All that crap about hydroelectric dams, tidal power, geothermal and other green energy is just made up by liberals.. those things don't exist either and never will.
I'd love (love) to see your charge your electric car from solar where I live. You might be able to make it down the street a few weeks a year. Snow, clouds, rain, and the simple fact that there is only ~8 hours of sunlight during the winter means it is almost impossible to use that here. Wind is never reliable, almost anywhere, even at the best of times. Hydroelectric? There is some, but that takes a massive amount of land, and is rather dangerous, if the dam breaks (in one instance killing 100,000+ people, but that is nearly worst case). Also, expensive. Tidal? The nearest ocean is ~1,000 miles away, good luck with that. Geothermal? Yeah, can't do that either. So unless you expect to pipe the power thousands of miles (expensive, wasteful, and difficult to maintain), none of that is going to work for me, or large sections of the world's population.
Nuclear? Works fantastic! Probably powering this computer as I speak. Other than that, it's pretty much all fossil fuels and a little bit of hydro (which is pretty limited in it's expansion options).
There is a massive difference between health effects associated with smoking, and having an omnivorous diet.
Not in America. The health problems associated with obesity are vastly greater, more certain, and more costly to society as a whole than the costs of smokers. Basically, smokers eventually end up getting cancer and dying. The health problems last maybe a few months. Tobacco doesn't have a debilitating effect that progressively gets worse throughout your life (well, you can't hold your breath for as long, I suppose). Obesity does. It's essentially a physical handicap, in moderately extreme cases, and even when it isn't it causes dozens, if not hundreds, of medical conditions. Virtually every non-infectious bad thing that can happen to you can be a direct result of obesity. And you can be sure that if companies think they can regulate you smoking, they will start regulating what you eat. They'd be stupid not to, from a financial point of view.
Before that, of course, is the drinking. Expect to see companies refusing to hire drinkers in 5-10 years or so.
According to the patent application, "within second" for extremely LEO (100 km) and "tens of second" for slightly higher orbits (~400km). It'll depend on the exact application, but the proposal makes it sound like they intend the gas to be "stationary" relative to the Earth, so it'll be in free fall, basically. Other situations they propose put it at ~1km/s, where it will de-orbit rather quickly.
It is very very unlikely to cause issues. After all, we already spray gases around in orbit, it's the single method we have of propulsion, and I've never actually seen a single person worry that it will create long-term problems (although maybe it could, I very much doubt it).
Besides, it's a lot easier to deal with transient gas clouds slowing orbits than it is with ramming into shards of metal at 10km/s or more. Shards of metal with explosives in it, in (rare) cases of unburnt propellant.
Wouldn't planet-based solar be far more affordable and efficient, and produce more than enough energy for a planet with population controlled at a reasonable level, which should be expected from any advanced civilization? Seems like it would be unlikely for an advanced civilization to build one of these given the other options (including fusion power)...
Define "reasonable level." You'll find it depends entirely on your resources. If you build a Dyson sphere, your available power resources are vastly greater (physical material such as food and water can, theoretically, by recycled with 100% efficiency given sufficient power). And it greatly benefits a society to have a larger population: faster evolution, more smart people to make advances, more culture and art are produced, and a vastly greater chance to survive any catastrophe.
In other words, you are thinking of the limitations a more advanced society would face from the perspective of our society. They are not the same, and doing so is a grave mistake. Our current population would have been completely and totally unsustainable for more than a few days 100 years ago (whether it is sustainable in the long term is irrelevant, my point is literally 1/2+ of the population would die in a week if we didn't have modern food production), it is foolish to think a population 100x our current couldn't be sustainable in 1000 years. In fact, we already know how we could do exactly that, in theory (hydroponics and similar). But you'd need a lot of energy to do that: hence, build a Dyson Sphere. Of course, that in itself assumes we don't discover a better way of getting energy in the next 1000 years, which is itself something of a major assumption.
