GOOFUS has a PhD. GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.
GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community. GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.
GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car. GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.
GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion. GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.
GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory". GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".
GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding. GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.
GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country. GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.
GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs. GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.
GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations. GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.
GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror. GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.
GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old. GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.
GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity. GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it. GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals. GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus. GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.
GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind. GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.
GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists. GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.
GOOFUS has no PR skills. GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.
GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now. GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.
GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science. GALLANT advises the president.
Car engines can't be nuclear. While nuclear reactors can be made with the appropriate power output for a car, the biggest problem is that the driver would be killed by the neutrons that would drift out of the engine. Neutrons are a bitch to shield against and a car would not be able to carry the necessary material.
Well, I agree they still regulate the spectrum and that someone has to do it. The area where their role is changing most rapidly and controversially, however, is the extension of their charter to policing what can be said on public airwaves and private networks as opposed to issues dealing with spectrum scarcity.
If they're going to "act in the public interest" by preventing nipples and dirty words from being broadcast on the public airwaves, it only stands to reason that they also have a perogative to prevent (for example) outright falsehoods or distortions from being broadcast on the news in attempts to deceive the public. Right? This is the can of worms they open by regulating content.
But the noises being made about keeping the F-word off cable- a medium which has no spectrum scarcity problem to justify regulation, and where the FCC should normally have no regulatory authority- are completely illogical. Interference is not a problem on cable. There is no publicly-owned spectrum being licensed to broadcasters on cable. There is no reason the FCC should be able to keep dirty words from being uttered on cable unless their role is to further the public interest by becoming a national censor.
They protect us from hearing the "seven words" over the *public* airwaves. The *public* airwaves. You want to say any of the words? GO AHEAD. But not over the public airwaves.
Apparently your definition of "public airwaves" includes cable. The Senate isn't currently in session, but here's a good story back from March. You can suck on this:
Senator Bids to Extend Indecency Rules to Cable
Cable television shows packed with sex and profanity, such as HBO's "Deadwood," FX's "Nip/Tuck" and Comedy Central's "South Park," would be subject to the same indecency regulations that govern over-the-air broadcasts if the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee has his way.
Currently, the Federal Communications Commission has the authority to fine only over-the-air radio and television broadcasters for violating its indecency regulations, which forbid airing sexual or excretory material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children are most likely watching.
But Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) told a group of broadcasters yesterday that he wants to extend that authority to cover the hundreds of cable and satellite television and radio channels that operate outside of the government's control. In addition to basic cable channels such as ESPN, Discovery and MTV, that would include premium channels such as HBO and Showtime and the two satellite radio services, XM and Sirius.
"We put restrictions on the over-the-air signals," Stevens said after his address to the National Association of Broadcasters, according to news reports confirmed by his staff. "I think we can put restrictions on cable itself. At least I intend to do my best to push that."
They're pandering to soccer moms who use their TVs as surrogate parents. This isn't about spectrum scarcity anymore. They want regulation of culture.
Hmmm. Well, I seem to have forgotten my smiley I guess. I hate typing those things though- they look so juvenile.
I'm not sure I agree with you, but this level of physics is open to many interpretations, as it were, and a lot of smart guys have been struggling with them for a long time and trying to come up with better ones. The rule seems to be that any given interpretation can be equally valid for predicting experimental results as long as you stick with it consistently. The problem is coming up with one that appears to make sense in all circumstances.
The electron's translational momentum has an expectation value of zero. If you take multiple measurements you get a distribution of momenta centered around zero, but all the individual measurements will not be zero. The momentum cannot be determined to be zero at all times or we wouldn't know anything about its position. That wave function doesn't just smear out the position- it smears the momentum out a bit too. That would imply a limited motion of some sort.
Yeah, forgot about them. The s electrons move in linear paths back and forth through the nucleus and the angular orientation of the path is indeterminate yielding the spherical distribution. Always have to be on guard for nitpickers around here.
