The van was not engaged until it interacted with the dead/wounded people on the ground. As I mentioned, such activity marked you as an enemy combatant according to the rules of engagement. It was not an ambulance, and was not carrying any markings that would protect it through the Geneva convention. Who the hell brings their van with children out to a battle with the enemy still orbiting overhead in a helicopter? Where is the sense in that?
Nope. That's wrong. While a clearly marked vehicle is off limits, that doesn't mean that only clearly marked vehicles are off limits. In actual fact the very first Geneva convention explicitly provides protection for civilians providing aid to the wounded with no other requirements. Look it up.
Now as the helicopter crew lied to their chain of command to obtain permission to fire, it is not unreasonable to assume they knew about this provision also
As to why someone would "bring their van full of children out to a battle." There's no evidence what so ever that that's what took place. The driver of the van needn't even have heard the helicopter firing, almost certainly didn't see it orbit, especially not in Baghdad at the time, and there were plenty of people lying around wounded from IEDs etc. that it's not even implausible that they just happened on the scene and tried to do their best for the guy that was crawling wounded and unarmed along the curb. Note that that's as far as they got, and that they didn't even try to leave the scene.
The kids were in a van where they weren't visible, and why was that van there? Wasn't it violating a curfew? And why would you take your kids into a firefight? The van was trying to help insurgents escape. It was entirely proper to engage it.
That would be true if it that behaviour was in concordance with the US own rules of engagement at the time. I.e. attacking a van based on the premises you list. However, as that would be a violation of the Geneva convention (that the US follows even though they are not a signatory) it wasn't and isn't. Hence the helicopter crew found it necessary to lie to their chain of command to receive permission to fire:
06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage.
07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies.
07:14 Where's that van at?
07:15 Right down there by the body.
07:16 Okay, yeah.
07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons.
Note that they seem clear on the illegality of attacking a wounded unarmed combatant an refrain from doing so. It is likewise illegal to attack those that give aid to the wounded, hence they're telling their command that they van is picking up bodies and weapons, to secure permission for their attack. This while clearly stating earlier that they're not seeing any weapons by the wounded the van is approaching. (Which is also clear from the video.)
So yes, trigger happy assholes covers them quite nicely. Their own relative safety in the whole affair means they're held to higher standards of behaviour. They were not in any immediate danger. Neither were any other US troops on the ground they were tasked to defend, so the usual excuses for such behaviour do not apply, hence lie not "honest mistake."
This is further emphasised by their tone of voice etc. during the whole affair that's gleeful, with their voices breaking up, they're clearly jumping in their seats with excitement. This is emphatically not how aircrew are trained to perform their mission, as it clearly interferes with their performance. "Condition yellow" is drilled into aircrew to prevent (among other things) just the sort of behaviour that we're seeing here, not to mention other mistakes.
#1. Absolute freedom of (written) speech, at least for the most part, to a degree that I am not aware of existing anywhere in the civilized world.
And of course, the reason Germany in particular abolishes the expression of Nazi sympathies in its constitution, is that the US required it to do that after WWII.
So while "absolute free speech" may be a good in the US constitution (amendment) it's clearly not considered a good for everyone everywhere...
How is the session key negotiated? I can't believe that my LTE phone came from the factory, already preloaded with a dictionary of what key to use for every base station that exists (and will exist), so there's surely some way that the base station and the phone sort that out.
Indeed no. That's what the SIM is actually for. The SIM contains all information about you and the network, including keys. The protocols are a bit convoluted, but there's nothing obviously wrong there.
Of course if you don't trust the issuer of the SIM then you're in trouble. However, since that also means that you really don't trust the network you're connecting to, you're in no worse trouble than before, i.e. you're basically screwed anyway.
Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"
But there are some that are close enough. The second verse of Sweden's start "Du tronar pÃ¥ minnen frÃ¥n fornstora dar, dÃ¥ Ãrat ditt namn flÃg Ãver jorden". According to Wikipedia "Thou art enthroned upon memories of great olden days, When honored thy name flew across the earth,"
So that comes pretty close I think... However, when it comes to broadband we're clearly a current superpower. I pay $52 for 100/100 MBps fibre to my house. (Dollar is cheap right now, used to be about $40). This includes IP-telephony.
Note that Sweden is roughly the size and shape of California, with only 9 million people and self governing municipalities (it's in the constitution). And we still manage to be in the top.
Non sequitur, we weren't talking about that. We were talking about how pooling the wealth among an evermore decreasing part of the population isn't good even from an economic standpoint. (It was one of the reasons for the great depression, for example). This money needs to be put back into circulation and the best way to do that is to spread it more evenly.
There's also the question of fairness. Why should they pay less when your country is at (a very expensive) war, than when they did after WWII, when you were at peace. Substantially less, I might add.
Also, when it comes to the 1%-ers, their income as such isn't the problem. It's their wealth. If you have to work you're not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination.
The problem with unmoderated "tax and spend" is that eventually you run out of other people's money. Then the problems get really bad. Much of the Western world is heading in that direction. Things that can't continue, won't.
Could we please consign this piece of trite Thatcherism to that rubbish pile of history where it belongs? Even the UKians don't believe it any longer and where ever it's been tried, it's lead to the same problems we are facing in the west at the moment. I.e. that the "landed gentry" has amassed more and more and more of the total wealth, and even in capitalist terms, this wealth doesn't do much productive (or at least not as much as it would do in the hands of others).
So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?
The mechanisation of agriculture in Europe put something like 20% of the population out of work and gave rise to a huge emigration to the US. Many of you are refugees from that (or rather great grandsons/daughters of those refugees). In Sweden to take one example twenty percent of the population emigrated to the US! One in every five! This worked because there was room in the US for all those people. Last time I checked that's not true anymore, so that fix won't work a second time around.
Sure in the sixties and early seventies there were some labour shortages with immigration of employees from (mainly) other parts of Europe, but not even close to those numbers.
So yes. There became jobs available, but it took getting rid of 20% of the population to do it.
Marxist much?
It's not a coincidence that actual Communist revolutions only took place in nations that were not yet industrialized. Russia and China are the prime examples.
Not really. All of Europe had the "socialist" revolution. It just wasn't bloody. (Or rather, wasn't *as* bloody). Take Sweden for example. The social democrats were considered and treated like communists for the first few decades of its existence (jailings, beatings, being fired from your job for membership etc.) but by diligent work for general suffrage (males only of course), even though the right were in strong opposition, when everybody got the vote, they came into power and held on to it almost uncontested for 50 years.
During their tenure the Swedish transformation was nothing short of revolutionary when it came to workers rights (i.e. anybody's rights but the landed gentry). Much the same happened through out Europe, to a smaller or greater extent. (The anglo saxons being a notable example at the smaller end. They still haven't gotten rid of the class society, whereas it died in almost all of the rest of Europe).
So plenty of industrialised societies in Europe had a "socialist" transformation, based on the rights of the general public, and stemming from that. Indeed your argument plays almost hand in hand with Marx's own, namely that the socialist revolution cannot succeed in a non industrialised society. With Russia/China etc. being prime examples of horrible failure...
Yes, that's why I said "almost". But by that token, you shouldn't be able to process it either, as WTI is among the sweetest and lightest grades of crude there is. But somehow you have acquired the ability to process thicker more sour variants. I wonder why? Market pressure perhaps?
Which was kind of my argument all along. This market is global, and for good reason. Shipping is readily available, easy and cheap.
P.S. Here in Sweden we refine mostly Brent, but also Russian oil, that is sometimes very high in sulphur. So it's not impossible by any means to build/maintain/have the capacity for various grades, without breaking the bank.
We'd still support the Saudis because Europe and China still use Mideast oil. We might not have been independent of Middle East oil, but we've always used much less of it than other places do.
