First, "children born to unwed mothers" does not necessarily mean children raised by a single mother and no father, it just means children born to mothers who aren't yet married. In some times and places in the past (and even to a degree today in some places, even in the US), having a child out of wedlock could get you shunned, maybe even arrested, banished or executed. Sometimes it would all fall on the mother, sometimes on the mother and father, sometimes mostly on the father (pretty rare, of course). At some times, it was vitally important for the couple to marry the moment pregnancy was suspected, to conceal the fact that the child had been conceived out of wedlock. At other times, it was enough to marry some time before the birth so that the child wouldn't be born a "bastard". In the social context we're working in for the purpose of this discussion, there isn't really such a thing as a "bastard" or "illegitimate" child anymore. Sure, the word bastard still means what it means, but the connotations aren't what they once were. It's no longer necessary for a couple to marry to "legitimize" their children. For one thing, with the family court system and DNA testing, women aren't dependent on the father to make a public declaration of responsibility in the form of a marriage. For another, the social stigma of being a bastard has been reduced. So, when a couple who are not married are expecting a baby, far fewer of them feel the need to run out and get married right away to protect themselves and their child from scorn.
To make a long story short (too late), your "children born to unwed mothers" statistic doesn't tell us if that extra 13% isn't just couples who don't feel the need to rush into marriage anymore, but still stay together to raise the child. For that matter, it doesn't give us divorce statistics on the 72% who were married in 1990 vs the 59% in 2008. All it tells us is what percent of children were born to to mothers who weren't married in two different years, not what percentage of children were raised only by their mothers.
Secondly, your statistic from the Village Voice about "children brought up in single mother homes" (assuming that's what it actually says, since that part is paraphrased) tells us about statistics for children brought up in single mother homes, but doesn't differentiate between homes where the mother is single by choice and those where the mother is not. For that matter, it doesn't make any effort to account for the fact that single mother families are far more likely to also be low-income or poverty-stricken and to adjust for the typical increase in all sorts of crime statistics among lower income brackets.
In other words, the idea that fictional characters deciding to raise their children alone leads to social problems is not supported at all by the statistics you quote.
But "something similar" would have been patent infringing and, if it had taken off, implementers of gopher browsers would have been sued. Of course, 20 years ago, software patents were a bit dubious. There were some that had been granted, but it was a fuzzy gray area and whether they could be enforced or not was up in the air. As for business method patents, anyone sane could assure you that business method patents weren't ever going to be acceptable.
We've been able to turn lead into gold (albeit, mostly radioactive isotopes of gold) for a long time now. The alchemists were right that it could be done, even if their methods and theories were all over the map. Of course, the process for doing it does not produce gold in a quantity sufficient to offset the cost of transmuting it in the first place, even at todays prices. That doesn't mean that the quest was pointless. The knowledge gained was far more valuable.
Regarding burning people in effigy. The British have a national holiday devoted to burning Guy Fawkes in effigy. They've been doing it for 400+ years now. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic zealot who tried to blow up parliament.
The United States does have some serious long term budget problems but the credit downgrade is just political posturing.
The two halves of that sentence don't seem to agree with one another. Serious long term budget problems don't seem compatible with a good credit rating.
I would have to agree with that. It's trivially obvious that pretty much all halfway decent methods (meaning methods that cross already mowed areas minimally and favor long runs rather than turns and/or backing up) will complete in very similar time. This will happen regardless of the growth of the lawn. In fact, the larger the lawn gets (without the shape growing more complex), the closer in time the different methods will come. On a very small lawn, using the optimal mowing method is still going to complete in an amount of time on the same order of magnitude as an unoptimized method. On a very, very large lawn, without a ridiculously unusual shape, the time difference between the optimal method and any other reasonably efficient method is only going to be a small fraction of the total time.
So, from a practical computer science perspective, this isn't a very interesting problem. This is the kind of problem that you can safely simply throw more resources at. It's trivial to parallelize by hiring in someone with a second mower. You can literally throw more horsepower at it in most cases by getting a faster mower with more cutting area, etc.
It's interesting as a recreational mathematics problem, of course. However, having practical experience mowing a decent sized lawn (around 3 acres) when I was younger, I have to say that the model used in this exercise is far too simplistic. In the real world, large lawns that are parking lot flat also tend to be very geometrically regular around the edges and the ones that aren't tend to have all kinds of conditions the graphing exercise in the article ignores. For example, all the slopes that have to be handled in one particular direction or the mower tips over or won't make it uphill without the wheels spinning. Then there's the areas with rocks and tree roots where you have to slow down and raise and lower the blades in just the right spots. Then there's the wild, wooded areas around some edges where, if you're not careful, branches snag you and pull you backwards off the seat of the mower. Etc.
