Looked into this a bit more. It looks like it was typically 12 years of age, based on pre-catholic roman law, but was as low as 7 years old and sometimes younger in catholic medieval europe.
It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories
Well yes, but you do have an "if" in there. It's conditional on how many calories you need. I should note that, in nutrition, kilocalories, also know as Calories, are used instead of calories. The Calorie/calorie difference has been the bane of anyone who knows a little physics trying to "prove" things in biology ever since someone thought it would be a good idea to give a unit and another unit worth a thousand times the first unit the same name, just with a capital letter on one of them (as another aside, even though nearly everyone has adopted the US definition of an "illion", the multiplie definitions of billion, trillion, etc. still cause problems from time to time).
Anyway, the "if" relies on some pretty big statistical assumptions. In fact, how many Calories you need can vary based directly on how many you consume. For the typical, mostly idle modern person it's hard to get good numbers. You can get much better numbers for populations that are active all the time and operating at peak efficiency. So, yes, the part about needing to take in as much energy as you expend or you have to burn off reserves is completely accurate. It's just not very useful in this situation.
While you've been exceptionally polite about just how right you are, I somehow can't feel too bad pointing out a small flaw in your reasoning. The method of calculating his adjusted wealth used there is percentage of GDP, not standard adjusted dollars. In regular old adjusted dollars, his net worth, when he had $1.5 billion sometime around 1930 was about $21 billion. It actually goes up if you go back a bit, but it never goes up above about $25 billion in adjusted dollars. If you think about that in terms of wages, a job that roughly equates to a minimum wage job in 1914 would be 50 cents per hour. Map that to a modern $8.00 an hour job and you're looking at about a 16 times increase, so that pretty much puts Rockerfeller's wealth, relative to the average working stiff of his time, in the neighborhood of a modern billionaire with something like $20 to $30 billion.
The percentage of GDP theory is an interesting one, but it isn't a realistic way of comparing wealth across a century of time. The problem is that you're basically saying that a big 10 kg fish in a small pond is bigger than a 20 kg fish in the ocean beause one is in a small pond and the other is in the ocean. Would rockerfeller have been richer if he had the same wealth and moved to a country with a smaller GDP (but the same or higher gdp per capita)? Would he have been poorer if he moved to a country with a larger GDP (but, once again, the same GDP per capita)?
Fact: The Catholic Church never taught people that pedophilia was correct, or good, or just. In fact they taught (and teach) their followers that it was bad, illegal, and that they would spend the rest of their lives in hell if they were to commit these acts.
I'm curious where this actually comes up in Catholic dogma. Has the Catholic church traditionally had a problem with this? Obviously they've always objected to adultery, so they would require a properly sanctioned marriage. Aside from those objections, however, are there any traditional catholic age limits?
No, the concept's been around for a couple decades. It was suggested in a science fiction book originally.
The concept is fine, the execution might be subject to a few realities. First off, mass. The total mass that humans have _ever_ put into space is somewhere around 7.5 million kilograms. For contrast, the estimated mass of the Chelyabinsk meteor (meteorite? they have recovered pieces that reached the ground, but does that mean that the larger object that actually exploded in the atmosphere gets to count as a meteorite, or as a meteor?) is something like 12 million kilograms, and that exploded with the approximate force of a typical Nuclear bomb (the yields of a nuclear weapon can vary widely, but the majority are in the 500 kiloton range) and it was travelling at least twice as fast as the average velocity that most of the mass humans have launced into space has been accelerated to. So, one Chelyabinsk meteor is equal to something like a third of everything humans have launched into space. In other words, if everything we have ever launched were "rods from god" we'd have about three nuclear weapons worth of impactors out there.
Another way to look at it is in terms of fuel. The space shuttle carried a total of about 1.75 kilotons of fuel. The kilotons that nuclear bombs are typically measured in are kilotons of TNT. There's pretty good parity between the energy density of TNT and the energy density of rocket fuels. So, if the total energy of all that fuel ends up converted to the kinetic energy of the payload (which it doesn't), then one launch gets you a maximum of about one tenth of a Little Boy (the 16 kiloton bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima).
Another way to look at it is to consider your telephone pole sized projectile. We'll make it out of Osmium, since that's pretty much the densest material humans can get their hands on. We'll say the projectile is ten meters long and 20 centimeters across. That makes it about 3,141,590 cubic centimeters. At 22.6 grams per cc, that makes the whole thing mass about 70,686 kilograms. Let's just call it 71,000 kilograms (about three shuttle payloads worth). We're talking about launching it from the ISS, so we'll pretend that we can get it to hit at around 27,000 kph. That works out to 2 terajoules. A kiloton of TNT is about 4.184 terajoules. So we'll call the explosive yield of our Osmium projectile.5 kilotons. That's reasonably impressive (although let's not forget that we've been pretty generous to it by ignoring all the energy losses it would face getting to the ground). That gives it 7 times the energy it would have if it were just a conventional explosive made out of high explosive and not dropped from space and a little more than ten times the explosive potential of the largest conventional bomb manufactured. Of course, since it's a rod that's going to drive itself into the ground, most of that destructive potential will be wasted on shattering the ground. I suppose it could be made of lots of small pellets that are blown apart by conventional explosives 50 meters or so from the ground. In any case, as impressive as it might be, it's outclassed by a standard nuke by a factor of a thousand. It also takes a ridiculous amount of effort and energy to get into space.