I've never understood this argument, but it is bandied about a lot, I'll give you that. Oil is (almost) perfectly fungible, i.e. you don't particularly care where your oil comes from, as long as you can get enough. That you get most of your oil from closer (i.e. slightly cheaper) sources, e.g. domestically and from latin america doesn't matter one bit, since if we Europeans couldn't get it from closer sources (Middle east, Russia, North Sea) we'd compete for your resources.
Oil is traded on a global market. If supply globally goes down, then prices go up. For everyone. Doesn't matter if your preferred supplier goes bust. You'll just compete for those that are left.
But he didn't invent it for warfare, he invented it to make mining easier, once he saw that people would use his invention for warfare he was horrified and thus invented the peace price.
That's giving Alfred Nobel too much credit. He owned the world renowned arms manufacturer Bofors and actually changed the company more towards arms manufacture than before. It wasn't until a French paper erroneously printed his obituary where he as lambasted as a "merchant of death", that he became concerned with his legacy. (If I remember correctly his peace prize was added at a later date to his will, there was also a woman involved, isn't there always?).
So no, he was about as far from a long haired hippie as can be. He didn't mind if people killed each other as long as they bought their guns and explosives from him. While he didn't originally develop dynamite for the military market, when he realised that's where big money could be made he didn't waste any time working that market.
Several people died in the explosions on the drilling rig. However (un)important the damage to the economy and the wildlife is, no human being gets away with killing someone and getting convicted to "only a fine", but a company like BP does.
Yes, there's a problem there, sometimes "I'm sorry" doesn't just cut it. However, history is not without precedent when it could be proven that corporate officers acted with intent and malice.
VCRs were actually one of the novelties he mentioned by name as the "modern day" American technological miracle.
Huh? He was using examples of Japaneese technological advances to sell the success of the US system? A system I might add that tried to ban/regulate VCRs as it was thought they threatened the almighty Hollywood (Jack Valenti and "as dangerous as the Boston strangeler to a woman home alone" and all that).
Reagans rethoric makes sense from an economic standpoint, as in "We're doing so well that people can buy VCRs", and that makes sense given his politics, but to call that "high tech" is IMHO missing the mark by quite a lot.
It turns out that many European countries do count all live births as "a live birth". And that many/most of those are still at the top.
To quote the summary of of the CDC's findings:
Key findings
Data from the United States' Linked Birth/Infant Death Data Set and the European Perinatal Health Report
Infant mortality rates for preterm (less than 37 weeks of gestation) infants are lower in the United States than in most European countries; however, infant mortality rates for infants born at 37 weeks of gestation or more are higher in the United States than in most European countries.
One in 8 births in the United States were born preterm, compared with 1 in 18 births in Ireland and Finland.
If the United States had Sweden's distribution of births by gestational age, nearly 8,000 infant deaths would be averted each year and the U.S. infant mortality rate would be one-third lower.
The main cause of the United States' high infant mortality rate when compared with Europe is the very high percentage of preterm births in the United States.
So something is clearly not quite right with the youngest Americans compared to their European counterparts.
What are you going to do if someones culture really does have a significant measurable impact on their learning performance? Tell them that their culture sucks?
Well, you do it to the taliban, don't you? Granted, their approach to schooling and teaching isn't perhaps the main reason, but it's cleary on the agenda, and often discussed.
So there's at least a precedent for telling someone their culture sucks. There's even a precedent for shooting at them... (Not that I'm saying that the cultures discussed here are in any way shape or form similar to the taliban, but there is a precedent for speaking up about it).
not even slightly true.
nuclear regulation became ridiculous precisely because of non proliferation.
Since we're talking Thorium I would beg to differ. The whole reason we're burning Uranium on a massive scale in the first place is to get Pu that could then be turned into weapons. That's why U/Pu reactors, physical, nuclear, chemical properties etc. were researched and the infrastructure was developed. When we later decided to go all "civilian" then it was too late. The infrastructure/industry was already weaponized.