Not really, since the star wasn't blocked from view (well, I'm assuming it wasn't, would need to be a really big planet for that to happen) by either planet, although the inner one may have been blocked by the outer, so it couldn't be an occultation. This would be a transit, since it is an apparently smaller body passing in front of a larger one, although the inner planet may be being occulted by the outer.
Since it is three bodies, though, we already have a term for this: syzygy. That is exactly what it is. Three celestial bodies in apparent alignment (although all Kepler observations use syzygies, since they rely on the Earth, planet, and star being in alignment).
No certain scientist want to keep their data hidden. Sorry, if you are public ally funded then show your data.. if you are advocating policies and tion based on your findings. You better show your data and methods for scrutiny.
Just to be perfectly 100% clear: this has nothing, in any way, shape, or form, anything whatsoever to do with the data or methods.
This is about the personal communications and rough drafts between the scientists. You know, the emails you send saying "Hey John could you take a look at "x" again, I want to know what you personally think?" or "Wanna go out for a beer later?" or "What do you think of the phrasing of "y"?"Stuff that has nothing to do with the science at all, but which could easily be cherry-picked by someone with a motive (and BP has one hell of a motive) to discredit someones work and/or reputation, with no chance for them to defend themselves. Some of it might be completely wrong and have been thrown out in the end results, yet could be trumpeted as part of the final answer by an interested party (even if that is a lie, some people would do exactly that).
So yes, it should probably stay hidden: it's irrelevant, and even if it was, letting (basically) only one side rip into it is completely biased.
Same Country that wants assange on funny smelling charges of "rape", just raided his server room.
Obviously not, given that Wikileaks is still up, and never went down according to the story. What are down are a couple of torrent sites. The only known relation to Wikileaks or TPB is the fact that this host has served both. Why was it mentioned in the headline, you may ask? Clickbait, so that people who were following those causes would read it, even though it was almost 100% completely unrelated in every possible way.
This is part of the reason it is hard to take the whole "Assange is a persecuted martyr" seriously: his supporters never seem to know all the facts, they simply react. Knee-jerk reactions do not help, and make your entire position look bad. So, if you really want to help Assange and think he and his cause are worth helping, stop it, and read the damned articles. Or don't, since, you know, clickbait.
Oh and wait for some actual information to come out, since at this point no one knows anything at all, especially given the number of technical issues (unrelated, I might add) PRQ seems to be having/have had.
No DDG is going to sail up to 200mi of a hostile to shoot it with a railgun when then can launch a Tomahawk with it's 800mi range for a Block III or 1500 for Block IIs.
...at ~$600,000 dollars a shot. That is... expensive, even for the US military, especially when fighting targets that aren't ~1,000 miles away, but which you still don't want to fly a plane over. Also, carrying 56 Tomahawks means you have a shit-ton of explosives on board just waiting to be detonated by a missile or bomb hitting the ship. The thing about railguns is they can be potentially combined with the new laser system the Navy is also developing for defense, meaning you have a platform that can't be hit by enemy missiles and can fire large-scale bombardments for nearly negligible cost (compared to the current cost), over the horizon. Sure, that's a few years or even decades down the line, but when your military operates on the principle of always having the technological upper hand (which is exactly how the US military works), investing in tech that is 10+ years away is a rather sound move. Not to mention the other applications rail technology could have, like space travel.
You wouldn't use or need a railgun for that, you'd use a missile (at long range, so it can guide in on the target) or a cannon at short range (so you don't need homing, you just shoot a ton of bullets and hope one hits, which is the system they use now). Lasers, now, those have some potential. Can't go over-the-horizon, but potentially much more efficient than current defense systems, which is why they are developing them.
No, railguns are to hit actual targets. 220mi isn't as long-range as a missile, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run, and you don't have to worry about the problems explosives introduce (such as having hundreds of tons of HE on your ship if it gets hit).
