The point about the teenagers is that the pictures of naked minors were pictures they took of themselves. Leaving aside the question of whether mere nudity constitutes pornography, the generally accepted reason that child pornography is considered bad is because it cannot be made without a sexual assault on a minor. In this case, however, if they were being victimized, it was by themselves. If we extend laws about sexual contact with minors to allow the victim and the perpetrator to be the same person, then a good 90% or more of us are surely guilty of numerous counts of statutory rape due to the fact that most of us started masturbating before we reached the age of consent. I suppose, actually, that even those of us who never masturbated have still taken our clothes off, seen ourselves naked, touched our own bodies in ways that would be considered some sort of sexual abuse if an adult were doing it to us. So, prison time and sexual offender registry for everyone then?
Bars, restaurants, everywhere is much nicer to visit now that smoking is banned in those places. I remember the bad old days when there was a smoking and non-smoking section. With very few exceptions where the non-smoking section was airtight-sealed, it was still pretty bad even in the non-smoking section. Now if they could just do something about the entrances to buildings. Make all the smokers go 20 meters off to the side or something so we don't have to pass through a cloud of disgusting cloying smoke.
Cigarette smoke is just awful. I've had smoke from camp fires blow into my face plenty of times when it's thick and choking and makes your eyes water. It's a lot stronger than a few people standing around smoking. But I vastly prefer that smoke to the vile stuff that issues out of cigarettes. A few minutes of exposure to it makes you feel unclean all day.
Yes, the point is that the heavy metal loaded run off from these will be even worse than what ends up under the gas stations now. And yes, I have a point. I've already stated it too. The point is that sealed batteries would probably be a much more environmentally sound idea than filling up with liquid battery juice.
I will absorb more heat from the room I'm sitting in right now over the time period of a typical flight than I would from 30 seconds under the pencil-thin flame of a MAPP torch. Nevertheless, I would much rather spend the four hours sitting comfortably in this room than 30 seconds under the torch flame. Four hours in the room will barely hurt me at all aside from a little normal aging damage, 30 seconds under the torch, depending on where it's applied, could blind me, deafen me, paralyze me, destroy my hands and feet, or even kill me. It has been pointed out over and over again that the radiation from these scanners is deposited over a tiny volume relative to the overall volume of a human body and that it's done over a dramatically shorter period of time than a flight. Some radiation risks are cumulative, others depend on intensity. Once again, think heat vs temperature.
Because we know from experience that they won't hire good statisticians to really figure it out and, even if they do, their advice will be overridden by people who trust their "gut instinct".
You would be a bit more convincing if there were any inventions on your list invented less than 63 years ago: Automobiles: At least 136 years ago if you only count internal combustion engines, 242 years ago if you count steam powered, and 500+ years for spring powered. Airplane: At least 107 years ago for sure, with earlier accounts of working models. Helicopters: There were string operated toy helicopters 500+ years ago (in China, however which I should note is in Asia), and of course Da Vinci drew some, but no working passenger models until 103 years ago and then nothing that could really be used as a vehicle until 86 years ago. Computers: If Babbage counts, then it's about 162 years ago, if only working models count rather than working concepts, then 75 years. Telephones: Who knows. It's at least 135 years ago, but may be as much as 167 years or more. Fiber Optics: About 130 years ago for illumination, and 115 years ago for data transmission Microwaves (I assume you mean the cooking appliance): About 64 years ago The transistor: Most recent invention at 63 years ago. Nuclear Power: Reactor invented around 69 years ago, although not developed into a working model for a while after.
So, we're looking at an average age of at least (136+107+86+75+135+115+64+63+69)/9 = 94 years for the inventions you've listed if you only give credit to the most recent inventor. The most recent is still 63 years ago, meaning that the percentage of people in the population right now who were even alive at the time is tiny. John Bardeen, who was the last of the credited transistor inventors to die has been dead for 20 years. There were certainly more people involved in developing the concept and maybe some of them are alive now, but it's not very likely that they were younger than mid twenties at the time, so their chances of being alive today are slim. Too many people were involved in the invention of nuclear power to say for sure if any of them are alive, but they're almost certainly past their prime inventing years. Ditto on Microwave ovens. No-one who originally invented the computer is still alive. Everyone else involved in inventing the other inventions you mentioned is long dead, unless their side work in alchemy paid off and we just haven't heard about it. Only 2 of these inventions are younger than my parents, but they're still old enough that my parents will have grown up with those inventions being relatively commonplace items that they took for granted. Although I do know that they never had a microwave oven until about 22 years ago and I think my father was the first of them to actually use a computer at university.