Now Thorium OTOH was never given the chance just *because* it can't be weaponized, and hence, with only civilian applications, was not even kept on the back burner. Now it suffers a substantial drawback as we would need large industry wide changes (including sending the nuclear engineers back to school) to make it viable. Changing over to molten salt Thorium is not an easy task. And that's even without considering that not all the technical issues are solved yet (molten salt tends to be somewhat corrosive...)
And it's all because of the worlds insatiable thirst for the bomb.
Hmm, that's all good and well (and well known), but current recommendations are based on *tests* with live human viewers. Not disections of the human eye and extrapolation, so any "virtual resolution" should already have been taken into account. No?
Yes. Swedish prosecutors can't do "deals". I.e. they can of course "promise" not to do something, i.e. prosecute, but that would have no legal weight. The promise could/would probably be reviewed, and another prosecutor wouldn't be bound by any previous promises made.
Okay, lets look at it scientifically. Our ears hear all the way up to around 22khz, but at 22khz they can still define between sine waves and saw/squares (cant tell much between saws and squares but can between sines and either). At 22khz on a 44.1 sample rate, the only wave possible right at the top is a saw. Because is frame 1 is at max phase (+1), frame two at minimum (-1) and frame three at +1 then you have a 22khz saw. You end up getting aliasing at the top end ultimately.
Well scientifically that's not true. While everybody and his brother seems to have heard about the Nyqvist critiera, very few seem to know how you actually *recreate* the signal after sampling.
And you don't play "connect the points" as you seem to suggest, but filter your time discrete sampled signal with a filter with a transfer function that looks like sin(x)/x (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyqvist_limit)
Nyqvist in fact says that a signal sampled at twice the maximum frequency can be perfectly recreated up to that limit. Note perfectly. That means that the wave forms will be correct, no sin waves converted to sawtooths or whatever.
That you percieve sound as better or worse sounding depends on a lot of other things than the Nyqvist limit...
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The van was not engaged until it interacted with the dead/wounded people on the ground. As I mentioned, such activity marked you as an enemy combatant according to the rules of engagement. It was not an ambulance, and was not carrying any markings that would protect it through the Geneva convention. Who the hell brings their van with children out to a battle with the enemy still orbiting overhead in a helicopter? Where is the sense in that?
Nope. That's wrong. While a clearly marked vehicle is off limits, that doesn't mean that only clearly marked vehicles are off limits. In actual fact the very first Geneva convention explicitly provides protection for civilians providing aid to the wounded with no other requirements. Look it up.
Now as the helicopter crew lied to their chain of command to obtain permission to fire, it is not unreasonable to assume they knew about this provision also
As to why someone would "bring their van full of children out to a battle." There's no evidence what so ever that that's what took place. The driver of the van needn't even have heard the helicopter firing, almost certainly didn't see it orbit, especially not in Baghdad at the time, and there were plenty of people lying around wounded from IEDs etc. that it's not even implausible that they just happened on the scene and tried to do their best for the guy that was crawling wounded and unarmed along the curb. Note that that's as far as they got, and that they didn't even try to leave the scene.
The kids were in a van where they weren't visible, and why was that van there? Wasn't it violating a curfew? And why would you take your kids into a firefight? The van was trying to help insurgents escape. It was entirely proper to engage it.
That would be true if it that behaviour was in concordance with the US own rules of engagement at the time. I.e. attacking a van based on the premises you list. However, as that would be a violation of the Geneva convention (that the US follows even though they are not a signatory) it wasn't and isn't. Hence the helicopter crew found it necessary to lie to their chain of command to receive permission to fire:
Note that they seem clear on the illegality of attacking a wounded unarmed combatant an refrain from doing so. It is likewise illegal to attack those that give aid to the wounded, hence they're telling their command that they van is picking up bodies and weapons, to secure permission for their attack. This while clearly stating earlier that they're not seeing any weapons by the wounded the van is approaching. (Which is also clear from the video.)