The jets don't come from inside the black hole at all, they are a result of the interaction of the black hole and the disk of matter falling into it. The exact mechanism for their production isn't certain yet, but the simple explanation is that as the matter gets close to the disk, it spins faster and faster while losing energy (since it is falling into a negative gravity well) which can be focused into some few particles (through magnetic effects or possible relativistic "frame dragging") that are then propelled outwards well before they reach the event horizon. The evaporation is more complex and I don't understand it so I won't try to explain it.
Attempting to explain the universe through electro-magnetism alone is... a useful exercise, but also really not true, and demonstrably so. Gravitation effects are radically different from electrical ones. You can alter electrical theory to fit the observations, but only if you introduce arbitrary new rules and exceptions, which is, if not exactly forbidden in science, at the least extremely questionable (and the more complexities you have to introduce the less likely your theory is to be accurate). Gravitational theory, on the other hand, proceeds from and naturally fits with the observations. Now, it is well known in physics that our understanding of gravity is incomplete (classical and quantum theories do not agree, for one thing, despite both seeming to be true on their respective scales), but to argue that because gravity is "weak" it cannot also be the strongest force en masse (so to speak) is, well, faulty logic. There are numerous examples of weak things aggregating to provide effects well outside their individual strength. When we say electrical forces are "stronger" than gravity, we mean only on a certain scale (atomic, to be specific). Over they scale of a few feet, the nuclear force is nonexistent, despite the fact it is even stronger than the electrical force on small scales.
It isn't really physically possible (at least, not so far as we know) for a black hole to be considered as a solid physical body. You see, the event horizon isn't the only place where the gravity prevents matter from escaping. Gravity increases until you hit the "outer" part of any body, which means if we assume for a second the event horizon occurs outside all the matter of the former star (which it does), gravity will be slightly more intense inside the horizon. That means that as you travel into the black hole until you reach the outer limit of the physical object itself, gravity will still increase and retain the property of inescapability. What that means is the outer shell of matter can't interact with everything inside, so the normal pressure from electromagnetic and nuclear forces can't keep the outer shell from collapsing inwards (the force literally can't push outwards, since gravity pulls it back).
That means the outer layer of matter will always collapse inwards, closer to the center, and as that happens, the body becomes more dense and the place where gravity forms a horizon extends ever closer to the center of the black hole. Normally, gravity would decrease after you entered the physical body, so near the center of the black hole there should still be a solid physical body where gravity is less than that required to form a horizon, but as the outer layer of the black hole continually falls downwards (it literally can't do anything else), the space near the center where the black hole retains normal physical properties of a star should diminish to nothing.
Another fascinating thing is that at the very center, there should be no gravity at all, by the simple rule of symmetry. But the black hole is ever shrinking towards that spot, so that the density approaches infinity and the entire matter of the star becomes condensed into a point with infinite gravitational force. So the center should also end up with infinity gravity. Which is impossible, or should be. That's why black holes are and always will remain a huge mystery, barring some incredible new scientific revelation that overturns the entire theory of... well, nearly everything.
In other words, for black holes to be treated as solid physical objects, a new force that defies the theory of general relativity (it would have to travel faster than light to allow the matter towards the center of the hole to interact with the matter towards the outer part of the hole) would need to be discovered. And that seems unlikely, although not impossible by any means.
Kids can be flooded with unlimited fictional violence on TV, movies and video games but the real thing is suddenly objectionable?
Yes, because there is a world of difference between fictional violence and real violence. It's like the difference between a drawing of a nuclear weapon and an actual nuke. Anyone who can't distinguish between fiction and reality need to get some help, and fast. Airing real violence, especially alongside fictional violence, helps to blur the distinction between the two and reduce the natural aversion humans have towards violence, which makes people more likely to actually commit violence in the future (note that so long as you can distinguish between real and fiction, all the fictional violence in the world won't make you more likely to commit actual violence, since fictional is nothing like real violence, being, you know, fictional.)