Ultimately, it's a weapon idea waiting for more advanced space propulsion. As it stands right now, it could be done, and it would work, but it's a ridiculous proposition compared to just about every other method of bombing a target.
Tolerance is a mixed bag. You're still likely to be messing up your liver long term. Not to mention that heavy drinkers, _especially_ those with a high tolerance, are at a high risk of an alcoholic stroke.
The US navy is roughly the size of every other navy on the planet combined, so no outside help is likely.
A fight to control the English Channel would be an interesting one to watch. The US Naval forces, pitted against other naval forces, would give the US very solid supply lines across the Atlantic and would, of course, allow the US to field impressive air power. They would not, however, be able to prevent outside help crossing the narrow parts of the English channel. That battle would be US Naval forces vs tanks and other land based artillary on high ground, and US planes against concentrated land-based anti-aircraft.
Also, the UK is a nuclear power. Everyone seems to have forgotten this fact, since everyone is so enthusiastic about nuking civilian populations, but one of the original selling points of nuclear weapons is that you can use one to blow up up large fleets of non-civilan ships at sea. A single nuke could wipe out most of a carrier group and there would be very little that could be done to stop it. The US could spread out the carrier group, but carriers are valuable targets all by themselves and would still be worth nuking, not to mention that spreading out the group would leave them vulnerable to conventional attack. That's the reason the US and the world in general stopped using battleships. They're way too vulnerable. One small hit and a massive investment sinks. Aircraft carriers are similarly vulnerable, but the aircraft have such great range that it's considered worth it as long as they're massively guarded. They're still _very_ vulnerable to advanced modern weapons even if those weapons aren't nukes.
Let's not forget that there was another technologically advanced nation with a massive military that thought it could take on the entire world in the last century. Even with support from a group of allies, it turned out they were wrong.
All that said, the biggest obstacle for the US in taking and holding the Capitol of any modern military power is that the US would have to comitt itself to accepting losses. Even if it won, there would be massive losses of very expensive equipment and tens of thousands of soldiers dead. The US hasn't been interested in that sort of fight for a long time now.
If they cut the funding, they might find a way to still have the air conditioning, just not power it with generators fueled with $400 per gallon fuel. Solar power springs to mind.
I have no children because I know I could not afford to give them everything they deserve. So, it would be a cruelty to them to be so self-centered as to have children anyway, knowing my situation, merely because I want them or think they're neat or think parenthood will fulfill my life or whatever. I have to consider what kind of life the child(ren) would have if I am to be a responsible parent. Maybe one day I'll be ready. I sure hope so.
Those kids went hungry because their mothers were too self-centered, or shallow, or not intelligent enough to make similar decisions. Yeah that does sound harsh. It sounds harsh because I care about children more than I care about playing to this crowd and sounding like a nice inoffensive person.
I suspect that is not the only reason that you don't have any children. I think it's stongly likely it would be your personal choice regardless of whether or not you had the means. In any case, your argument is essentially that no-one should ever have children since they can't know that they will always be able to provide for them. Even if you had the financial wherewithal now, you could not guarantee you would for the next 18 years. The fact is, people die, people get sick and don't die, couples break up, one parent may decide to run away, people lose their jobs or simply fail to do as well financially as they hoped. People can end up requiring welfare services for many reasons.
Unless of course you wish to argue that everyone has an unlimited right to taxpayer-funded children in perpetuity. That would be an interesting argument.
An interesting point. Forgive me if I start my answer to that question with a question. Can people choose to live in the wilderness, foraging for food or farming their own small plots and living in huts? Obviously, they can't (well, they sometimes can, but the park rangers eventually get them). That age is past. Modern society has all but done away with the notion of independant self sufficiency. The vast majority of people can only get by in this world by working within a system that requires trading goods and labor with other people and organizations. The economy is essentially mandatory. The problem is, it's also full of cracks that people fall through sometimes. People end up structurally unemployed through no fault of their own, sometimes en masse. How is someone living in a house, with a mortgage, in a geographically isolated town with no jobs supposed to pack up and move away? For that matter job searches follow a statistical bell curve, like many things. Logically there must be some small number of qualified, hard working people who still manage to run out the clock on their job search and end up living in their car or on the streets for every layoff. As it is, being too poor has been effectively criminalized in many places in the US. Basically, we have a world where people can be effectively forced out of our structured society. Should death, a life of crime, or prison be the only solutions? I actually believe that, in a sufficiently prosperous society, structured in such a way that participation in the economic system is effectively forced, everyone, not just parents of young children, should get economic support. A basic universal living wage, provided to everyone, might end up being the best way to go. The point is that, unless you're in favor of just letting people die, there has to be something.
That said, you should be aware that various other projects also enjoy protection under United States trademark laws, although they are far less hostile than Canonical in my experience.
That seems to be a good point to mention the history of the trademark on the term "Linux". Linus did not initially seek a trademark on the the term. A scummy lawyer named William R. Della Croce, Jr got one for it in 1994 and, in classic IP troll fashion, starting sending letters out to distros and book publishers demanding payments to license the term. There followed a lengthy court case to determine if the guy named "Linus", who was the acknowledged originator of the operating system named "Linux" might have a better claim to the trademark than some low life legal leech.
