, we'd all still be using ICQ for instant messaging. (Well, *I* still am, but that's a whole different story.)
So, what's to prevent the engaging ship from detonating weapons in six to eight positions relative to where they think the target is, so that if the target moves they still end up destroying it?
The same thing that prevents them from doing that now, only moreso.
That is, too much time and energy spent wasting shots--each of which gives a real clear fix on your position.
It's just you.
Or, more specifically, it's the crappy tape drive you used for backup.
Real space battles will be boring as hell.
Somehow, I doubt that. A tactical spacecraft--at the current, only an ICBM or slimiar missle--will be nothing but manuvering, with an unusually high allotment of its weight given over to course correction.
It won't be Star Wars, but it won't be interplanetary pool, either.
Even if all 10^7 lines of code could be thoroughly stabilitized today, it could get completely broken tomorrow because MS would come out with a new version of .doc.
.DOC format
Except that MS cannot do that.
If Word 2005 had a brand-new format, they would lose their biggest selling point to have everyone who uses Word 2000, XP, or 2003--the constant
And MS *did* introduce a new format in 2003. WordML, an ugly XML format, that OOo *already* has an importer for. MS breaking DOC isn't just an urban legend--it's a straw-man argument akin to saying that MS might move to an all-new language for their UI, and everyone who speaks English will be out of luck.
I can't comment on the complexity of OOo, but since there isn't an OSS alternative that even gets the Word-Processing part in the same leauge, I'd say that an argument that "OOo is big because of DOC" is a bit premaure. Maybe they're just big because doing all of the things that folk expect a word processor to do requires a LOT of code.
I've bashed OOo in the past, but you're wrong on two of three points.
.DOCs. It happens to run them, because it has spent a goodly ammount of time on understanding the format and implementing all of the features that DOC was hacked to use.
Monolithic Design
The OSS world *needs* a consistent set of office-suite apps. Preferrably as many as necessary, sharing as much as they care to. There are lots of word processors, and spreadsheets, and all that, but if you can't take your extant intermingled data and toss it to and fro, or teach your entire bundle in a single one-week course to a bunch of users, your application is needlessly expansive.
Would it be good if OOo was more modular in its implementation? Sure. Would it be better if it was more eglitarian in design? No.
Formats
OOo is not "designed" to run
But OOo doesn't need to use DOCs, it doesn't natively use DOCs, and it sure as heck isn't going to die suddenly if MS changes DOC. The OOo native format *was* a neat compressed XML folder, and now it's an open-standard format that a whole bunch of other OSS programs said they're going to support.
the fact is, I would be using OOo and singing its praises, if not for two things that are so far out of their project's scope that it's unrealistic to expect them to support it. (The first is a palm format, the second is a bunch of MS-office macros that make my writing easier.)
Seems to me it's a very inefficient interface...requiring large arm-waving motions to do menial tasks like moving windows
it is. But it wasn't designed to be a computer UI. It was designed to work with the thought-process of the user.
Have you ever stood up and walked to think? Ever wanted to guesture and put something on the wall?
It's a useful technology. Not one that you'd use next to your keyboard, but one that you'd use to direct a media stream or command a hundred distinct fire-teams.
The reason nobody other than watermellons like yourself can be bothered with fuel economy trials is that they are BORING.
Who the hell said anything about fuel economy trials?
Hybrid fanatics keep a real-world measurement, by driving their car and noting how little gas they put into it.
Being able to hit a dime at 100 yards without a scope. Fun to do, but boring to watch.
No, not really. Expert marksmanship is quite facinating, it's just not scalable like expectant-slaughter.
The only exception is...
Yes, braniac.
And when we drill all the way down to the mantle, it's more likely that we'll have a hole that itself is pressurized (and thus able to, y'know, fit drilling equipment) than a hole that fills up with rock and dirt as we drill down.
and opening a hole will relieve that pressure and cause a large amount of it to flow out?
Why, yes, that can happen. Mind you, "large" is only on the human scale, and this is hardly an unusual circumstance.
What is essetnially (but not actually) mantle-juice flows out onto the crust on a somewhat irregular basis. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's quite specatcular when molten rock et al flow out.
As for a "large ammount" -- us drilling into the mantle is like us sticking a very large straw into the ocean. Sure, the water down at the bottom is under pressure, and it will shoot up the straw if we let it. But the ocean certainly isn't going anywhere.
Any fool can bolt together an 80 mpg vehicle, the third world is full of the damn things. I have no objection to hybrids or non-petroleum engines per se, its just that this pretence that they are somehow cool irritates me.
I find it shocking, not that you think that maximizing fuel economy requires less skill than making a car as fast as you can, but that you hold this idea and you're reading Slashdot.
There's nothing unbelievable about the technology needed to get a car to 300, 400, or 500 miles per hour. A high school education and a sufficient budget will let you compete within 10% of the best in the world.
"Unbelievable" is cars that travel for hundreds of miles on a gallon of gasoline, vechicles that break the sound barrier, or the technology that lets you ignite ten stories of fuel and stay in a straight line.
And as for drag racing--it's a mock test that is about a good a means to drive advances in automotive technology as testing by engine noise. And, ethically speaking, they're the equivalent of spectacle rape. (The massive crowds that go to drag racing or NASCAR don't go to see finely tuned machines. They go because they hope to see a high-speed crash.)
I was under the impression cops need evidence before arresting you.
No, they need to charge you with something. And if they do it without reasonable procedure and belief, you can often sue the individual police offficer for harassment (and, in some cases, even apply a claim against the government he or she works for.)