So, I'd have to say you've hardly proven your point about how the West invents everything and Asians are just devilish copiers in the "recent history" that you say "speaks for itself". Maybe you can prove your point, but you'd better use some examples that aren't three or more human generations old.
Most people on the planet understand "America" is an abbreviation of "The United Sates of America" and will argue there is no such continent as America
I don't think the link you provided supports that. It does lay out some different models for numbering and naming the continents, but all of them include one or two Americas. The link doesn't say anything supporting the idea that, to most people in the world, the term America precisely means "The United States of America".
Virtually no-one I've ever met who isn't from the USA, including myself seems to agree with you on this. Are you from the US? Most people do understand that when people talk about things or people being "American" that it's probably a reference to the USA, but usually people go by context on this rather than believing it's some sort of absolute. The kind of absolutist argument you're making seems to be the kind of argument you get from people who have never really learned another language or exposed themselves to another culture. The kind of person who thinks that the entire rest of the world is stupid for "incorrectly" saying football when they mean soccer.
The other big problem I have with your argument is that you seem to be claiming that there are two separate things: "The Americas" and "America". You seem to argue that they're somehow completely separate and explicitly state:
"America" is an abbreviation of "The United Sates of America"
If that's the case, then where did the people who came up with the term "The United States of America" come up with that word at the end? Why isn't it "The United States of The Americas"? Without invoking time travel, or a GNU-style recursive naming convention, how would they name a country using a phrase where one of the words is derived from the phrase itself?
Ultimately we're really quibbling over a small point. I'm not arguing that "America" isn't generally synonymous with "The United States of America", I'm simply arguing with your ironclad view that it is the absolute definition of the term and everyone the world over agrees with you.
Hard to tell which is more important: groundwater or air. I was actually arguing for sealed batteries as opposed to liquid flow battery juice. Concentrating the job of filling batteries with highly reactive heavy metal containing liquid compounds seems like a job best done in a small number of well-regulated facilities with serious containment and trained, careful personnel rather than at tens of thousands of little stations maybe inspected once every few years with the filling done by commuters in a rush or other careless people. I don't see why you can't have strings of batteries on serpentine chain belts that you can feed into cars while replacing the old ones.
If someone could develop an actual 100% efficient quick-charging battery that could compete with a tank of gas, that would also be great, as well as a complete miracle. The problem without such a battery, and the reason something else is needed, is that the energy transfer rate from a typical gas pump is on the order of 10 MW, which is possible because it's a simple transfer of an inert substance. Charging a chemical battery requires energy conversion. If the conversion is 99% efficient, then that means that, to keep up with a gas pump, around 100 KW of heat is produced, which is a lot of heat to handle without the car melting and the person filling it bursting into flame, not to mention that the 99% efficiency is probably a pipe dream. Aside from that, it means that the electric equivalent of even a small four pump gas station has to be wired for 40 MW (buffering power somehow with ultracapacitors or a flywheel or something sounds doable until you look at what's actually available and do the math and realize they just wouldn't cut it for the usage patterns of a typical gas station) and so does the one right across the street.
It's hardly a "radically new approach". The idea has been around for a long time and is easy to come up with off the the top of your head. I did in this slashdot post. I'm not going to try to claim to have come up with a radically new approach there either since the idea has, in all likelihood, been around for about as long as batteries have (which is millenia, incidentally). Making it work is another matter altogether. If they have, it may be of some interest. Of course, in the post I linked to above, I speculated that such an approach was almost guaranteed to end up as an environmental disaster in one way or another. My view on that may have softened a little since that post, but it would take some extraordinary proof for me to believe that it wouldn't end up resulting in thousands of plumes of heavy metal laden electrolyte under filling stations everywhere.
No, my mission in life is not to "eat shit and spout nonsense". I'll leave the spouting nonsense to the Coca Cola mission statement. As for eating excrement, why would I want to make that my mission in life? If you didn't read what I wrote very carefully, I was saying that I _didn't_ like their mission statement, so why would I want to make eating it my mission? I did not say that actual lists of goals were a bad thing. I also know that any manager proposing to stop production to bottle water for a disaster area is going to make the argument you just made rather than saying "please refer to the bullet points Planet and Profit in our mission statements Vision section". There is a little bit in that mission statement that can count as actual guidance. Most of it was just rah-rah cheerleading nonsense which seems to enthuse some people but mostly is just annoying. That mission statement belongs thoroughly to the kind of person who things that they can inspire you by telling you how to feel rather than providing good leadership. The kind of person who writes about "leading the way in great customer service" or some other such tripe in a memo telling you that you have to cut the amount of time you spend helping customers in half. No-one respects people who try to dress things up in flowery doublespeak unless they're actually good at it. Most of the marketing types who write this stuff just aren't good enough.