Getting bail has jack shit to do with how serious your crime was, and everything to do with a) your likelihood of commiting another crime while out (very small for most murderers), and b) your trustworthiness, i.e. the likelihood the government will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars tracking you down after you jump bail. In other words, it's an expression of how much the government trusts you to behave. Breaking probation indicates he is untrustworthy: therefore, no bail.
Oh no! A random vague "prophecy" that can be interpreted to fit events from nearly any period in human history! The end is nigh*!
*For some definition of "nigh" that includes anytime from tomorrow to the heat-death of the universe. So, in other words, just about as precise as this "prophecy".
Most, yes, although they may offer some games (where it works really well) under a WINE wrapper (I believe they use Dosbox for some Dos games in a similar fashion). Some will, however, be native (Valve titles mostly, at the beginning anyways).
First, they haven't gone after Assange in Sweden because he isn't in Sweden, and it would have made more sense to just do straight from the UK anyways since the US has a better treaty with them, and second, at least the latter two actually have extradition treaties with the US. Noriega was captured in a straight-up war (as a POW), and eventually extradited back to Panama (via France) to serve his sentence there. So, none of those were actually cases of "extraordinary rendition" at all.
Those laws all look like pretty standard extradition terms, actually. Many countries forbid extradition if it might carry the death penalty, for example, only do it for serious crimes, and only do it for crimes they recognize as crimes.
Which is not to say all countries always follow those laws (exceptions are made, for example, if they requesting country agrees not to pursue the death penalty in that case), but those are pretty standard extradition laws.
Or it could be that this mistake was entirely on the side of the NZ government and has exactly jack shit to do with the US's case against Dotcom, as the Ars Technica article states:
Key told reporters he did not expect the illegal GCSB surveillance to affect the fight over extraditing Dotcom to the United States, because none of the evidence the United States planned to use against Dotcom in those proceedings were derived from GCSB surveillance.
So, no, thats not going to happen because of this. The US's case may be wrong/illegal for other reasons, but saying they should drop it because the NZ government made a mistake is... rather ridiculous.
What happens when the TSA does not turn in their formal report in February?
They'll get a very stern talking to and told they "better not do it again, and I mean it this time!" while getting a few more (b/m)illions from Congress to funnel towards some congressman's drinking buddy. So, same as always happens.
Destroying, yes. The star may survive, but the accretion disk that would form planets is being ripped to shreds by the massive tidal forces and radiation from the black hole, and therefore the system is in fact being destroyed. Also the star will probably be ripped apart eventually too, but that is speculation on my part.
Why not run reactors that are 60 years old but still safe and putting out needed power?
Just because something is old does not make it bad.
Because the older something is, the more likely it is to break, no matter how much maintenance it has (unless every single component has been replaced, which is unlikely or impossible for a nuclear plant). When that involves, say, a car, it's usually a minor inconvenience for you and maybe a handful of drivers on the highway. At worst, you crash and die and kill 3-4 other people. When it is a nuclear power plant, a breakdown at best causes a major headache as the power grid shuffles to find excess capacity and a few million in repair and inspection costs, and at worst kills hundreds of thousands, sends a country into a panic, and poisons the land for hundreds of miles around for a thousand years.
Hence, as big a fan as I am of nuclear power, I really think we need to shutdown the older plants and build newer, safer, better ones.
There are three different kinds of pints. A 568mL one, a 473mL one, and a 551mL one. The first is used in the UK, the second two (mostly the 473mL) in the US, and (ironically) is the older usage. The UK changed their definition after the US declared independence, so the US uses the older system. But 500mL is a decent approximation, and works just fine when comparing costs.
Having to earn respect is a lot different from deserving disrespect. And we all have delusions, which quite often negatively effect others. The point of tolerance is to prevent one brand of delusion from harming another (or from harming something that isn't a delusion, but also can't be proven as such, therefore causing other people who disagree to brand it as a delusion).
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All that crap about hydroelectric dams, tidal power, geothermal and other green energy is just made up by liberals.. those things don't exist either and never will.