Then, there's the question of aesthetics. Efficiency is a sidenote. Most people mow their lawns for aesthetic reasons, otherwise they wouldn't do it so often. The pattern the mower leaves on the grass is important to most people who care what their lawn looks like enough to mow it obsessively enough to even need to try to make the process more efficient. The crazy pattern shown in the example wouldn't be acceptable to most of those people.
In any case, as far as actual efficiency goes, the article breaks its own advice on reducing curves. It also ignores the start point and end point. Moving the mower to where you will start cutting and back to where you store it are part of the exercise as well and should be considered unless you really do simply abandon the mower in the middle of the lawn when you're done. Clearly it's more efficient if you cut for as much of that distance as you can. Also, the article doesn't consider whether you're collecting clippings and dumping them into a compost heap somewhere or just leaving them. If you're dumping them, then you need to take regular detours to a dumping location to drop them off for large lawns and the cutting plan should be devised in such a way that you can make repeated trips back to this location, preferably over different previously uncut areas. For scalability, refueling might be a consideration as well. The refueling and clipping dumping issues require estimation of clipping volume and fuel use which will never be 100% in the real world, so you have to set thresholds instead and start weighing optimum possible efficiency versus the possibility of running out of gas and having to make an extra trip to get the gas can. Overall, it looks like it's not that easy to use a simple model to plan a big real world job.
That analogy isn't quite correct. It's more like you owe Billy $3 and you got $7 that you owe yourself out of your interest-bearing retirement account instead of your checking account and it's looking like there's no chance you'll ever pay that amount back into your retirement account, but will instead have to keep borrowing more.
It's too heavy for any realistic parachute to slow it down enough so that it won't destroy itself on landing. I believe the video said the chute would slow it down to about 200 MPH, and I'm sure that even a much larger chute wouldn't slow it down significantly more than that. So, to be concise, it's too heavy to land with a parachute, but can still be slowed down by a parachute.
Sigh. Yeah. I remember back in the old days when Bucky was the one shining example of a significant comic book character who had died and actually stayed dead.
Mars has a very thin atmosphere. It's nearly a vacuum. To generate enough lift to be worth anything, the wings for any spaceplane would have to be enormous. Atmospheric braking can work at high speeds, but once it slows down, there isn't enough drag for a parachute to slow it down to a survivable speed. If a parachute won't work, wings won't either unless they can make some sort of incredible high speed horizontal landing on very flat ground.
With the technology currently available, they seem to have made the best choices they can. Dumping parts all over the place may not appeal to you, but it's the best way to have, for example, a heat shield for atmospheric braking that you don't have to spend fuel on lowering gently to the ground afterwards. The lowering mechanism, where the rover is lowered from the hovering section is the oddest seeming part of the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's meant to lower the rover gently because the thrusters wouldn't be able to make a gentle landing, or if it's simply meant to keep the thruster section clear of the rover. If it's the former, then I suppose it makes sense. If it's the latter, then I think it would be a better idea to have the rover land with the thruster section attached, then have it detach and fly away. Then again, maybe they're worried about high speed grains of dust and rock kicked up by the thrusters. In any case, I'm not sure that anyone here criticizing the design actually has a better idea. I mean, you could imagine some sort of Voltron style rover that assembles itself from multiple independent pieces that land via airbag, for example, but it wouldn't exactly be less complicated.
Thanks. The question of whether or not it was radioisotope powered was a little silly as the answer was fairly obvious and easy to find. The question of how they can manage to launch it from a point of view of politics and negative publicity was my real question. That goes a good way towards answering it. Still, it's always possible it could get some unwanted NIMBY attention before its launch. People can get kind of funny about a few kilograms of plutonium even when the greatest risk in the worst case scenario is that it might fall on someone.
I know I'm replying to this a bit late, but anyway... I understand "The owners of this property have asked that you be removed" perfectly well thank you. In my experience, the average person is actually a bit confused about how laws about trespassing apply to "public spaces" even when they're actually private property. Ignorance of the law, especially when it's so complex, is actually an excuse. If you really made an effort to make sure that they understood that they really didn't have a legal right to be there anymore, that's one thing. If, on the other hand, you just robotically repeated something you knew they didn't really understand, as your description implies, then you were just setting up an excuse to exercise your power. You even wrote "idiots get confused about this all the time" which shows that you knew you were dealing with people who truly didn't understand the situation and were legitimately confused.