In terms of mass, density, etc. you would expect it to probably act like regular matter with similar properties, but because the electromagnetic charges are swapped, would it look like regular matter since optical properties are all about how matter interacts with electromagnetic radiation? Would antimatter gold be yellow and shiny? Would antimatter water ice be transparent? Would incandescently hot antimatter iron actually be incandescent? In the same frequencies? What would the magnetic properties of antimatter iron be? Would antimatter carbon-14 have the same radioactive decay rate as regular carbon-14? For that matter, carbon-14 decays into Nitrogen 14 through beta decay, releasing an electron and an electron antineutrino, so does that mean anti-carbon-14 undergoes beta decay to produce a positron and an electron neutrino? Is the symmetry really so exact in all other details? If it is, then why isn't the universe split evenly between matter and antimatter? Would the other properties really be the same?
It's normal to think of atoms in a fairly simplistic fashion, but they're really quite complex structures. Exactly the same, but just opposite charges? Easy to imagine it that way, just like it's easy to imagine the solar system working on Newtonian principles until you take detailed enough measurements and discover that the orbit of Mercury doesn't quite fit the model. It seems to me that really small differences could add up to quite big differences in things like crystalline structure. So maybe anti-iron could have similar properties to iron but it turns out the crystals don't stick to each other, so solid anti-iron objects fall apart into powder like tin at low temperatures. Maybe you can't make antimatter analogues of various compounds. Water seems like it should work, but what about complex long-chain molecules like DNA? I can't tell what the real answers are to most of these questions. I think it would be very interesting to know.
Faggots are indeed also a kind of meatball. Once again, deriving from the same base meaning: a bunch of stuff rolled up and bound together. In this case a bunch of minced meat (well, animal product certainly... almost certainly anyway) rolled up and bound in a membrane. They're sort of like haggis in the sense that, while they're a traditional food and most people know of them, most modern English people don't actually regularly eat them or even ever eat them, just like most most modern Scottish people don't have haggis all that often. Anyway, using the term for cigarette is not as common as the abbreviation "fag" (incidentally, are you disputing that it's an abbreviation?), but I've certainly heard it used. I would argue that doesn't make me ignorant, but I suppose you're using a variation on the "No True Scotsman" argument from your end. So, if an Englishman (or woman actually, as the case may be) uses the term "faggot" to refer to a cigarette then they are No True Englishman, therefore they don't count for a discussion of whether any Englishman uses the term "faggot" for cigarette. I personally think that line of reasoning is idiotic and that therefore Hognoxious is an idiot. Of course maybe I'm only descending to insults because Hognoxious did first and I don't really mean it. Usually I try to keep the discussion civil even if it didn't start out that way because you can sometimes get some surprisingly reasonable discussion out of people who started in the conversation with flaming.
I should note also that I am technically English as I was born while my parents were students at Cambridge, but they were New Zealanders themselves. I've lived in England, New Zealand and France before ending up in the United States where I've been for quite some time. In any case, I haven't actually visited England at all in nearly thirty years now, so I really am No True Englishman. I also don't smoke.
Interesting things I found out from some quick research on the word is that it goes back to the term Fascis which was a type of axe used by the Romans, often symbolically to represent justice or state power. It's where we get the term fascism. The axe handle was made of a number of strips of birch bound together to make one solid column. Apparently the Romans got the word from the greek phákelos which just means a bundle. Fascinating stuff to learn really. I find the fluid, organic, messy nature of language simultaneously fascinating and extremely frustrating. Frustrating because it means it's almost impossible to ever pin down the exact meaning of anything, or even to properly trace the development of words and language, but fascinating too because, fuzzy as it is, we've still managed to turn our grunts and scribblings on walls into this amazing system of communication.
Fag is just an abbreviation for faggot or fagot, which is a bundle of materials, generally sticks, bound together for the purposes of burning or firing in some manner. The definition could certainly stretch to include bundles of leaves, by which token a cigarette is literally a fagot. In any case, using fag for a cigarette is much more common than using faggot, but I've certainly heard both terms used in England for both cigarettes and homosexuals. As it happens, they are almost certainly literally the same word with the same origin. The likely derivation for homosexuals is apparently from a slang derogatory term for a woman, referring to her as a "faggot" in the same way some might refer to her as "old baggage". So, the usage for a cigarette is saying that something is literally a bundle of stuff to be burned, and the one for a homosexual is metaphorically saying that he is a woman by way of a second metaphor saying that a woman is a bundle of sticks to be carried around.