Even traditional CAPTCHA's are easily defeated by anyone who puts in a little effort. They might stop the low hanging fruit script-kiddies, but anyone with a brain realizes that you can simply hire human being to solve them for, at most, a few cents each. I mean, there's 3600 seconds in an hour. At 10 seconds each, that's 360 CAPTCHAs in an hour. If you're paying $8.00 an hour (which you won't be because you can do your hiring in places where your money will go a lot further), that's just over 2 cents each. Decrease the pay and get more demanding, which you can surely get away with somewhere, you can probably bring it down to 1 cent per captcha. That's only if you actually want to pay someone. If you don't, I once saw an interesting idea from someone for scamming people into solving them for you. Just throw up a fake (or even real) porn site with "free memberships" and require people to solve captchas to create their account. That might end up being more effort than just paying people.
In any case, that's the problem with any access method that bases itself on verifying that it's being accessed by a human: you can simply use a human to bypass it.
More importantly, 49% are always losers in any democratic system. Whether it is a two party system, or N party system.
That's flawed logic based, I supposed, on a notion of "winning" derived from the current system. Or maybe just from too much exposure to sports, or other such competitive paradigms. The way elections should work is to filter the candidates so that the person who gets the position comes from a small pool of people who are _all_ qualified for the job. Consider the fact that no-one really "wins" just because the candidate they voted for got the position. They win if the candidate who is elected is not corrupt, and actually good at their job. People get super-focused on the fact that one candidate or another may be for or against some detail of gun control, or abortion, or homosexual marriage, etc. Those things may be important but actually running the country competently is also important. Frankly, what this country needs is a few decades of competent, intelligent administrators who understand the constitutional limits on their powers, actually act in a lawful manner, don't appoint cronies and contributors to any position, actually READ and also understand the legislation they are voting for, aren't campaigning for re-election all the time, etc., etc. Instead there have been decades and decades of back and forth "victories" between two big sides, whose candidates generally immediately betray everyone the moment they're in office.
Yes. It's "government to the rescue" after the free market has already sorted things out already. Just enforce sane and useful labeling but otherwise butt the f*ck out.
Well, that's an interesting argument. If you think about it, back when the only real power of the FDA was to enforce labelling, and Elixir Sulfalinamide was making the rounds they could have applied the same logic. Sure the stuff was deadly poison, but the free market truly would have taken care of that. Eventually people would have realized that it sickened, blinded and killed the people that took it and usage would have petered off. True, the perfect information required for informed free market choices wasn't fully available since it was prescribed to already sick people and their deaths were often seen as caused by their condition being more serious than initially believed. Due to that, it would have taken much longer for the free market forces to actually take hold, but they would have been effective in the end. I mean, many more people would have died than the top-down "government to the rescue" method, but the end result would have been the same as long as you don't consider those deaths to be part of the end result.
If it's that bad for you, tons of health downsides and no upsides, why are people still eating it? Why does the FDA have to go out of it's way to make it illegal to eat something that they're claiming is, essentially, some form of poison?
I would think that the answer to your second question would obviously be that the FDA asked themselves your first question.
SEALs don't work in 24-man teams; that'd be too noisy. A SEAL team is typically made up of 6-8 individuals, each with a specific specialty.
A SEAL team typically has 120 members. There are three troops in each team, and each troop has two platoons. Those then break down into squads and then fire teams. It sounds like what you're describing is a squad. Also, the actual raid in Abottabad, which is being discussed here, involved approximately 24 SEALs in two blackhawks with another 24 SEALs on standby inside Pakistan, but not at the compound with backup Chinooks, then another 24 SEALS waiting just over the border with more chinooks. There were also drones and fighters providing intelligence and air support. They also had a dog.
some of us have to wear socks , and our socks get wet.
Then, because your socks are wet, you put on dry socks? I must be wierd. I take off my wet socks when my socks are wet, not put on another pair of dry socks over them. Oh? Does the act of putting on dry socks also involve taking off wet ones first? Hmm. Why do the two acts have to be related? I would only put on dry socks after taking off the wet ones if I needed to wear socks "because" of some other reason. Situations where I might not put socks on again include, for example, if I'm going to stay home and take a nap.
do residency at 80 hours/week for 3-7 more years after that
The 80 hours/week is part of the hazing referred to. If medical professionals expect each other to work 80 hour weeks, how can we respect their medical expertise? It's unhealthy (for both the doctors and for their patients) and idiotic.
league politics aside, the very nature of sports is to be a pure meritocracy and the fans demand it
Just picture me figuratively rolling around on the floor laughing for 10 minutes. The fans only demand meritocratic fairness when it's to their team's advantage. If the opposing team is obviously being treated unfairly, they tend to gloat.
if that happened in the NFL...if it was revealed to be fixed and scripted like the WWF **all hell would break loose** people would fuckign loose their minds with anger...the concussion cover-up thing would be nothing compared to that!
Well, first of all. Numerous NFL games have been documented as fixed. Aside from that though, the NFL is explicitly an "entertainment" company. The likelyhood of the NFL not being rigged is lower than the likelyhood that they aren't. As an aside, the players are also pretty much all certain to be on performance enhancing drugs.