In my experience a lot of police officers use, and are in fact encouraged and trained to use, a hard-edged, authoritarian, and in fact bullying approach to people and situations. It seems to me that approach from the start just creates more problems than it solves. For example, most of the worst riots you can think of seem to happen because of police action rather than being prevented by police action.
How is this powered? Not the landing stages, the rover itself? The video doesn't show any solar cells on the rover. Are they omitted from the simulation for simplicity, or is it using some sort of radiosotope battery. The video mentioned it had a planned life of two years. If that's the case, and given the size of the thing, then it almost has to be. That makes perfect sense of course, it's the ideal use of the technology. But don't they always run into political obstacles when they launch anything with "nuclear" in the name?
I was only responding to someone who was stating that not wearing a seatbelt only endangers the person not wearing the seatbelt. Arguments over whether or not it's reasonable to make it illegal not to wear them are perfectly valid, of course. It all depends on where you want to draw the line. Personally, I wear mine, but I'm conflicted on laws forcing them to be worn.
Incidentally, have you ever tried to demand that someone who really doesn't want to wear their seatbelt in a car with you put their belt on? They don't actually have to be behind you. As others have pointed out, their dead weight can end up thrown around the car like a pool ball even if they're in the front. Anyway, in my experience, even if it's the law and if you point out that they're endangering your life as well, they'll still refuse to wear their belt. In most situations where you're sharing a ride with people somewhere, there's really only limited place for negotiations and you usually need to settle on doing what they want.
You don't have to pretend that I'm not asking you to believe that there's a reasonable risk of someone being flung out of the car and killing or seriously injuring someone outside the car. I'm not asking anyone to believe that. It happens, but it's obviously pretty rare, I should have been more clear when I merely said that the odds were "much slimmer". Incidentally, after a quick google search related to this, I would like to urge anyone considering suicide not to do it by throwing themselves off tall buildings. Apparently, they land on people quite a lot. Also, don't throw yourselves in front of trains, it really stresses out the engineers.
It's two miles wide. That should certainly be visible from 70 miles up. True, it wouldn't be visible from the moon, or from Alpha Proxima, or from somewhere in another galaxy, all of which are "in space", but from the edge of space, it should be visible to the unaided eye.
Wow. Sounds a lot like you were playing power games with those people. Nowhere in your description did you include the part where you explained to them about trespassing. By the sound of it, you just made it into "obey orders or else", with hopes that they wouldn't so you could impose your power on them.
Actually, if you're in the back seat, you stand a really good chance of killing the person in the front seat in a serious accident. You could also be thrown out of the car and become a dangerous projectile, but chances of that are much slimmer than the scenario where you kill the person in front of you.
I never said anything about not getting upset about it, just that there isn't really any international law. The closest we can come is organizations like the UN. Either that or total anarchy. Don't try to misconstrue what I'm saying as support for North Korea gaining nuclear weapons. That's _not_ what I was saying. All I was saying is that you can't have it both ways. You can't declare that actions like developing nuclear weapons are "illegal" while simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of international organizations like the UN.
If a nation decides not to honor a treaty, then they don't honor the treaty. It's not illegal for them to do so. In the case of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, article X allows for a country to withdraw from the treaty. What set of laws are you referring to under which breaking the treaty is "illegal"? A treaty between just two nations doesn't really count as "international law" since it's not really binding on anyone except those two nations (and whether it's really binding to those nations is a little dubious). Treaties that many, or all, nations sign on to create the kind of web of obligation that might be considered "international law". Treaties with that kind of scope are brokered, for good or ill, through organizations like the UN, the League of Nations before it, the G6/G8/G20, WIPO, etc.
Your statement that North Korea did sign the NPT treaty is incorrect. Technically speaking, the treaty was closed for signing at that point and they only acceded to to it. As for international law being "established by treaties long before there were organizations like the UN", I think you're confused. In the case of the NPT, for example, it was brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is an organization like the UN. It's theoretically independent of the UN, but still acts as a sort of satellite agency of the UN.
The reality is that, ultimately, there's no international law. Instead, there's a state of anarchy in which some consensus exists on how nations should behave towards each other, with a lot of it formalized in treaties. Most of these treaties are brokered through the UN or other such international agencies.