So yes, trigger happy assholes covers them quite nicely. Their own relative safety in the whole affair means they're held to higher standards of behaviour. They were not in any immediate danger. Neither were any other US troops on the ground they were tasked to defend, so the usual excuses for such behaviour do not apply, hence lie not "honest mistake."
This is further emphasised by their tone of voice etc. during the whole affair that's gleeful, with their voices breaking up, they're clearly jumping in their seats with excitement. This is emphatically not how aircrew are trained to perform their mission, as it clearly interferes with their performance. "Condition yellow" is drilled into aircrew to prevent (among other things) just the sort of behaviour that we're seeing here, not to mention other mistakes.
Trigger happy assholes.
#1. Absolute freedom of (written) speech, at least for the most part, to a degree that I am not aware of existing anywhere in the civilized world.
And of course, the reason Germany in particular abolishes the expression of Nazi sympathies in its constitution, is that the US required it to do that after WWII.
So while "absolute free speech" may be a good in the US constitution (amendment) it's clearly not considered a good for everyone everywhere...
Arxiv to the rescue: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3008 (This may lack editorial changes etc. made by the journal, but should be factually complete.)
How is the session key negotiated? I can't believe that my LTE phone came from the factory, already preloaded with a dictionary of what key to use for every base station that exists (and will exist), so there's surely some way that the base station and the phone sort that out.
Indeed no. That's what the SIM is actually for. The SIM contains all information about you and the network, including keys. The protocols are a bit convoluted, but there's nothing obviously wrong there.
Of course if you don't trust the issuer of the SIM then you're in trouble. However, since that also means that you really don't trust the network you're connecting to, you're in no worse trouble than before, i.e. you're basically screwed anyway.
Because we live here. Duh. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!"
But there are some that are close enough. The second verse of Sweden's start "Du tronar pÃ¥ minnen frÃ¥n fornstora dar, dÃ¥ Ãrat ditt namn flÃg Ãver jorden". According to Wikipedia "Thou art enthroned upon memories of great olden days, When honored thy name flew across the earth,"
So that comes pretty close I think... However, when it comes to broadband we're clearly a current superpower. I pay $52 for 100/100 MBps fibre to my house. (Dollar is cheap right now, used to be about $40). This includes IP-telephony.
Note that Sweden is roughly the size and shape of California, with only 9 million people and self governing municipalities (it's in the constitution). And we still manage to be in the top.
Non sequitur, we weren't talking about that. We were talking about how pooling the wealth among an evermore decreasing part of the population isn't good even from an economic standpoint. (It was one of the reasons for the great depression, for example). This money needs to be put back into circulation and the best way to do that is to spread it more evenly.
There's also the question of fairness. Why should they pay less when your country is at (a very expensive) war, than when they did after WWII, when you were at peace. Substantially less, I might add.
Also, when it comes to the 1%-ers, their income as such isn't the problem. It's their wealth. If you have to work you're not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination.
The problem with unmoderated "tax and spend" is that eventually you run out of other people's money. Then the problems get really bad. Much of the Western world is heading in that direction. Things that can't continue, won't.
Could we please consign this piece of trite Thatcherism to that rubbish pile of history where it belongs? Even the UKians don't believe it any longer and where ever it's been tried, it's lead to the same problems we are facing in the west at the moment. I.e. that the "landed gentry" has amassed more and more and more of the total wealth, and even in capitalist terms, this wealth doesn't do much productive (or at least not as much as it would do in the hands of others).
And that's just for starters.
So, the guy didn't learn from the Industrial Revolution (and revolutions since) that all the fear of 'no more jobs for anyone' ended up being unfounded?
The mechanisation of agriculture in Europe put something like 20% of the population out of work and gave rise to a huge emigration to the US. Many of you are refugees from that (or rather great grandsons/daughters of those refugees). In Sweden to take one example twenty percent of the population emigrated to the US! One in every five! This worked because there was room in the US for all those people. Last time I checked that's not true anymore, so that fix won't work a second time around.