This is the classical "white death" of the universe predicted by classical physics. An electron in a hydrogen orbital does go in circles. But it can only radiate to a lower energy state. As it becomes more localized around the proton, the uncertainty in position goes down and the uncertainty in momentum goes up. The electron eventually "floats" on this uncertainty in momentum, since radiating more photons does not get rid of it and can only increase it. This process is what forbids further radiative transitions to even lower states closer to the nucleus (which is why they do not exist, to crudely sum up a lot of math).
Sometimes the ground state electrons do fall in, but only if they are destroyed in the process. In nuclei that decay via electron capture, an electron in the innermost shell is captured by the nucleus in a p+e -> n+neutrino interaction. As it moves from the innermost shell into the nucleus, the electron emits an X-ray photon. The energy of this photon can be used to distinguish between K-capture and L-capture (from the lowest and second lowest shells), although I think they use Auger electron spectroscopy for that.
I pay $1400 a month in Redwood City CA. This isn't even a nice neighborhood- the houses are ten feet apart, there's only a tiny yard, parking is a big problem, and there is crime here- auto thefts, burglaries, even a shooting once in a while.
Houses on this street go for $650K-$750K. I probably couldn't afford a mortgage here.
Well, I probably phrased that badly. I would say I was "awed" and nothing more. Although I would go as far as "proud" for the moon landings, even if I wasn't born yet.
OK, can one of you physics geeks explain to me why x-rays are able to escape the gravitational clutches of a black hole when light cannot? I've never understood this.
Those x-rays you're seeing are coming from hot gas outside the event horizon. Undoubtedly much more radiation is emitted inside it than outside, but any photon inside the horizon has a world-line ending at the singularity and not your eye. And the photons you do see have lost a lot of energy in the trip up from the horizon's edge. They could have started out as gamma rays, but they get redshifted and softened as they climb up out of the field as they lose energy. Or here's a different way to look at it. Just as a clock near the event horizon will appear to a distant observer to be ticking slowly, a photon emitted with a given frequency near the horizon will have a lower frequency as measured by a distant observer.
One site I've started reading in the past several months is The Housing Bubble 2 blog. (It has a "2" because the Illuminati convinced Blogspot to shut down the original site.) This guy collects real estate news from all over the world and he has a comments section that attracts an interesting crowd with some good information.
This bubble is not just something that affects places like San Diego- it's worldwide and echo bubbles are infecting markets that hadn't yet been reached. Even sh8tholes like Bakersfield are seeing a 33% year over year appreciation and people are falling over themselves to buy crap land in West Texas. People are leveraging themselves with interest-only ARMs to buy houses they otherwise could never afford and many are already on the edge of bankruptcy even though rates are still low. When the credit crunch hits it won't be pretty. Close to 40% of all jobs created since the last recession have been in construction and real estate, and this country has built millions of unoccupied units at a ferocious rate in the past few years.
The mere fact that everyone is yakking about real estate is a sign that the smart money is cashing out and moving on.
Using them the first time is the hardest; it's easier to do it again.
I'd say you've got that backwards. The first time, with the two explosions in Japan, was the easiest. It was only afterwards that using them became an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the world.
But how does it feel -after all pride and duty- to be part of the nation that fired up such a "baby" at first?
Actually, I always felt proud and honored to live in the first country to create them. The story of the Manhattan Project is quite fascinating merely from a technical standpoint. It was a huge engineering feat, one which no other world power at the time was in a position to make, and since we were the first to make them, we had a good excuse for using them (not knowing better) that the second and third countries to develop them did not enjoy. People back then thought of these things as conventional explosives, only bigger. Nobody had seen large amounts of ionizing radiation before and there was no general appreciation yet of its hazards.