The problem is, they're only "illegal" because the UN says so. There is no international law except for that which nations agree on through organizations like the UN. So, all the posters who just want North Korea out of the UN don't seem to quite grasp what that would mean. As for North Korea being head of this committee, can anyone tell me if the US, France, UK, Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa (while it had nukes), China, USSR/Russia/Belarus/Kazakhstan/Ukraine have ever headed it? With the exceptions of the former soviet republics and South Africa, none of those nations have given up their nuclear weapons. If they're seriously discussing disarmament like adults, then I think it's appropriate for any of those countries to be on the committee and even chair it. Same should go for North Korea. On the other hand, if the nations with nukes are just being high handed towards countries that don't have nuclear weapons, then none of the nuke possessing countries should be allowed to chair the committee or even be on it.
It would be nice for the money to go to lots of programs, certainly. I suppose the big tragedy is that there is no money. All of this extra spending is being done with prospective future money that can be spent today by virtue of various forms of credit. It's all well and good to do that, as long as you spend as much time in the black as you do in the red and catch up on your debt rather than letting it grow and grow and grow. The US hasn't been in the black during my entire lifetime or indeed during the lifetimes of more than half of its citizens. All I can really conclude in the end is that the US, and indeed most of the world, is a mess.
Well, the primary example seems to be nearly everything that has been done in response to 9/11: the wars, the pork spending, the security theater, etc. versus spending all that money and effort on cancer research, or just outright paying for medical care for people in need. Or maybe spending the money and effort on increasing auto safety to reduce fatalities by say, 10%. There are lots of worthy causes out there, and allocating the kind of resources that have been apportioned out to them could probably save tens of thousands of lives per year. Meanwhile it's not clear whether anything done in response to 9/11 has managed to help anyone.
Of course, most of the things that the resources could be used on instead could never get the funding on their own merits, no matter how many people they could help. For one thing, the money just isn't there. The country was heavily in debt before all of this happened and things have just gotten worse. Nevertheless, due to overblown emotion the country is happily spending itself into bankruptcy and seems to not have any actual success to show for it.
It doesn't matter if it's stupid, that's what'll happen. It's stupid that my cats are afraid of flying, there's not one thing I can do about it.
I never argued that it's not what will happen, just that it's a serious flaw in our behavior and one we should try to correct. Your cats don't really know what's going on when they're flying, they just don't like the noise and the vibration and the uncomfortable movement. You and I, on the other hand, know exactly what's going on when we're flying, for the most part. We are, in fact, much much more aware of the dangers of horrible death involved in flying. If we were irrational about it, we wouldn't fly out of sheer terror of what could happen (possibly what could happen if the plane were seized by people intent on crashing it). Since we're rational I'm assuming that we both fly anyway, because we have a grasp on the actual probability of dying in a plane crash (or the even smaller possibility of the plane being hijacked). There's nothing you can do about your cats stupidity, but as highly aware, informed, and intelligent beings, there's something we can do about our own stupidity or we wouldn't have planes in the first place.
You keep arguing that the danger was 'perceived', the implication being that the danger wasn't there at all.
No. This is incorrect. This is where I believe you're being disingenuous. You're trying to shift my argument slightly to create a strawman you can attack. Here's a history lesson, starting with Chill, then you, then me, then you:
The problem is the spread-out nature of the event diminishes the perceived impact.
This statement supports my point. If all of the car crashes in the space of a year happened in one day the damage would be greater than it currently is where everything is spread out.
But that's a circular argument. You're saying that more significance should be attached to such events because people perceive them as more significant.
No, I'm saying they are more significant.
I was _not_ implying that "the danger wasn't there at all". I was outright stating that the danger was less than the danger presented by other well known causes and that it's irrational to treat that danger as if it's thousands of times worse than other dangers that cause far more death and destruction.
Once again, I've never argued that the problems we're still experiencing due to the trigger event on 9/11 aren't real, just that the reaction is overblown and stupid. You don't actually seem to disagree with me on that half the time.
As for the capacity of the buildings and how many were in them, I remember watching all of this on TV as it happened and speculative numbers like that being thrown around before anyone knew for sure. Before the towers even fell. Things like that stick with you whereas continuously adjusted information eking out for months and years afterwards doesn't always stick so well. Perfectly understandable.
However, the 50k number is still important, unless it is your intention to say that Osama was trying to keep the kill count really low. An hour later and that's what the occupancy would have been at the time of impact.