Sure in the sixties and early seventies there were some labour shortages with immigration of employees from (mainly) other parts of Europe, but not even close to those numbers.
So yes. There became jobs available, but it took getting rid of 20% of the population to do it.
Marxist much? It's not a coincidence that actual Communist revolutions only took place in nations that were not yet industrialized. Russia and China are the prime examples.
Not really. All of Europe had the "socialist" revolution. It just wasn't bloody. (Or rather, wasn't *as* bloody). Take Sweden for example. The social democrats were considered and treated like communists for the first few decades of its existence (jailings, beatings, being fired from your job for membership etc.) but by diligent work for general suffrage (males only of course), even though the right were in strong opposition, when everybody got the vote, they came into power and held on to it almost uncontested for 50 years.
During their tenure the Swedish transformation was nothing short of revolutionary when it came to workers rights (i.e. anybody's rights but the landed gentry). Much the same happened through out Europe, to a smaller or greater extent. (The anglo saxons being a notable example at the smaller end. They still haven't gotten rid of the class society, whereas it died in almost all of the rest of Europe).
So plenty of industrialised societies in Europe had a "socialist" transformation, based on the rights of the general public, and stemming from that. Indeed your argument plays almost hand in hand with Marx's own, namely that the socialist revolution cannot succeed in a non industrialised society. With Russia/China etc. being prime examples of horrible failure...
Yes, that's why I said "almost". But by that token, you shouldn't be able to process it either, as WTI is among the sweetest and lightest grades of crude there is. But somehow you have acquired the ability to process thicker more sour variants. I wonder why? Market pressure perhaps?
Which was kind of my argument all along. This market is global, and for good reason. Shipping is readily available, easy and cheap.
P.S. Here in Sweden we refine mostly Brent, but also Russian oil, that is sometimes very high in sulphur. So it's not impossible by any means to build/maintain/have the capacity for various grades, without breaking the bank.
We'd still support the Saudis because Europe and China still use Mideast oil. We might not have been independent of Middle East oil, but we've always used much less of it than other places do.
I've never understood this argument, but it is bandied about a lot, I'll give you that. Oil is (almost) perfectly fungible, i.e. you don't particularly care where your oil comes from, as long as you can get enough. That you get most of your oil from closer (i.e. slightly cheaper) sources, e.g. domestically and from latin america doesn't matter one bit, since if we Europeans couldn't get it from closer sources (Middle east, Russia, North Sea) we'd compete for your resources.
Oil is traded on a global market. If supply globally goes down, then prices go up. For everyone. Doesn't matter if your preferred supplier goes bust. You'll just compete for those that are left.
But he didn't invent it for warfare, he invented it to make mining easier, once he saw that people would use his invention for warfare he was horrified and thus invented the peace price.
That's giving Alfred Nobel too much credit. He owned the world renowned arms manufacturer Bofors and actually changed the company more towards arms manufacture than before. It wasn't until a French paper erroneously printed his obituary where he as lambasted as a "merchant of death", that he became concerned with his legacy. (If I remember correctly his peace prize was added at a later date to his will, there was also a woman involved, isn't there always?).
So no, he was about as far from a long haired hippie as can be. He didn't mind if people killed each other as long as they bought their guns and explosives from him. While he didn't originally develop dynamite for the military market, when he realised that's where big money could be made he didn't waste any time working that market.
Woosh
Several people died in the explosions on the drilling rig. However (un)important the damage to the economy and the wildlife is, no human being gets away with killing someone and getting convicted to "only a fine", but a company like BP does.
Yes, there's a problem there, sometimes "I'm sorry" doesn't just cut it. However, history is not without precedent when it could be proven that corporate officers acted with intent and malice.
Sorry for Godwining the thread so early...
VCRs were actually one of the novelties he mentioned by name as the "modern day" American technological miracle.
Huh? He was using examples of Japaneese technological advances to sell the success of the US system? A system I might add that tried to ban/regulate VCRs as it was thought they threatened the almighty Hollywood (Jack Valenti and "as dangerous as the Boston strangeler to a woman home alone" and all that).