I'd love (love) to see your charge your electric car from solar where I live. You might be able to make it down the street a few weeks a year. Snow, clouds, rain, and the simple fact that there is only ~8 hours of sunlight during the winter means it is almost impossible to use that here. Wind is never reliable, almost anywhere, even at the best of times. Hydroelectric? There is some, but that takes a massive amount of land, and is rather dangerous, if the dam breaks (in one instance killing 100,000+ people, but that is nearly worst case). Also, expensive. Tidal? The nearest ocean is ~1,000 miles away, good luck with that. Geothermal? Yeah, can't do that either. So unless you expect to pipe the power thousands of miles (expensive, wasteful, and difficult to maintain), none of that is going to work for me, or large sections of the world's population.
Nuclear? Works fantastic! Probably powering this computer as I speak. Other than that, it's pretty much all fossil fuels and a little bit of hydro (which is pretty limited in it's expansion options).
There is a massive difference between health effects associated with smoking, and having an omnivorous diet.
Not in America. The health problems associated with obesity are vastly greater, more certain, and more costly to society as a whole than the costs of smokers. Basically, smokers eventually end up getting cancer and dying. The health problems last maybe a few months. Tobacco doesn't have a debilitating effect that progressively gets worse throughout your life (well, you can't hold your breath for as long, I suppose). Obesity does. It's essentially a physical handicap, in moderately extreme cases, and even when it isn't it causes dozens, if not hundreds, of medical conditions. Virtually every non-infectious bad thing that can happen to you can be a direct result of obesity. And you can be sure that if companies think they can regulate you smoking, they will start regulating what you eat. They'd be stupid not to, from a financial point of view.
Before that, of course, is the drinking. Expect to see companies refusing to hire drinkers in 5-10 years or so.
According to the patent application, "within second" for extremely LEO (100 km) and "tens of second" for slightly higher orbits (~400km). It'll depend on the exact application, but the proposal makes it sound like they intend the gas to be "stationary" relative to the Earth, so it'll be in free fall, basically. Other situations they propose put it at ~1km/s, where it will de-orbit rather quickly.
It is very very unlikely to cause issues. After all, we already spray gases around in orbit, it's the single method we have of propulsion, and I've never actually seen a single person worry that it will create long-term problems (although maybe it could, I very much doubt it).
Besides, it's a lot easier to deal with transient gas clouds slowing orbits than it is with ramming into shards of metal at 10km/s or more. Shards of metal with explosives in it, in (rare) cases of unburnt propellant.
If the gas is sprayed at less-than-orbital velocities, it'd just fall to Earth almost immediately. Boeing in fact addresses that:
8. The method of claim 1, wherein the cloud is created at a density and temperature to dissipate after creation and fall into the atmosphere.
Wouldn't planet-based solar be far more affordable and efficient, and produce more than enough energy for a planet with population controlled at a reasonable level, which should be expected from any advanced civilization? Seems like it would be unlikely for an advanced civilization to build one of these given the other options (including fusion power)...
Define "reasonable level." You'll find it depends entirely on your resources. If you build a Dyson sphere, your available power resources are vastly greater (physical material such as food and water can, theoretically, by recycled with 100% efficiency given sufficient power). And it greatly benefits a society to have a larger population: faster evolution, more smart people to make advances, more culture and art are produced, and a vastly greater chance to survive any catastrophe.
In other words, you are thinking of the limitations a more advanced society would face from the perspective of our society. They are not the same, and doing so is a grave mistake. Our current population would have been completely and totally unsustainable for more than a few days 100 years ago (whether it is sustainable in the long term is irrelevant, my point is literally 1/2+ of the population would die in a week if we didn't have modern food production), it is foolish to think a population 100x our current couldn't be sustainable in 1000 years. In fact, we already know how we could do exactly that, in theory (hydroponics and similar). But you'd need a lot of energy to do that: hence, build a Dyson Sphere. Of course, that in itself assumes we don't discover a better way of getting energy in the next 1000 years, which is itself something of a major assumption.
Or 'multi-object occultation'?