Actually, I've always wondered about that. In many respects, the 9/11 attacks were a terrorist masterwork. However, the timing of the attacks meant that the first strike happened before 9:00 AM in an office building, which should be an obviously bad time if your intent is to kill as many people as possible. A less obvious timing problem, but still one you might expect the planners to consider is that it was the day of the mayoral primary and also the first day of school. So, the attacks occurred on the weekday that was almost guaranteed to have the lowest attendance, especially in the morning, for months. The question there is if it was
Slashdot Mirror
A few comments about those statistics.
First, "children born to unwed mothers" does not necessarily mean children raised by a single mother and no father, it just means children born to mothers who aren't yet married. In some times and places in the past (and even to a degree today in some places, even in the US), having a child out of wedlock could get you shunned, maybe even arrested, banished or executed. Sometimes it would all fall on the mother, sometimes on the mother and father, sometimes mostly on the father (pretty rare, of course). At some times, it was vitally important for the couple to marry the moment pregnancy was suspected, to conceal the fact that the child had been conceived out of wedlock. At other times, it was enough to marry some time before the birth so that the child wouldn't be born a "bastard". In the social context we're working in for the purpose of this discussion, there isn't really such a thing as a "bastard" or "illegitimate" child anymore. Sure, the word bastard still means what it means, but the connotations aren't what they once were. It's no longer necessary for a couple to marry to "legitimize" their children. For one thing, with the family court system and DNA testing, women aren't dependent on the father to make a public declaration of responsibility in the form of a marriage. For another, the social stigma of being a bastard has been reduced. So, when a couple who are not married are expecting a baby, far fewer of them feel the need to run out and get married right away to protect themselves and their child from scorn.
To make a long story short (too late), your "children born to unwed mothers" statistic doesn't tell us if that extra 13% isn't just couples who don't feel the need to rush into marriage anymore, but still stay together to raise the child. For that matter, it doesn't give us divorce statistics on the 72% who were married in 1990 vs the 59% in 2008. All it tells us is what percent of children were born to to mothers who weren't married in two different years, not what percentage of children were raised only by their mothers.
Secondly, your statistic from the Village Voice about "children brought up in single mother homes" (assuming that's what it actually says, since that part is paraphrased) tells us about statistics for children brought up in single mother homes, but doesn't differentiate between homes where the mother is single by choice and those where the mother is not. For that matter, it doesn't make any effort to account for the fact that single mother families are far more likely to also be low-income or poverty-stricken and to adjust for the typical increase in all sorts of crime statistics among lower income brackets.
In other words, the idea that fictional characters deciding to raise their children alone leads to social problems is not supported at all by the statistics you quote.
But "something similar" would have been patent infringing and, if it had taken off, implementers of gopher browsers would have been sued. Of course, 20 years ago, software patents were a bit dubious. There were some that had been granted, but it was a fuzzy gray area and whether they could be enforced or not was up in the air. As for business method patents, anyone sane could assure you that business method patents weren't ever going to be acceptable.
Isn't that what patents are for?
We've been able to turn lead into gold (albeit, mostly radioactive isotopes of gold) for a long time now. The alchemists were right that it could be done, even if their methods and theories were all over the map. Of course, the process for doing it does not produce gold in a quantity sufficient to offset the cost of transmuting it in the first place, even at todays prices. That doesn't mean that the quest was pointless. The knowledge gained was far more valuable.
Regarding burning people in effigy. The British have a national holiday devoted to burning Guy Fawkes in effigy. They've been doing it for 400+ years now. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic zealot who tried to blow up parliament.
Snarky McButtface wrote:
The two halves of that sentence don't seem to agree with one another. Serious long term budget problems don't seem compatible with a good credit rating.
I would have to agree with that. It's trivially obvious that pretty much all halfway decent methods (meaning methods that cross already mowed areas minimally and favor long runs rather than turns and/or backing up) will complete in very similar time. This will happen regardless of the growth of the lawn. In fact, the larger the lawn gets (without the shape growing more complex), the closer in time the different methods will come. On a very small lawn, using the optimal mowing method is still going to complete in an amount of time on the same order of magnitude as an unoptimized method. On a very, very large lawn, without a ridiculously unusual shape, the time difference between the optimal method and any other reasonably efficient method is only going to be a small fraction of the total time.
So, from a practical computer science perspective, this isn't a very interesting problem. This is the kind of problem that you can safely simply throw more resources at. It's trivial to parallelize by hiring in someone with a second mower. You can literally throw more horsepower at it in most cases by getting a faster mower with more cutting area, etc.