To be fair, a millionaire isn't a big deal any more. Most working professionals should expect to be a millionaire by retirement these days unless something goes wrong.
IF YOU CANNOT GRASP THAT RAIN CAUSES YOUR CLOSES TO BE WET WITHOUT IT BEING EXPLICITLY STATED, YOUR ARE NOT ACTING INTELLIGENTLY. Once again, if you are 3, this is OK, if your are 12, not so much.
"...YOUR ARE NOT ACTING..."? "...your are 12..."
You simple cannot fathom that your kid isn't the best."
"You simple..."?
IF YOUR WANT YOUR KID TO SUCCEED, TRY CHALLENGING THEM AND SUPPORTING THEM WHEN THEY FAIL INSTEAD OF BLAMING THE "SYSTEM".
"...IF YOUR WANT YOUR..."? You have the excuse that you're just writing a post on Slashdot and aren't expecting to be graded. If your post were being graded, it would be covered in red marks, and you're not even 12. It's obligatory to point this sort of thing out whenever anyone posts a harshly critical post about grammar or spelling in another post. In this case, you didn't make such a post. Instead you were harshly criticizing a young child. I think that deserves the same treatment.
Now I will address the actual content of your post. By your own admission, on that particular set of questions, you have a 50% chance of a grade of 50% (also known as an F), since you can't tell if the answer to the first question is (b) or (c). You say: "without the exact story, its hard to call between (b) and (c) for the first question." What you haven't grasped is that the quoted text was, in fact, the entire story and not a summary. The simple fact is that story titles are not newspaper headlines. There is no "correct" title and the answer is subjective.
Why would, for example, "Rain and Sun" be correct? Why not just "The Sun"? Any child who understands that the sun is what causes rain in the first place might consider rain to be a redundant part. They also might wonder why it isn't "Sun, then Rain" or "Sun, then Rain, then Sun again". After all, these are sequential, not simultaneous events. For that matter, a descriptive title that leaves out the main character of the story could easily be seen as the wrong choice. The sun and the rain aren't characters in the story. They influence the events, but they aren't conscious actors. By that perfectly valid philosophy, it has to be "Timmy Takes a Nap" or "Timmy Goes to the Park". Trips to the park dominate the story in terms of action, so the latter is a logical choice. On the other hand, the nap is central to the story. In the traditional five-part short story, it's probably the peak of the rising action section, with the sun coming out again being the climax. So, "Timmy Takes a Nap" is a perfectly valid title. So, all the titles are valid from different points of view. The makers of the test clearly have a favorite. I'm guessing "Rain and Sun", but that's just an educated guess. It's also, I should note, a guess based on the contents of the multiple choice answers, rather than the questions. That turns it into a guessing game to try and figure out what the test writers want as the answer. Imagine if, instead of multiple choice, the question were simply "what title would you give this story?" Do you think you would have provided any of the 4 answers they presented as your title?
As for the second question. It's ridiculous. You don't put on dry socks because your socks are wet. You _remove_ your socks because they're wet. You may or may not put on dry socks afterwards depending on your plans. You certainly don't put on dry socks just because the last ones were wet. If you're going to take a nap, and you do it in a bed, most people would actually leave the socks off. Frankly, if Timmy put on dry socks just because his old socks were wet without any consideration of whether he actually needed to continue wearing socks, he's not a very bright child. Once again, you're left trying to choose the least worst option. It devolves into a test-taking game where you try to divine the intent of the test creators rather than provide a practical answer to the question. To put all that more succinctly "Timmy must wear dry socks at all ti
Ok, and I said that the GGP's definition of morality left a lot to be desired. So did the Nazi's. As a matter of fact, in this particular area, the GGP's system of morality seems to align quite well with the Nazi one.
I think you need a refresher on how fractions and percentages work. It's actually mostly other people's company. The money he's getting is not what he's due as a stockholder, it's executive pay which he gets on top of that. It comes out of the companies profits, which rightfully belong to the stockholders.
Why do so many people have absolutely no clue what a socialist is? Ellison owns something like 24% of Oracle. He doesn't own the whole thing. No-one is saying to take that away from him, or to have him pay anything more than his fair share of taxes on any capital gains or dividends. They're just supporting the other stockholders of Oracle, who think that he's being paid too much of _their_ money.
[Screed about how we prisons should be filled with starved slaves, being worked to death] Now we have a working system, financially, morally and judiciously.
Some people's definition of what constitutes morality leaves a lot to be desired.
Good? Bad? Depends on who you ask. But the one thing I've gotten real damn tired of hearing on Slashdot and hundreds of other websites is the tired mantra of "Oh noes! The NSA is spying on us!"... without bothering to answer the question of why much beyond "Because they're just evil, you know."
I think most of us have asked and answered that question. The obvious answer is _power_, just as you say. Theoretically, the NSA is meant to amass this power on behalf of the people. The problem is that they're obviously using these capabilities for power _over_ the people. Evil? Not sure. Corrupt? Pretty much by definition considering the principles in the corruption (the fact that we're now constantly being told that the constitution doesn't mean what we think it means, is just more corruption).