Not really, since the star wasn't blocked from view (well, I'm assuming it wasn't, would need to be a really big planet for that to happen) by either planet, although the inner one may have been blocked by the outer, so it couldn't be an occultation. This would be a transit, since it is an apparently smaller body passing in front of a larger one, although the inner planet may be being occulted by the outer.
Since it is three bodies, though, we already have a term for this: syzygy. That is exactly what it is. Three celestial bodies in apparent alignment (although all Kepler observations use syzygies, since they rely on the Earth, planet, and star being in alignment).
I have a cute neighbor...
I think NASA has a slightly different idea of what kind of "heavenly body" they want to study.
No certain scientist want to keep their data hidden. Sorry, if you are public ally funded then show your data.. if you are advocating policies and tion based on your findings. You better show your data and methods for scrutiny.
Just to be perfectly 100% clear: this has nothing, in any way, shape, or form, anything whatsoever to do with the data or methods.
This is about the personal communications and rough drafts between the scientists. You know, the emails you send saying "Hey John could you take a look at "x" again, I want to know what you personally think?" or "Wanna go out for a beer later?" or "What do you think of the phrasing of "y"?"Stuff that has nothing to do with the science at all, but which could easily be cherry-picked by someone with a motive (and BP has one hell of a motive) to discredit someones work and/or reputation, with no chance for them to defend themselves. Some of it might be completely wrong and have been thrown out in the end results, yet could be trumpeted as part of the final answer by an interested party (even if that is a lie, some people would do exactly that).
So yes, it should probably stay hidden: it's irrelevant, and even if it was, letting (basically) only one side rip into it is completely biased.
Same Country that wants assange on funny smelling charges of "rape", just raided his server room.
Obviously not, given that Wikileaks is still up, and never went down according to the story. What are down are a couple of torrent sites. The only known relation to Wikileaks or TPB is the fact that this host has served both. Why was it mentioned in the headline, you may ask? Clickbait, so that people who were following those causes would read it, even though it was almost 100% completely unrelated in every possible way.
This is part of the reason it is hard to take the whole "Assange is a persecuted martyr" seriously: his supporters never seem to know all the facts, they simply react. Knee-jerk reactions do not help, and make your entire position look bad. So, if you really want to help Assange and think he and his cause are worth helping, stop it, and read the damned articles. Or don't, since, you know, clickbait.
Oh and wait for some actual information to come out, since at this point no one knows anything at all, especially given the number of technical issues (unrelated, I might add) PRQ seems to be having/have had.
No DDG is going to sail up to 200mi of a hostile to shoot it with a railgun when then can launch a Tomahawk with it's 800mi range for a Block III or 1500 for Block IIs.
...at ~$600,000 dollars a shot. That is... expensive, even for the US military, especially when fighting targets that aren't ~1,000 miles away, but which you still don't want to fly a plane over. Also, carrying 56 Tomahawks means you have a shit-ton of explosives on board just waiting to be detonated by a missile or bomb hitting the ship. The thing about railguns is they can be potentially combined with the new laser system the Navy is also developing for defense, meaning you have a platform that can't be hit by enemy missiles and can fire large-scale bombardments for nearly negligible cost (compared to the current cost), over the horizon. Sure, that's a few years or even decades down the line, but when your military operates on the principle of always having the technological upper hand (which is exactly how the US military works), investing in tech that is 10+ years away is a rather sound move. Not to mention the other applications rail technology could have, like space travel.
You wouldn't use or need a railgun for that, you'd use a missile (at long range, so it can guide in on the target) or a cannon at short range (so you don't need homing, you just shoot a ton of bullets and hope one hits, which is the system they use now). Lasers, now, those have some potential. Can't go over-the-horizon, but potentially much more efficient than current defense systems, which is why they are developing them.
No, railguns are to hit actual targets. 220mi isn't as long-range as a missile, but it is a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run, and you don't have to worry about the problems explosives introduce (such as having hundreds of tons of HE on your ship if it gets hit).