It's interesting as a recreational mathematics problem, of course. However, having practical experience mowing a decent sized lawn (around 3 acres) when I was younger, I have to say that the model used in this exercise is far too simplistic. In the real world, large lawns that are parking lot flat also tend to be very geometrically regular around the edges and the ones that aren't tend to have all kinds of conditions the graphing exercise in the article ignores. For example, all the slopes that have to be handled in one particular direction or the mower tips over or won't make it uphill without the wheels spinning. Then there's the areas with rocks and tree roots where you have to slow down and raise and lower the blades in just the right spots. Then there's the wild, wooded areas around some edges where, if you're not careful, branches snag you and pull you backwards off the seat of the mower. Etc.
Then, there's the question of aesthetics. Efficiency is a sidenote. Most people mow their lawns for aesthetic reasons, otherwise they wouldn't do it so often. The pattern the mower leaves on the grass is important to most people who care what their lawn looks like enough to mow it obsessively enough to even need to try to make the process more efficient. The crazy pattern shown in the example wouldn't be acceptable to most of those people.
In any case, as far as actual efficiency goes, the article breaks its own advice on reducing curves. It also ignores the start point and end point. Moving the mower to where you will start cutting and back to where you store it are part of the exercise as well and should be considered unless you really do simply abandon the mower in the middle of the lawn when you're done. Clearly it's more efficient if you cut for as much of that distance as you can. Also, the article doesn't consider whether you're collecting clippings and dumping them into a compost heap somewhere or just leaving them. If you're dumping them, then you need to take regular detours to a dumping location to drop them off for large lawns and the cutting plan should be devised in such a way that you can make repeated trips back to this location, preferably over different previously uncut areas. For scalability, refueling might be a consideration as well. The refueling and clipping dumping issues require estimation of clipping volume and fuel use which will never be 100% in the real world, so you have to set thresholds instead and start weighing optimum possible efficiency versus the possibility of running out of gas and having to make an extra trip to get the gas can. Overall, it looks like it's not that easy to use a simple model to plan a big real world job.
That analogy isn't quite correct. It's more like you owe Billy $3 and you got $7 that you owe yourself out of your interest-bearing retirement account instead of your checking account and it's looking like there's no chance you'll ever pay that amount back into your retirement account, but will instead have to keep borrowing more.
It's too heavy for any realistic parachute to slow it down enough so that it won't destroy itself on landing. I believe the video said the chute would slow it down to about 200 MPH, and I'm sure that even a much larger chute wouldn't slow it down significantly more than that. So, to be concise, it's too heavy to land with a parachute, but can still be slowed down by a parachute.
Sigh. Yeah. I remember back in the old days when Bucky was the one shining example of a significant comic book character who had died and actually stayed dead.
Mars has a very thin atmosphere. It's nearly a vacuum. To generate enough lift to be worth anything, the wings for any spaceplane would have to be enormous. Atmospheric braking can work at high speeds, but once it slows down, there isn't enough drag for a parachute to slow it down to a survivable speed. If a parachute won't work, wings won't either unless they can make some sort of incredible high speed horizontal landing on very flat ground.
With the technology currently available, they seem to have made the best choices they can. Dumping parts all over the place may not appeal to you, but it's the best way to have, for example, a heat shield for atmospheric braking that you don't have to spend fuel on lowering gently to the ground afterwards. The lowering mechanism, where the rover is lowered from the hovering section is the oddest seeming part of the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's meant to lower the rover gently because the thrusters wouldn't be able to make a gentle landing, or if it's simply meant to keep the thruster section clear of the rover. If it's the former, then I suppose it makes sense. If it's the latter, then I think it would be a better idea to have the rover land with the thruster section attached, then have it detach and fly away. Then again, maybe they're worried about high speed grains of dust and rock kicked up by the thrusters. In any case, I'm not sure that anyone here criticizing the design actually has a better idea. I mean, you could imagine some sort of Voltron style rover that assembles itself from multiple independent pieces that land via airbag, for example, but it wouldn't exactly be less complicated.
Thanks. The question of whether or not it was radioisotope powered was a little silly as the answer was fairly obvious and easy to find. The question of how they can manage to launch it from a point of view of politics and negative publicity was my real question. That goes a good way towards answering it. Still, it's always possible it could get some unwanted NIMBY attention before its launch. People can get kind of funny about a few kilograms of plutonium even when the greatest risk in the worst case scenario is that it might fall on someone.