Now you might say that Truman should have looked at what happened in Hiroshima and decided not to bomb Nagasaki. But that's really expecting a lot of the U.S. to "get religion" on nukes within a week. Just look at all the stupid things that were being done with nuclear power and atomic weapons for decades afterwards. They sent soldiers into zones irradiated with nuclear artillery shells. They flew planes through mushroom clouds. They blasted this crater in an effort to show how canals could be dug with thermonuclear weapons. People were remarkably slow to recognize the dangers for a long time. Even shoe stores in the 50s would irradiate your feet continuously with X-rays to help you get a better fit. It really didn't dawn on people until sometime in the sixties that this stuff is nothing to be trifled with.
We should consider ourselves lucky that so far nuclear weapons have only been used once, and to end a world war. This is not to excuse the jingoistic Japan-bashing from Americans that I see on every Hiroshima anniversary, which is just petty, and profoundly misses the point. But the human race was bound to discover nuclear weapons eventually. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been bombed early on with relatively small nuclear weapons, we might not have been witness to such an early demonstration of the danger they present, and we might have used them to a greater extent in a much larger conflict later on.
The strategic situation in 1945 may indeed have been such that Truman's decision to drop the bomb saved more lives than it cost. But whenever the world stops to remember Hiroshima and reflect on the destruction that nuclear weapons can inflict on civilian populations, Americans get all thin-skinned and start huffing and puffing about what the Japanese did before the bombings.
These are valid points, but they're largely irrelevant. Nuclear weapons have not been used since, so when we reflect on their actual usage, we have no choice but to recall these two events in 1945- which is unfortunate because they bring in the baggage associated with that particular war that makes Americans lose sight of the larger issue. The point in remembering them really has more to do with the nature of nuclear war itself than some perceived effort to slight the Americans. If someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on the U.S.A., the world would no doubt commemorate that too.
>How can it be called ID Theft if the original owner still has his identity?
This is just a pathetically lame attempt to confuse the issue. It doesn't matter that "the original owner still has it" since a liability has been associated with it and its owner may even wish he didn't "still have it". This isn't like stealing software or music.
What happened is that some spyware harvested very personal info about some people. That's bad, possibly criminal. But it's not identity theft. Identity theft occurs whebn somebody takes the personal information and uses it to pose as you, draining your bank account, sleeping with your girlfriend, or in some way abusing the illicit information. There's no direct evidence of that here.
I'd say there's pretty good evidence. A spyware program is uploading keystrokes to a server. What do you think is going on, Officer Barbrady?
It's the old kevin mitnick scenario: breaking into a system and wandering around is not the same crime as breaking into a system, changing or destroying files, is not the same crime as breaking into a system and using the info to commit real world crimes such as wire fraud or embezzlement.
Are you trying to suggest that Mitnick's motive was the one in play here? Mitnick broke into restricted systems mostly to prove that he could do it. Which is an odd motive, but it's still believable. It's simply not a credible hypothesis that someone would design and distribute a spyware program to infect machines, run a keylogger, and upload keystrokes to a server- just to prove they could do it. Nor is it believable that nobody accessed the information accumulating on the server, or even that the server's location was a secret known to a restricted group of people. In this case the researchers showed that anyone with an infected machine would have been able to find the uploaded keystroke logs.
-How dare this 'nature' interfere with our business model? Everyone must pay for the clean water and air, there is no free lunch. Everyone who says there is, is either a communist or a terrorist and must be shot on sight.
You forgot their favorite line: "Stealing is stealing."
Theory = not reproduced enough to be called a Law or Fact.
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
No, really, the political climate is such that any scientist who questions any portion of the litany of global warming is treated as a pariah, ideologue, and crackpot.
You can say the same thing about relativity, quantum physics, evolution, atomic theory, and the earth being round. What's your point?
In science, the only real test is reproducibility.
Not true. Reproducibility is not always possible when the data doesn't come from a tabletop apparatus. For cold fusion or pentaquarks it is an acceptable requirement but most of the historical sciences (geology, archaeology, paleontology, cosmology) offer few datasets that can be regenerated, let alone reproduced.
Depends who you believe. Apparently this estimate is based on a gloom and doom scenario by someone with an axe to grind
"Scenario" has nothing to do with it. This is a calculation of net energy costs for processes happening today.