The jets don't come from inside the black hole at all, they are a result of the interaction of the black hole and the disk of matter falling into it. The exact mechanism for their production isn't certain yet, but the simple explanation is that as the matter gets close to the disk, it spins faster and faster while losing energy (since it is falling into a negative gravity well) which can be focused into some few particles (through magnetic effects or possible relativistic "frame dragging") that are then propelled outwards well before they reach the event horizon. The evaporation is more complex and I don't understand it so I won't try to explain it.
Attempting to explain the universe through electro-magnetism alone is... a useful exercise, but also really not true, and demonstrably so. Gravitation effects are radically different from electrical ones. You can alter electrical theory to fit the observations, but only if you introduce arbitrary new rules and exceptions, which is, if not exactly forbidden in science, at the least extremely questionable (and the more complexities you have to introduce the less likely your theory is to be accurate). Gravitational theory, on the other hand, proceeds from and naturally fits with the observations. Now, it is well known in physics that our understanding of gravity is incomplete (classical and quantum theories do not agree, for one thing, despite both seeming to be true on their respective scales), but to argue that because gravity is "weak" it cannot also be the strongest force en masse (so to speak) is, well, faulty logic. There are numerous examples of weak things aggregating to provide effects well outside their individual strength. When we say electrical forces are "stronger" than gravity, we mean only on a certain scale (atomic, to be specific). Over they scale of a few feet, the nuclear force is nonexistent, despite the fact it is even stronger than the electrical force on small scales.
It isn't really physically possible (at least, not so far as we know) for a black hole to be considered as a solid physical body. You see, the event horizon isn't the only place where the gravity prevents matter from escaping. Gravity increases until you hit the "outer" part of any body, which means if we assume for a second the event horizon occurs outside all the matter of the former star (which it does), gravity will be slightly more intense inside the horizon. That means that as you travel into the black hole until you reach the outer limit of the physical object itself, gravity will still increase and retain the property of inescapability. What that means is the outer shell of matter can't interact with everything inside, so the normal pressure from electromagnetic and nuclear forces can't keep the outer shell from collapsing inwards (the force literally can't push outwards, since gravity pulls it back).
That means the outer layer of matter will always collapse inwards, closer to the center, and as that happens, the body becomes more dense and the place where gravity forms a horizon extends ever closer to the center of the black hole. Normally, gravity would decrease after you entered the physical body, so near the center of the black hole there should still be a solid physical body where gravity is less than that required to form a horizon, but as the outer layer of the black hole continually falls downwards (it literally can't do anything else), the space near the center where the black hole retains normal physical properties of a star should diminish to nothing.
Another fascinating thing is that at the very center, there should be no gravity at all, by the simple rule of symmetry. But the black hole is ever shrinking towards that spot, so that the density approaches infinity and the entire matter of the star becomes condensed into a point with infinite gravitational force. So the center should also end up with infinity gravity. Which is impossible, or should be. That's why black holes are and always will remain a huge mystery, barring some incredible new scientific revelation that overturns the entire theory of... well, nearly everything.
In other words, for black holes to be treated as solid physical objects, a new force that defies the theory of general relativity (it would have to travel faster than light to allow the matter towards the center of the hole to interact with the matter towards the outer part of the hole) would need to be discovered. And that seems unlikely, although not impossible by any means.
Why is either airing an issue?
Kids can be flooded with unlimited fictional violence on TV, movies and video games but the real thing is suddenly objectionable?
Yes, because there is a world of difference between fictional violence and real violence. It's like the difference between a drawing of a nuclear weapon and an actual nuke. Anyone who can't distinguish between fiction and reality need to get some help, and fast. Airing real violence, especially alongside fictional violence, helps to blur the distinction between the two and reduce the natural aversion humans have towards violence, which makes people more likely to actually commit violence in the future (note that so long as you can distinguish between real and fiction, all the fictional violence in the world won't make you more likely to commit actual violence, since fictional is nothing like real violence, being, you know, fictional.)