I know I'm replying to this a bit late, but anyway... I understand "The owners of this property have asked that you be removed" perfectly well thank you. In my experience, the average person is actually a bit confused about how laws about trespassing apply to "public spaces" even when they're actually private property. Ignorance of the law, especially when it's so complex, is actually an excuse. If you really made an effort to make sure that they understood that they really didn't have a legal right to be there anymore, that's one thing. If, on the other hand, you just robotically repeated something you knew they didn't really understand, as your description implies, then you were just setting up an excuse to exercise your power. You even wrote "idiots get confused about this all the time" which shows that you knew you were dealing with people who truly didn't understand the situation and were legitimately confused.
In my experience a lot of police officers use, and are in fact encouraged and trained to use, a hard-edged, authoritarian, and in fact bullying approach to people and situations. It seems to me that approach from the start just creates more problems than it solves. For example, most of the worst riots you can think of seem to happen because of police action rather than being prevented by police action.
How is this powered? Not the landing stages, the rover itself? The video doesn't show any solar cells on the rover. Are they omitted from the simulation for simplicity, or is it using some sort of radiosotope battery. The video mentioned it had a planned life of two years. If that's the case, and given the size of the thing, then it almost has to be. That makes perfect sense of course, it's the ideal use of the technology. But don't they always run into political obstacles when they launch anything with "nuclear" in the name?
I was only responding to someone who was stating that not wearing a seatbelt only endangers the person not wearing the seatbelt. Arguments over whether or not it's reasonable to make it illegal not to wear them are perfectly valid, of course. It all depends on where you want to draw the line. Personally, I wear mine, but I'm conflicted on laws forcing them to be worn.
Incidentally, have you ever tried to demand that someone who really doesn't want to wear their seatbelt in a car with you put their belt on? They don't actually have to be behind you. As others have pointed out, their dead weight can end up thrown around the car like a pool ball even if they're in the front. Anyway, in my experience, even if it's the law and if you point out that they're endangering your life as well, they'll still refuse to wear their belt. In most situations where you're sharing a ride with people somewhere, there's really only limited place for negotiations and you usually need to settle on doing what they want.
You don't have to pretend that I'm not asking you to believe that there's a reasonable risk of someone being flung out of the car and killing or seriously injuring someone outside the car. I'm not asking anyone to believe that. It happens, but it's obviously pretty rare, I should have been more clear when I merely said that the odds were "much slimmer". Incidentally, after a quick google search related to this, I would like to urge anyone considering suicide not to do it by throwing themselves off tall buildings. Apparently, they land on people quite a lot. Also, don't throw yourselves in front of trains, it really stresses out the engineers.
It's two miles wide. That should certainly be visible from 70 miles up. True, it wouldn't be visible from the moon, or from Alpha Proxima, or from somewhere in another galaxy, all of which are "in space", but from the edge of space, it should be visible to the unaided eye.
Wow. Sounds a lot like you were playing power games with those people. Nowhere in your description did you include the part where you explained to them about trespassing. By the sound of it, you just made it into "obey orders or else", with hopes that they wouldn't so you could impose your power on them.
Actually, if you're in the back seat, you stand a really good chance of killing the person in the front seat in a serious accident. You could also be thrown out of the car and become a dangerous projectile, but chances of that are much slimmer than the scenario where you kill the person in front of you.
I never said anything about not getting upset about it, just that there isn't really any international law. The closest we can come is organizations like the UN. Either that or total anarchy. Don't try to misconstrue what I'm saying as support for North Korea gaining nuclear weapons. That's _not_ what I was saying. All I was saying is that you can't have it both ways. You can't declare that actions like developing nuclear weapons are "illegal" while simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of international organizations like the UN.
If a nation decides not to honor a treaty, then they don't honor the treaty. It's not illegal for them to do so. In the case of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, article X allows for a country to withdraw from the treaty. What set of laws are you referring to under which breaking the treaty is "illegal"? A treaty between just two nations doesn't really count as "international law" since it's not really binding on anyone except those two nations (and whether it's really binding to those nations is a little dubious). Treaties that many, or all, nations sign on to create the kind of web of obligation that might be considered "international law". Treaties with that kind of scope are brokered, for good or ill, through organizations like the UN, the League of Nations before it, the G6/G8/G20, WIPO, etc.
Your statement that North Korea did sign the NPT treaty is incorrect. Technically speaking, the treaty was closed for signing at that point and they only acceded to to it. As for international law being "established by treaties long before there were organizations like the UN", I think you're confused. In the case of the NPT, for example, it was brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is an organization like the UN. It's theoretically independent of the UN, but still acts as a sort of satellite agency of the UN.