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Looked into this a bit more. It looks like it was typically 12 years of age, based on pre-catholic roman law, but was as low as 7 years old and sometimes younger in catholic medieval europe.
It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories
Well yes, but you do have an "if" in there. It's conditional on how many calories you need. I should note that, in nutrition, kilocalories, also know as Calories, are used instead of calories. The Calorie/calorie difference has been the bane of anyone who knows a little physics trying to "prove" things in biology ever since someone thought it would be a good idea to give a unit and another unit worth a thousand times the first unit the same name, just with a capital letter on one of them (as another aside, even though nearly everyone has adopted the US definition of an "illion", the multiplie definitions of billion, trillion, etc. still cause problems from time to time).
Anyway, the "if" relies on some pretty big statistical assumptions. In fact, how many Calories you need can vary based directly on how many you consume. For the typical, mostly idle modern person it's hard to get good numbers. You can get much better numbers for populations that are active all the time and operating at peak efficiency. So, yes, the part about needing to take in as much energy as you expend or you have to burn off reserves is completely accurate. It's just not very useful in this situation.
While you've been exceptionally polite about just how right you are, I somehow can't feel too bad pointing out a small flaw in your reasoning. The method of calculating his adjusted wealth used there is percentage of GDP, not standard adjusted dollars. In regular old adjusted dollars, his net worth, when he had $1.5 billion sometime around 1930 was about $21 billion. It actually goes up if you go back a bit, but it never goes up above about $25 billion in adjusted dollars. If you think about that in terms of wages, a job that roughly equates to a minimum wage job in 1914 would be 50 cents per hour. Map that to a modern $8.00 an hour job and you're looking at about a 16 times increase, so that pretty much puts Rockerfeller's wealth, relative to the average working stiff of his time, in the neighborhood of a modern billionaire with something like $20 to $30 billion.
The percentage of GDP theory is an interesting one, but it isn't a realistic way of comparing wealth across a century of time. The problem is that you're basically saying that a big 10 kg fish in a small pond is bigger than a 20 kg fish in the ocean beause one is in a small pond and the other is in the ocean. Would rockerfeller have been richer if he had the same wealth and moved to a country with a smaller GDP (but the same or higher gdp per capita)? Would he have been poorer if he moved to a country with a larger GDP (but, once again, the same GDP per capita)?
Fact: The Catholic Church never taught people that pedophilia was correct, or good, or just. In fact they taught (and teach) their followers that it was bad, illegal, and that they would spend the rest of their lives in hell if they were to commit these acts.
I'm curious where this actually comes up in Catholic dogma. Has the Catholic church traditionally had a problem with this? Obviously they've always objected to adultery, so they would require a properly sanctioned marriage. Aside from those objections, however, are there any traditional catholic age limits?
No, the concept's been around for a couple decades. It was suggested in a science fiction book originally.
The concept is fine, the execution might be subject to a few realities. First off, mass. The total mass that humans have _ever_ put into space is somewhere around 7.5 million kilograms. For contrast, the estimated mass of the Chelyabinsk meteor (meteorite? they have recovered pieces that reached the ground, but does that mean that the larger object that actually exploded in the atmosphere gets to count as a meteorite, or as a meteor?) is something like 12 million kilograms, and that exploded with the approximate force of a typical Nuclear bomb (the yields of a nuclear weapon can vary widely, but the majority are in the 500 kiloton range) and it was travelling at least twice as fast as the average velocity that most of the mass humans have launced into space has been accelerated to. So, one Chelyabinsk meteor is equal to something like a third of everything humans have launched into space. In other words, if everything we have ever launched were "rods from god" we'd have about three nuclear weapons worth of impactors out there.
Another way to look at it is in terms of fuel. The space shuttle carried a total of about 1.75 kilotons of fuel. The kilotons that nuclear bombs are typically measured in are kilotons of TNT. There's pretty good parity between the energy density of TNT and the energy density of rocket fuels. So, if the total energy of all that fuel ends up converted to the kinetic energy of the payload (which it doesn't), then one launch gets you a maximum of about one tenth of a Little Boy (the 16 kiloton bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima).
Another way to look at it is to consider your telephone pole sized projectile. We'll make it out of Osmium, since that's pretty much the densest material humans can get their hands on. We'll say the projectile is ten meters long and 20 centimeters across. That makes it about 3,141,590 cubic centimeters. At 22.6 grams per cc, that makes the whole thing mass about 70,686 kilograms. Let's just call it 71,000 kilograms (about three shuttle payloads worth). We're talking about launching it from the ISS, so we'll pretend that we can get it to hit at around 27,000 kph. That works out to 2 terajoules. A kiloton of TNT is about 4.184 terajoules. So we'll call the explosive yield of our Osmium projectile .5 kilotons. That's reasonably impressive (although let's not forget that we've been pretty generous to it by ignoring all the energy losses it would face getting to the ground). That gives it 7 times the energy it would have if it were just a conventional explosive made out of high explosive and not dropped from space and a little more than ten times the explosive potential of the largest conventional bomb manufactured. Of course, since it's a rod that's going to drive itself into the ground, most of that destructive potential will be wasted on shattering the ground. I suppose it could be made of lots of small pellets that are blown apart by conventional explosives 50 meters or so from the ground. In any case, as impressive as it might be, it's outclassed by a standard nuke by a factor of a thousand. It also takes a ridiculous amount of effort and energy to get into space.