They are saying it costs 1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil ("less" because of ethanol's lower energy density per gallon). This constitutes more than a mere prediction about the future that may or may not pan out. It's easily verifiable or falsifiable.
Slashdot Mirror
GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.
GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.
GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.
GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.
GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".
GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.
GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.
GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.
GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.
GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.
GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.
GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.
GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.
GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.
GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.
GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.
GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.
GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.
GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.
Car engines can't be nuclear. While nuclear reactors can be made with the appropriate power output for a car, the biggest problem is that the driver would be killed by the neutrons that would drift out of the engine. Neutrons are a bitch to shield against and a car would not be able to carry the necessary material.
Well, I agree they still regulate the spectrum and that someone has to do it. The area where their role is changing most rapidly and controversially, however, is the extension of their charter to policing what can be said on public airwaves and private networks as opposed to issues dealing with spectrum scarcity.
If they're going to "act in the public interest" by preventing nipples and dirty words from being broadcast on the public airwaves, it only stands to reason that they also have a perogative to prevent (for example) outright falsehoods or distortions from being broadcast on the news in attempts to deceive the public. Right? This is the can of worms they open by regulating content.
But the noises being made about keeping the F-word off cable- a medium which has no spectrum scarcity problem to justify regulation, and where the FCC should normally have no regulatory authority- are completely illogical. Interference is not a problem on cable. There is no publicly-owned spectrum being licensed to broadcasters on cable. There is no reason the FCC should be able to keep dirty words from being uttered on cable unless their role is to further the public interest by becoming a national censor.
Geez, such manners!
They protect us from hearing the "seven words" over the *public* airwaves. The *public* airwaves. You want to say any of the words? GO AHEAD. But not over the public airwaves.
Apparently your definition of "public airwaves" includes cable. The Senate isn't currently in session, but here's a good story back from March. You can suck on this: They're pandering to soccer moms who use their TVs as surrogate parents. This isn't about spectrum scarcity anymore. They want regulation of culture.
It is largely a regulatory agency there to ensure that the spectrums don't get abused and misused.
It was largely that.
Now it's the branch of government in charge of enforcing "clean language" by protecting us from hearing any of seven unmentionable words.
Hmmm. Well, I seem to have forgotten my smiley I guess. I hate typing those things though- they look so juvenile.
I'm not sure I agree with you, but this level of physics is open to many interpretations, as it were, and a lot of smart guys have been struggling with them for a long time and trying to come up with better ones. The rule seems to be that any given interpretation can be equally valid for predicting experimental results as long as you stick with it consistently. The problem is coming up with one that appears to make sense in all circumstances.
The electron's translational momentum has an expectation value of zero. If you take multiple measurements you get a distribution of momenta centered around zero, but all the individual measurements will not be zero. The momentum cannot be determined to be zero at all times or we wouldn't know anything about its position. That wave function doesn't just smear out the position- it smears the momentum out a bit too. That would imply a limited motion of some sort.
Yeah, forgot about them. The s electrons move in linear paths back and forth through the nucleus and the angular orientation of the path is indeterminate yielding the spherical distribution. Always have to be on guard for nitpickers around here.
This is the classical "white death" of the universe predicted by classical physics. An electron in a hydrogen orbital does go in circles. But it can only radiate to a lower energy state. As it becomes more localized around the proton, the uncertainty in position goes down and the uncertainty in momentum goes up. The electron eventually "floats" on this uncertainty in momentum, since radiating more photons does not get rid of it and can only increase it. This process is what forbids further radiative transitions to even lower states closer to the nucleus (which is why they do not exist, to crudely sum up a lot of math).
Sometimes the ground state electrons do fall in, but only if they are destroyed in the process. In nuclei that decay via electron capture, an electron in the innermost shell is captured by the nucleus in a p+e -> n+neutrino interaction. As it moves from the innermost shell into the nucleus, the electron emits an X-ray photon. The energy of this photon can be used to distinguish between K-capture and L-capture (from the lowest and second lowest shells), although I think they use Auger electron spectroscopy for that.