Yes, you can see antimatter. Except for transparent antimatter (actually, that is a pretty interesting thought, anyone know if anyone has done any reliable work on what the likely physical properties of antimatter elements would be) and, of course, the antimatter only present in microscopic amounts. As it turns out, we've only worked with it in microscopic amounts so far. If you were in a situation where you were dealing with a macroscopic amount of antimatter and you were looking right at it, you'd have to be really, really, really confident in the containment technology to not be escaping as fast as you could run/drive/fly. Anyway, there are sure to be ways to detect antimatter non-destructively although they may be difficult, but it certainly emits gamma radiation when it annihilates with regular matter, so you can certainly tell that you had antimatter in your container after the fact.
But the tendency in all such cases seems to be for all income to be spent on the sport itself and none to flow back to other school activities but in most cases, the sport still also gets school funds that otherwise could have gone to other classes. Just like with the the big stadiums for professional teams that get paid for by public money on the flimsy theory that it will produce economic activity that will return profits to the taxpayers. In the final accounting, those promises of a return on investment never seem to actually come true. The same seems to me to be true of supposedly "profitable" school sports.
The link you provided does not agree with you at all. It mentions the 7 continent model most of us are probably familiar with and two 6 continent models, one of which includes North and South America as separate continents, but has Eurasia as one continent and another which considers both North and South America to be one continent. In none of these models is America not the name of a continent or a set of two continents joined by an isthmus. Most people on the planet who count for purposes of this discussion (I don't consider people who can't find two or more of: North America, South America, or the United States of America, or anyone who thinks that Mexico is part of South America, to count in geography discussions on this subject) understand America to be a context-sensitive term that most of the time people use to mean the USA, even if incorrectly, but they would not argue that there is no such continent as America, but rather that America is a set of continents.
But punishment from government for speaking is pretty much _the_ defining example of when you don't have free speech. When Henry Ford says that he wants his employees to speak their minds, even if it gets them fired (paraphrasing here, and not 100% sure it was Ford since I can't find the quote now), then it's not necessarily a free speech issue. When the government says, you're free to speak your mind, even if it gets you thrown into a gulag by us, then it is a free speech issue, even when it's not a gulag, but just an indefinite suspension from school.
The problem is that cause and effect are a little hard to figure out in brain development, or indeed in any other kind of development. Try to figure out if someone is well-muscled because they're an athlete or if they're an athlete because they're well muscled. In most cases, it's both and the cause and effect are hard to find. Same with brain development. Do certain regions of the brain develop at certain ages and that's why we develop certain patterns of thought, mental abilities and ability to accept certain kinds of responsibility, or does our learning certain patterns of thought, exercising mental abilities and accepting certain kinds of responsibility cause certain regions of the brain to develop?
Do sports bring in the bucks before University? Even then, do they really bring in the bucks? I hear this argument a lot, usually when someone is proposing spending a boatload of money on things like new sports stadiums and so forth. As far as I can tell, the promised bucks, even for big municipal stadium projects for rich professional teams, never seem to materialize for the people who actually shelled out the "investment" in the first place. So, I would have to say that academics, art, band _and_ sports cost money unless there are some good figures to demonstrate otherwise.
Also, I have to say that your former employer sounds horrible.
Man, that Coca Cola mission statement is a load of sales tripe. Personally, over the years I've become completely sick of working in places where you get in trouble for not expressing the expected enthusiasm for stupid, so-called, "mission statements" like that. There is nothing in that Coca Cola mission statement that isn't either blindingly obvious standard operating procedure for the business they're in or overblown fill-in-the-bullet-point busy work. Seriously, when their "vision" is a bullet point pseudo-alliterative list that looks like an early teen wrote it, people who have real work to do tend to feel nothing but contempt when their supervisors expect them to get excited about this stuff.
Not to discount the idea of a mission statement. If Coca Cola decided to build a moon base by 2035, or even just to completely change their business model, or just developed some new goal other than: "make and sell beverages" (from which all of the stuff about doing market research, developing new recipes, advertising, etc. can be simply inferred), a mission statement might make some sense. If it's defining real goals it makes sense. When the "mission" can be pretty clearly stated as "business as usual", then they should just pencil that in and get back to work. If they really, truly want to make some part of their statement a true goal, such as "be a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities", then they shouldn't plop it down in among a bunch of stuff they clearly put in there just to fill space.