Reagans rethoric makes sense from an economic standpoint, as in "We're doing so well that people can buy VCRs", and that makes sense given his politics, but to call that "high tech" is IMHO missing the mark by quite a lot.
Stop redefining words. Torture is the use of pain and/or harm on another living being. Period.
So that old standby of torturers everywhere, the fake execution, is not torture then? The pain felt is only emotional after all.
It's already been pointed out that the reason why the United States has "high" infant mortality is that we count ALL live births as a live birth.
Not according to the CDC.
It turns out that many European countries do count all live births as "a live birth". And that many/most of those are still at the top.
To quote the summary of of the CDC's findings:
So something is clearly not quite right with the youngest Americans compared to their European counterparts.
Er, surely the overall death rate per 100k is.... 100k?
Yes, but not per year, which is what this refers to.
What are you going to do if someones culture really does have a significant measurable impact on their learning performance? Tell them that their culture sucks?
Well, you do it to the taliban, don't you? Granted, their approach to schooling and teaching isn't perhaps the main reason, but it's cleary on the agenda, and often discussed.
So there's at least a precedent for telling someone their culture sucks. There's even a precedent for shooting at them... (Not that I'm saying that the cultures discussed here are in any way shape or form similar to the taliban, but there is a precedent for speaking up about it).
Some of them have a power factor of 0.5, which means they're actually half as "energy efficient" as the label says.
Nope. Not even close. That word (actually two of them) "power factor" does not mean what you think it means.
Look it up.
not even slightly true. nuclear regulation became ridiculous precisely because of non proliferation.
Since we're talking Thorium I would beg to differ. The whole reason we're burning Uranium on a massive scale in the first place is to get Pu that could then be turned into weapons. That's why U/Pu reactors, physical, nuclear, chemical properties etc. were researched and the infrastructure was developed. When we later decided to go all "civilian" then it was too late. The infrastructure/industry was already weaponized.
Now Thorium OTOH was never given the chance just *because* it can't be weaponized, and hence, with only civilian applications, was not even kept on the back burner. Now it suffers a substantial drawback as we would need large industry wide changes (including sending the nuclear engineers back to school) to make it viable. Changing over to molten salt Thorium is not an easy task. And that's even without considering that not all the technical issues are solved yet (molten salt tends to be somewhat corrosive...)
And it's all because of the worlds insatiable thirst for the bomb.
Hmm, that's all good and well (and well known), but current recommendations are based on *tests* with live human viewers. Not disections of the human eye and extrapolation, so any "virtual resolution" should already have been taken into account. No?
Yes. Swedish prosecutors can't do "deals". I.e. they can of course "promise" not to do something, i.e. prosecute, but that would have no legal weight. The promise could/would probably be reviewed, and another prosecutor wouldn't be bound by any previous promises made.
Okay, lets look at it scientifically. Our ears hear all the way up to around 22khz, but at 22khz they can still define between sine waves and saw/squares (cant tell much between saws and squares but can between sines and either). At 22khz on a 44.1 sample rate, the only wave possible right at the top is a saw. Because is frame 1 is at max phase (+1), frame two at minimum (-1) and frame three at +1 then you have a 22khz saw. You end up getting aliasing at the top end ultimately.
Well scientifically that's not true. While everybody and his brother seems to have heard about the Nyqvist critiera, very few seem to know how you actually *recreate* the signal after sampling.
And you don't play "connect the points" as you seem to suggest, but filter your time discrete sampled signal with a filter with a transfer function that looks like sin(x)/x (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyqvist_limit)
Nyqvist in fact says that a signal sampled at twice the maximum frequency can be perfectly recreated up to that limit. Note perfectly. That means that the wave forms will be correct, no sin waves converted to sawtooths or whatever.
That you percieve sound as better or worse sounding depends on a lot of other things than the Nyqvist limit...