Ultimately, it's a weapon idea waiting for more advanced space propulsion. As it stands right now, it could be done, and it would work, but it's a ridiculous proposition compared to just about every other method of bombing a target.
Tolerance is a mixed bag. You're still likely to be messing up your liver long term. Not to mention that heavy drinkers, _especially_ those with a high tolerance, are at a high risk of an alcoholic stroke.
The US navy is roughly the size of every other navy on the planet combined, so no outside help is likely.
A fight to control the English Channel would be an interesting one to watch. The US Naval forces, pitted against other naval forces, would give the US very solid supply lines across the Atlantic and would, of course, allow the US to field impressive air power. They would not, however, be able to prevent outside help crossing the narrow parts of the English channel. That battle would be US Naval forces vs tanks and other land based artillary on high ground, and US planes against concentrated land-based anti-aircraft.
Also, the UK is a nuclear power. Everyone seems to have forgotten this fact, since everyone is so enthusiastic about nuking civilian populations, but one of the original selling points of nuclear weapons is that you can use one to blow up up large fleets of non-civilan ships at sea. A single nuke could wipe out most of a carrier group and there would be very little that could be done to stop it. The US could spread out the carrier group, but carriers are valuable targets all by themselves and would still be worth nuking, not to mention that spreading out the group would leave them vulnerable to conventional attack. That's the reason the US and the world in general stopped using battleships. They're way too vulnerable. One small hit and a massive investment sinks. Aircraft carriers are similarly vulnerable, but the aircraft have such great range that it's considered worth it as long as they're massively guarded. They're still _very_ vulnerable to advanced modern weapons even if those weapons aren't nukes.
Let's not forget that there was another technologically advanced nation with a massive military that thought it could take on the entire world in the last century. Even with support from a group of allies, it turned out they were wrong.
All that said, the biggest obstacle for the US in taking and holding the Capitol of any modern military power is that the US would have to comitt itself to accepting losses. Even if it won, there would be massive losses of very expensive equipment and tens of thousands of soldiers dead. The US hasn't been interested in that sort of fight for a long time now.
If they cut the funding, they might find a way to still have the air conditioning, just not power it with generators fueled with $400 per gallon fuel. Solar power springs to mind.
I have no children because I know I could not afford to give them everything they deserve. So, it would be a cruelty to them to be so self-centered as to have children anyway, knowing my situation, merely because I want them or think they're neat or think parenthood will fulfill my life or whatever. I have to consider what kind of life the child(ren) would have if I am to be a responsible parent. Maybe one day I'll be ready. I sure hope so.
Those kids went hungry because their mothers were too self-centered, or shallow, or not intelligent enough to make similar decisions. Yeah that does sound harsh. It sounds harsh because I care about children more than I care about playing to this crowd and sounding like a nice inoffensive person.
I suspect that is not the only reason that you don't have any children. I think it's stongly likely it would be your personal choice regardless of whether or not you had the means. In any case, your argument is essentially that no-one should ever have children since they can't know that they will always be able to provide for them. Even if you had the financial wherewithal now, you could not guarantee you would for the next 18 years. The fact is, people die, people get sick and don't die, couples break up, one parent may decide to run away, people lose their jobs or simply fail to do as well financially as they hoped. People can end up requiring welfare services for many reasons.
Unless of course you wish to argue that everyone has an unlimited right to taxpayer-funded children in perpetuity. That would be an interesting argument.
An interesting point. Forgive me if I start my answer to that question with a question. Can people choose to live in the wilderness, foraging for food or farming their own small plots and living in huts? Obviously, they can't (well, they sometimes can, but the park rangers eventually get them). That age is past. Modern society has all but done away with the notion of independant self sufficiency. The vast majority of people can only get by in this world by working within a system that requires trading goods and labor with other people and organizations. The economy is essentially mandatory. The problem is, it's also full of cracks that people fall through sometimes. People end up structurally unemployed through no fault of their own, sometimes en masse. How is someone living in a house, with a mortgage, in a geographically isolated town with no jobs supposed to pack up and move away? For that matter job searches follow a statistical bell curve, like many things. Logically there must be some small number of qualified, hard working people who still manage to run out the clock on their job search and end up living in their car or on the streets for every layoff. As it is, being too poor has been effectively criminalized in many places in the US.
Basically, we have a world where people can be effectively forced out of our structured society. Should death, a life of crime, or prison be the only solutions? I actually believe that, in a sufficiently prosperous society, structured in such a way that participation in the economic system is effectively forced, everyone, not just parents of young children, should get economic support. A basic universal living wage, provided to everyone, might end up being the best way to go. The point is that, unless you're in favor of just letting people die, there has to be something.
That said, you should be aware that various other projects also enjoy protection under United States trademark laws, although they are far less hostile than Canonical in my experience.
That seems to be a good point to mention the history of the trademark on the term "Linux". Linus did not initially seek a trademark on the the term. A scummy lawyer named William R. Della Croce, Jr got one for it in 1994 and, in classic IP troll fashion, starting sending letters out to distros and book publishers demanding payments to license the term. There followed a lengthy court case to determine if the guy named "Linus", who was the acknowledged originator of the operating system named "Linux" might have a better claim to the trademark than some low life legal leech.