The reality is that, ultimately, there's no international law. Instead, there's a state of anarchy in which some consensus exists on how nations should behave towards each other, with a lot of it formalized in treaties. Most of these treaties are brokered through the UN or other such international agencies.
The problem is, they're only "illegal" because the UN says so. There is no international law except for that which nations agree on through organizations like the UN. So, all the posters who just want North Korea out of the UN don't seem to quite grasp what that would mean. As for North Korea being head of this committee, can anyone tell me if the US, France, UK, Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa (while it had nukes), China, USSR/Russia/Belarus/Kazakhstan/Ukraine have ever headed it? With the exceptions of the former soviet republics and South Africa, none of those nations have given up their nuclear weapons. If they're seriously discussing disarmament like adults, then I think it's appropriate for any of those countries to be on the committee and even chair it. Same should go for North Korea. On the other hand, if the nations with nukes are just being high handed towards countries that don't have nuclear weapons, then none of the nuke possessing countries should be allowed to chair the committee or even be on it.
It would be nice for the money to go to lots of programs, certainly. I suppose the big tragedy is that there is no money. All of this extra spending is being done with prospective future money that can be spent today by virtue of various forms of credit. It's all well and good to do that, as long as you spend as much time in the black as you do in the red and catch up on your debt rather than letting it grow and grow and grow. The US hasn't been in the black during my entire lifetime or indeed during the lifetimes of more than half of its citizens. All I can really conclude in the end is that the US, and indeed most of the world, is a mess.
Are there _any_ nuclear power plants in the US that could exist without large subsidies an tax relief though?
Well, the primary example seems to be nearly everything that has been done in response to 9/11: the wars, the pork spending, the security theater, etc. versus spending all that money and effort on cancer research, or just outright paying for medical care for people in need. Or maybe spending the money and effort on increasing auto safety to reduce fatalities by say, 10%. There are lots of worthy causes out there, and allocating the kind of resources that have been apportioned out to them could probably save tens of thousands of lives per year. Meanwhile it's not clear whether anything done in response to 9/11 has managed to help anyone.
Of course, most of the things that the resources could be used on instead could never get the funding on their own merits, no matter how many people they could help. For one thing, the money just isn't there. The country was heavily in debt before all of this happened and things have just gotten worse. Nevertheless, due to overblown emotion the country is happily spending itself into bankruptcy and seems to not have any actual success to show for it.
I never argued that it's not what will happen, just that it's a serious flaw in our behavior and one we should try to correct. Your cats don't really know what's going on when they're flying, they just don't like the noise and the vibration and the uncomfortable movement. You and I, on the other hand, know exactly what's going on when we're flying, for the most part. We are, in fact, much much more aware of the dangers of horrible death involved in flying. If we were irrational about it, we wouldn't fly out of sheer terror of what could happen (possibly what could happen if the plane were seized by people intent on crashing it). Since we're rational I'm assuming that we both fly anyway, because we have a grasp on the actual probability of dying in a plane crash (or the even smaller possibility of the plane being hijacked). There's nothing you can do about your cats stupidity, but as highly aware, informed, and intelligent beings, there's something we can do about our own stupidity or we wouldn't have planes in the first place.
No. This is incorrect. This is where I believe you're being disingenuous. You're trying to shift my argument slightly to create a strawman you can attack. Here's a history lesson, starting with Chill, then you, then me, then you:
I was _not_ implying that "the danger wasn't there at all". I was outright stating that the danger was less than the danger presented by other well known causes and that it's irrational to treat that danger as if it's thousands of times worse than other dangers that cause far more death and destruction.
Once again, I've never argued that the problems we're still experiencing due to the trigger event on 9/11 aren't real, just that the reaction is overblown and stupid. You don't actually seem to disagree with me on that half the time.
As for the capacity of the buildings and how many were in them, I remember watching all of this on TV as it happened and speculative numbers like that being thrown around before anyone knew for sure. Before the towers even fell. Things like that stick with you whereas continuously adjusted information eking out for months and years afterwards doesn't always stick so well. Perfectly understandable.
Actually, I've always wondered about that. In many respects, the 9/11 attacks were a terrorist masterwork. However, the timing of the attacks meant that the first strike happened before 9:00 AM in an office building, which should be an obviously bad time if your intent is to kill as many people as possible. A less obvious timing problem, but still one you might expect the planners to consider is that it was the day of the mayoral primary and also the first day of school. So, the attacks occurred on the weekday that was almost guaranteed to have the lowest attendance, especially in the morning, for months. The question there is if it was