I pay $1400 a month in Redwood City CA. This isn't even a nice neighborhood- the houses are ten feet apart, there's only a tiny yard, parking is a big problem, and there is crime here- auto thefts, burglaries, even a shooting once in a while.
Houses on this street go for $650K-$750K. I probably couldn't afford a mortgage here.
Well, I probably phrased that badly. I would say I was "awed" and nothing more. Although I would go as far as "proud" for the moon landings, even if I wasn't born yet.
Why didn't you just edit the wikipedia article to match your comment?
OK, can one of you physics geeks explain to me why x-rays are able to escape the gravitational clutches of a black hole when light cannot? I've never understood this.
Those x-rays you're seeing are coming from hot gas outside the event horizon. Undoubtedly much more radiation is emitted inside it than outside, but any photon inside the horizon has a world-line ending at the singularity and not your eye. And the photons you do see have lost a lot of energy in the trip up from the horizon's edge. They could have started out as gamma rays, but they get redshifted and softened as they climb up out of the field as they lose energy. Or here's a different way to look at it. Just as a clock near the event horizon will appear to a distant observer to be ticking slowly, a photon emitted with a given frequency near the horizon will have a lower frequency as measured by a distant observer.
I think your reading comprehension needs a little work.
One site I've started reading in the past several months is The Housing Bubble 2 blog. (It has a "2" because the Illuminati convinced Blogspot to shut down the original site.) This guy collects real estate news from all over the world and he has a comments section that attracts an interesting crowd with some good information.
This bubble is not just something that affects places like San Diego- it's worldwide and echo bubbles are infecting markets that hadn't yet been reached. Even sh8tholes like Bakersfield are seeing a 33% year over year appreciation and people are falling over themselves to buy crap land in West Texas. People are leveraging themselves with interest-only ARMs to buy houses they otherwise could never afford and many are already on the edge of bankruptcy even though rates are still low. When the credit crunch hits it won't be pretty. Close to 40% of all jobs created since the last recession have been in construction and real estate, and this country has built millions of unoccupied units at a ferocious rate in the past few years.
The mere fact that everyone is yakking about real estate is a sign that the smart money is cashing out and moving on.
It appears to pass because it exceeds 3000 bytes in length. If you trim the post to 3000 bytes or less it gets rejected with the YELLING message.
Using them the first time is the hardest; it's easier to do it again.
I'd say you've got that backwards.
The first time, with the two explosions in Japan, was the easiest. It was only afterwards that using them became an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the world.
But how does it feel -after all pride and duty- to be part of the nation that fired up such a "baby" at first?
Actually, I always felt proud and honored to live in the first country to create them. The story of the Manhattan Project is quite fascinating merely from a technical standpoint. It was a huge engineering feat, one which no other world power at the time was in a position to make, and since we were the first to make them, we had a good excuse for using them (not knowing better) that the second and third countries to develop them did not enjoy. People back then thought of these things as conventional explosives, only bigger. Nobody had seen large amounts of ionizing radiation before and there was no general appreciation yet of its hazards.
Now you might say that Truman should have looked at what happened in Hiroshima and decided not to bomb Nagasaki. But that's really expecting a lot of the U.S. to "get religion" on nukes within a week. Just look at all the stupid things that were being done with nuclear power and atomic weapons for decades afterwards. They sent soldiers into zones irradiated with nuclear artillery shells. They flew planes through mushroom clouds. They blasted this crater in an effort to show how canals could be dug with thermonuclear weapons. People were remarkably slow to recognize the dangers for a long time. Even shoe stores in the 50s would irradiate your feet continuously with X-rays to help you get a better fit. It really didn't dawn on people until sometime in the sixties that this stuff is nothing to be trifled with.