Even traditional CAPTCHA's are easily defeated by anyone who puts in a little effort. They might stop the low hanging fruit script-kiddies, but anyone with a brain realizes that you can simply hire human being to solve them for, at most, a few cents each. I mean, there's 3600 seconds in an hour. At 10 seconds each, that's 360 CAPTCHAs in an hour. If you're paying $8.00 an hour (which you won't be because you can do your hiring in places where your money will go a lot further), that's just over 2 cents each. Decrease the pay and get more demanding, which you can surely get away with somewhere, you can probably bring it down to 1 cent per captcha.
That's only if you actually want to pay someone. If you don't, I once saw an interesting idea from someone for scamming people into solving them for you. Just throw up a fake (or even real) porn site with "free memberships" and require people to solve captchas to create their account. That might end up being more effort than just paying people.
In any case, that's the problem with any access method that bases itself on verifying that it's being accessed by a human: you can simply use a human to bypass it.
More importantly, 49% are always losers in any democratic system. Whether it is a two party system, or N party system.
That's flawed logic based, I supposed, on a notion of "winning" derived from the current system. Or maybe just from too much exposure to sports, or other such competitive paradigms. The way elections should work is to filter the candidates so that the person who gets the position comes from a small pool of people who are _all_ qualified for the job. Consider the fact that no-one really "wins" just because the candidate they voted for got the position. They win if the candidate who is elected is not corrupt, and actually good at their job. People get super-focused on the fact that one candidate or another may be for or against some detail of gun control, or abortion, or homosexual marriage, etc. Those things may be important but actually running the country competently is also important. Frankly, what this country needs is a few decades of competent, intelligent administrators who understand the constitutional limits on their powers, actually act in a lawful manner, don't appoint cronies and contributors to any position, actually READ and also understand the legislation they are voting for, aren't campaigning for re-election all the time, etc., etc. Instead there have been decades and decades of back and forth "victories" between two big sides, whose candidates generally immediately betray everyone the moment they're in office.
Yes. It's "government to the rescue" after the free market has already sorted things out already. Just enforce sane and useful labeling but otherwise butt the f*ck out.
Well, that's an interesting argument. If you think about it, back when the only real power of the FDA was to enforce labelling, and Elixir Sulfalinamide was making the rounds they could have applied the same logic. Sure the stuff was deadly poison, but the free market truly would have taken care of that. Eventually people would have realized that it sickened, blinded and killed the people that took it and usage would have petered off. True, the perfect information required for informed free market choices wasn't fully available since it was prescribed to already sick people and their deaths were often seen as caused by their condition being more serious than initially believed. Due to that, it would have taken much longer for the free market forces to actually take hold, but they would have been effective in the end. I mean, many more people would have died than the top-down "government to the rescue" method, but the end result would have been the same as long as you don't consider those deaths to be part of the end result.
If it's that bad for you, tons of health downsides and no upsides, why are people still eating it? Why does the FDA have to go out of it's way to make it illegal to eat something that they're claiming is, essentially, some form of poison?
I would think that the answer to your second question would obviously be that the FDA asked themselves your first question.
SEALs don't work in 24-man teams; that'd be too noisy. A SEAL team is typically made up of 6-8 individuals, each with a specific specialty.
A SEAL team typically has 120 members. There are three troops in each team, and each troop has two platoons. Those then break down into squads and then fire teams. It sounds like what you're describing is a squad. Also, the actual raid in Abottabad, which is being discussed here, involved approximately 24 SEALs in two blackhawks with another 24 SEALs on standby inside Pakistan, but not at the compound with backup Chinooks, then another 24 SEALS waiting just over the border with more chinooks. There were also drones and fighters providing intelligence and air support. They also had a dog.
some of us have to wear socks , and our socks get wet.
Then, because your socks are wet, you put on dry socks? I must be wierd. I take off my wet socks when my socks are wet, not put on another pair of dry socks over them. Oh? Does the act of putting on dry socks also involve taking off wet ones first? Hmm. Why do the two acts have to be related? I would only put on dry socks after taking off the wet ones if I needed to wear socks "because" of some other reason. Situations where I might not put socks on again include, for example, if I'm going to stay home and take a nap.
do residency at 80 hours/week for 3-7 more years after that
The 80 hours/week is part of the hazing referred to. If medical professionals expect each other to work 80 hour weeks, how can we respect their medical expertise? It's unhealthy (for both the doctors and for their patients) and idiotic.
league politics aside, the very nature of sports is to be a pure meritocracy and the fans demand it
Just picture me figuratively rolling around on the floor laughing for 10 minutes. The fans only demand meritocratic fairness when it's to their team's advantage. If the opposing team is obviously being treated unfairly, they tend to gloat.
if that happened in the NFL...if it was revealed to be fixed and scripted like the WWF **all hell would break loose** people would fuckign loose their minds with anger...the concussion cover-up thing would be nothing compared to that!
Well, first of all. Numerous NFL games have been documented as fixed. Aside from that though, the NFL is explicitly an "entertainment" company. The likelyhood of the NFL not being rigged is lower than the likelyhood that they aren't. As an aside, the players are also pretty much all certain to be on performance enhancing drugs.