Getting bail has jack shit to do with how serious your crime was, and everything to do with a) your likelihood of commiting another crime while out (very small for most murderers), and b) your trustworthiness, i.e. the likelihood the government will have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars tracking you down after you jump bail. In other words, it's an expression of how much the government trusts you to behave. Breaking probation indicates he is untrustworthy: therefore, no bail.
Oh no! A random vague "prophecy" that can be interpreted to fit events from nearly any period in human history! The end is nigh*!
*For some definition of "nigh" that includes anytime from tomorrow to the heat-death of the universe. So, in other words, just about as precise as this "prophecy".
Most, yes, although they may offer some games (where it works really well) under a WINE wrapper (I believe they use Dosbox for some Dos games in a similar fashion). Some will, however, be native (Valve titles mostly, at the beginning anyways).
First, they haven't gone after Assange in Sweden because he isn't in Sweden, and it would have made more sense to just do straight from the UK anyways since the US has a better treaty with them, and second, at least the latter two actually have extradition treaties with the US. Noriega was captured in a straight-up war (as a POW), and eventually extradited back to Panama (via France) to serve his sentence there. So, none of those were actually cases of "extraordinary rendition" at all.
Those laws all look like pretty standard extradition terms, actually. Many countries forbid extradition if it might carry the death penalty, for example, only do it for serious crimes, and only do it for crimes they recognize as crimes.
Which is not to say all countries always follow those laws (exceptions are made, for example, if they requesting country agrees not to pursue the death penalty in that case), but those are pretty standard extradition laws.
Or it could be that this mistake was entirely on the side of the NZ government and has exactly jack shit to do with the US's case against Dotcom, as the Ars Technica article states:
Key told reporters he did not expect the illegal GCSB surveillance to affect the fight over extraditing Dotcom to the United States, because none of the evidence the United States planned to use against Dotcom in those proceedings were derived from GCSB surveillance.
So, no, thats not going to happen because of this. The US's case may be wrong/illegal for other reasons, but saying they should drop it because the NZ government made a mistake is... rather ridiculous.
What happens when the TSA does not turn in their formal report in February?
They'll get a very stern talking to and told they "better not do it again, and I mean it this time!" while getting a few more (b/m)illions from Congress to funnel towards some congressman's drinking buddy. So, same as always happens.
Destroying, yes. The star may survive, but the accretion disk that would form planets is being ripped to shreds by the massive tidal forces and radiation from the black hole, and therefore the system is in fact being destroyed. Also the star will probably be ripped apart eventually too, but that is speculation on my part.
Why not run reactors that are 60 years old but still safe and putting out needed power?
Just because something is old does not make it bad.
Because the older something is, the more likely it is to break, no matter how much maintenance it has (unless every single component has been replaced, which is unlikely or impossible for a nuclear plant). When that involves, say, a car, it's usually a minor inconvenience for you and maybe a handful of drivers on the highway. At worst, you crash and die and kill 3-4 other people. When it is a nuclear power plant, a breakdown at best causes a major headache as the power grid shuffles to find excess capacity and a few million in repair and inspection costs, and at worst kills hundreds of thousands, sends a country into a panic, and poisons the land for hundreds of miles around for a thousand years.
Hence, as big a fan as I am of nuclear power, I really think we need to shutdown the older plants and build newer, safer, better ones.
There are three different kinds of pints. A 568mL one, a 473mL one, and a 551mL one. The first is used in the UK, the second two (mostly the 473mL) in the US, and (ironically) is the older usage. The UK changed their definition after the US declared independence, so the US uses the older system. But 500mL is a decent approximation, and works just fine when comparing costs.
Having to earn respect is a lot different from deserving disrespect. And we all have delusions, which quite often negatively effect others. The point of tolerance is to prevent one brand of delusion from harming another (or from harming something that isn't a delusion, but also can't be proven as such, therefore causing other people who disagree to brand it as a delusion).