We should consider ourselves lucky that so far nuclear weapons have only been used once, and to end a world war. This is not to excuse the jingoistic Japan-bashing from Americans that I see on every Hiroshima anniversary, which is just petty, and profoundly misses the point. But the human race was bound to discover nuclear weapons eventually. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been bombed early on with relatively small nuclear weapons, we might not have been witness to such an early demonstration of the danger they present, and we might have used them to a greater extent in a much larger conflict later on.
The strategic situation in 1945 may indeed have been such that Truman's decision to drop the bomb saved more lives than it cost. But whenever the world stops to remember Hiroshima and reflect on the destruction that nuclear weapons can inflict on civilian populations, Americans get all thin-skinned and start huffing and puffing about what the Japanese did before the bombings.
These are valid points, but they're largely irrelevant. Nuclear weapons have not been used since, so when we reflect on their actual usage, we have no choice but to recall these two events in 1945- which is unfortunate because they bring in the baggage associated with that particular war that makes Americans lose sight of the larger issue. The point in remembering them really has more to do with the nature of nuclear war itself than some perceived effort to slight the Americans. If someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on the U.S.A., the world would no doubt commemorate that too.
>How can it be called ID Theft if the original owner still has his identity?
This is just a pathetically lame attempt to confuse the issue. It doesn't matter that "the original owner still has it" since a liability has been associated with it and its owner may even wish he didn't "still have it". This isn't like stealing software or music.
What happened is that some spyware harvested very personal info about some people. That's bad, possibly criminal. But it's not identity theft.
Identity theft occurs whebn somebody takes the personal information and uses it to pose as you, draining your bank account, sleeping with your girlfriend, or in some way abusing the illicit information. There's no direct evidence of that here.
I'd say there's pretty good evidence. A spyware program is uploading keystrokes to a server. What do you think is going on, Officer Barbrady?
It's the old kevin mitnick scenario: breaking into a system and wandering around is not the same crime as breaking into a system, changing or destroying files, is not the same crime as breaking into a system and using the info to commit real world crimes such as wire fraud or embezzlement.
Are you trying to suggest that Mitnick's motive was the one in play here? Mitnick broke into restricted systems mostly to prove that he could do it. Which is an odd motive, but it's still believable. It's simply not a credible hypothesis that someone would design and distribute a spyware program to infect machines, run a keylogger, and upload keystrokes to a server- just to prove they could do it. Nor is it believable that nobody accessed the information accumulating on the server, or even that the server's location was a secret known to a restricted group of people. In this case the researchers showed that anyone with an infected machine would have been able to find the uploaded keystroke logs.
-How dare this 'nature' interfere with our business model? Everyone must pay for the clean water and air, there is no free lunch. Everyone who says there is, is either a communist or a terrorist and must be shot on sight.
You forgot their favorite line:
"Stealing is stealing."
Neither evolution and I.D. belong in the Science classroom. They're both historical hypothesis.
By that reasoning, neither do any of the historical sciences. And we should get rid of history classes too.
They are both historical hypotheses, but one has supporting evidence. The other has none, and is unfalsifiable to boot.
-Stephen Jay Gould
No, really, the political climate is such that any scientist who questions any portion of the litany of global warming is treated as a pariah, ideologue, and crackpot.
You can say the same thing about relativity, quantum physics, evolution, atomic theory, and the earth being round. What's your point?
In science, the only real test is reproducibility.
Not true. Reproducibility is not always possible when the data doesn't come from a tabletop apparatus. For cold fusion or pentaquarks it is an acceptable requirement but most of the historical sciences (geology, archaeology, paleontology, cosmology) offer few datasets that can be regenerated, let alone reproduced.
Depends who you believe. Apparently this estimate is based on a gloom and doom scenario by someone with an axe to grind
"Scenario" has nothing to do with it. This is a calculation of net energy costs for processes happening today.
They are saying it costs 1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil ("less" because of ethanol's lower energy density per gallon). This constitutes more than a mere prediction about the future that may or may not pan out. It's easily verifiable or falsifiable.