There are no selfmade millionaires.
To be fair, a millionaire isn't a big deal any more. Most working professionals should expect to be a millionaire by retirement these days unless something goes wrong.
IF YOU CANNOT GRASP THAT RAIN CAUSES YOUR CLOSES TO BE WET WITHOUT IT BEING EXPLICITLY STATED, YOUR ARE NOT ACTING INTELLIGENTLY. Once again, if you are 3, this is OK, if your are 12, not so much.
"...YOUR ARE NOT ACTING..."? "...your are 12..."
You simple cannot fathom that your kid isn't the best."
"You simple..."?
IF YOUR WANT YOUR KID TO SUCCEED, TRY CHALLENGING THEM AND SUPPORTING THEM WHEN THEY FAIL INSTEAD OF BLAMING THE "SYSTEM".
"...IF YOUR WANT YOUR..."? You have the excuse that you're just writing a post on Slashdot and aren't expecting to be graded. If your post were being graded, it would be covered in red marks, and you're not even 12. It's obligatory to point this sort of thing out whenever anyone posts a harshly critical post about grammar or spelling in another post. In this case, you didn't make such a post. Instead you were harshly criticizing a young child. I think that deserves the same treatment.
Now I will address the actual content of your post. By your own admission, on that particular set of questions, you have a 50% chance of a grade of 50% (also known as an F), since you can't tell if the answer to the first question is (b) or (c). You say: "without the exact story, its hard to call between (b) and (c) for the first question." What you haven't grasped is that the quoted text was, in fact, the entire story and not a summary. The simple fact is that story titles are not newspaper headlines. There is no "correct" title and the answer is subjective.
Why would, for example, "Rain and Sun" be correct? Why not just "The Sun"? Any child who understands that the sun is what causes rain in the first place might consider rain to be a redundant part. They also might wonder why it isn't "Sun, then Rain" or "Sun, then Rain, then Sun again". After all, these are sequential, not simultaneous events. For that matter, a descriptive title that leaves out the main character of the story could easily be seen as the wrong choice. The sun and the rain aren't characters in the story. They influence the events, but they aren't conscious actors. By that perfectly valid philosophy, it has to be "Timmy Takes a Nap" or "Timmy Goes to the Park". Trips to the park dominate the story in terms of action, so the latter is a logical choice. On the other hand, the nap is central to the story. In the traditional five-part short story, it's probably the peak of the rising action section, with the sun coming out again being the climax. So, "Timmy Takes a Nap" is a perfectly valid title. So, all the titles are valid from different points of view. The makers of the test clearly have a favorite. I'm guessing "Rain and Sun", but that's just an educated guess. It's also, I should note, a guess based on the contents of the multiple choice answers, rather than the questions. That turns it into a guessing game to try and figure out what the test writers want as the answer. Imagine if, instead of multiple choice, the question were simply "what title would you give this story?" Do you think you would have provided any of the 4 answers they presented as your title?
As for the second question. It's ridiculous. You don't put on dry socks because your socks are wet. You _remove_ your socks because they're wet. You may or may not put on dry socks afterwards depending on your plans. You certainly don't put on dry socks just because the last ones were wet. If you're going to take a nap, and you do it in a bed, most people would actually leave the socks off. Frankly, if Timmy put on dry socks just because his old socks were wet without any consideration of whether he actually needed to continue wearing socks, he's not a very bright child. Once again, you're left trying to choose the least worst option. It devolves into a test-taking game where you try to divine the intent of the test creators rather than provide a practical answer to the question. To put all that more succinctly "Timmy must wear dry socks at all ti
Ok, and I said that the GGP's definition of morality left a lot to be desired. So did the Nazi's. As a matter of fact, in this particular area, the GGP's system of morality seems to align quite well with the Nazi one.
I think you need a refresher on how fractions and percentages work. It's actually mostly other people's company. The money he's getting is not what he's due as a stockholder, it's executive pay which he gets on top of that. It comes out of the companies profits, which rightfully belong to the stockholders.
Spoken like a true socialist.
Why do so many people have absolutely no clue what a socialist is? Ellison owns something like 24% of Oracle. He doesn't own the whole thing. No-one is saying to take that away from him, or to have him pay anything more than his fair share of taxes on any capital gains or dividends. They're just supporting the other stockholders of Oracle, who think that he's being paid too much of _their_ money.
[Screed about how we prisons should be filled with starved slaves, being worked to death] Now we have a working system, financially, morally and judiciously.
Some people's definition of what constitutes morality leaves a lot to be desired.
Good? Bad? Depends on who you ask. But the one thing I've gotten real damn tired of hearing on Slashdot and hundreds of other websites is the tired mantra of "Oh noes! The NSA is spying on us!" ... without bothering to answer the question of why much beyond "Because they're just evil, you know."
I think most of us have asked and answered that question. The obvious answer is _power_, just as you say. Theoretically, the NSA is meant to amass this power on behalf of the people. The problem is that they're obviously using these capabilities for power _over_ the people. Evil? Not sure. Corrupt? Pretty much by definition considering the principles in the corruption (the fact that we're now constantly being told that the constitution doesn't mean what we think it means, is just more corruption).