But that should be less a reason not to legalize it, and more a reason to stamp on the insurance companies throats if they try to pull that, surely? From a strict resource-usage point of view, suicide by terminally ill patients (or those who will need lifelong full-time care), is a desirable thing since those patients use most of the resources (of course, medical accounting seems to be even wackier than military accounting, so who can ever really know) and so clearly it would be desirable to the insurance companies. The slippery slope where they, or the hospitals, or the law itself, starts to push "suicide" on people is clearly undesirable. It's clearly not something that could "never happen" as there are numerous historical (many well within living memory) examples of it happening and not just to the terminally ill. That's no reason to keep it illegal however, it's just a reason to be extremely vigilant, if it's made legal, at making sure that every last person who does get assisted suicide really considers it to be the best possible choice for them.
The initial cause of the Great Famine was potato blight, but most of the actual human tragedy was caused by human nature. A poisonous soup of politics, racial and religious hatred, and moronic attempts to "fix" social problems from the top down.
Yes, but that would be covered by the "generally speaking". In the Five and Three Doctors series the collective powers of the Time Lords was being used to allow the doctors to co-exist. In the Two Doctors, the Second Doctor was on a mission for the time lords, so they may have been intervening to allow it as well. Collectively (and individually with individuals such as the Doctor himself) the Time Lords are meant to be scary powerful and can turn off, or at least work around laws of physics. Basically, the current series and episodes like _The Waters of Mars_ seem to indicate that the Laws of Time that the Time Lords follow are laws of physics for the rest of us, but are more like regulatory laws for them. So, they can break them and potentially contain and repair the damage, with some violations being worse than others
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I don't think you quite grasp that most of us don't think that "mercilessly beating" anyone, even those who are not "innocent slobs", is right.
The point about the teenagers is that the pictures of naked minors were pictures they took of themselves. Leaving aside the question of whether mere nudity constitutes pornography, the generally accepted reason that child pornography is considered bad is because it cannot be made without a sexual assault on a minor. In this case, however, if they were being victimized, it was by themselves. If we extend laws about sexual contact with minors to allow the victim and the perpetrator to be the same person, then a good 90% or more of us are surely guilty of numerous counts of statutory rape due to the fact that most of us started masturbating before we reached the age of consent. I suppose, actually, that even those of us who never masturbated have still taken our clothes off, seen ourselves naked, touched our own bodies in ways that would be considered some sort of sexual abuse if an adult were doing it to us. So, prison time and sexual offender registry for everyone then?
Bars, restaurants, everywhere is much nicer to visit now that smoking is banned in those places. I remember the bad old days when there was a smoking and non-smoking section. With very few exceptions where the non-smoking section was airtight-sealed, it was still pretty bad even in the non-smoking section. Now if they could just do something about the entrances to buildings. Make all the smokers go 20 meters off to the side or something so we don't have to pass through a cloud of disgusting cloying smoke.
Cigarette smoke is just awful. I've had smoke from camp fires blow into my face plenty of times when it's thick and choking and makes your eyes water. It's a lot stronger than a few people standing around smoking. But I vastly prefer that smoke to the vile stuff that issues out of cigarettes. A few minutes of exposure to it makes you feel unclean all day.
Yes, the point is that the heavy metal loaded run off from these will be even worse than what ends up under the gas stations now. And yes, I have a point. I've already stated it too. The point is that sealed batteries would probably be a much more environmentally sound idea than filling up with liquid battery juice.
I will absorb more heat from the room I'm sitting in right now over the time period of a typical flight than I would from 30 seconds under the pencil-thin flame of a MAPP torch. Nevertheless, I would much rather spend the four hours sitting comfortably in this room than 30 seconds under the torch flame. Four hours in the room will barely hurt me at all aside from a little normal aging damage, 30 seconds under the torch, depending on where it's applied, could blind me, deafen me, paralyze me, destroy my hands and feet, or even kill me. It has been pointed out over and over again that the radiation from these scanners is deposited over a tiny volume relative to the overall volume of a human body and that it's done over a dramatically shorter period of time than a flight. Some radiation risks are cumulative, others depend on intensity. Once again, think heat vs temperature.
Because we know from experience that they won't hire good statisticians to really figure it out and, even if they do, their advice will be overridden by people who trust their "gut instinct".
You would be a bit more convincing if there were any inventions on your list invented less than 63 years ago:
Automobiles: At least 136 years ago if you only count internal combustion engines, 242 years ago if you count steam powered, and 500+ years for spring powered.
Airplane: At least 107 years ago for sure, with earlier accounts of working models.
Helicopters: There were string operated toy helicopters 500+ years ago (in China, however which I should note is in Asia), and of course Da Vinci drew some, but no working passenger models until 103 years ago and then nothing that could really be used as a vehicle until 86 years ago.
Computers: If Babbage counts, then it's about 162 years ago, if only working models count rather than working concepts, then 75 years.
Telephones: Who knows. It's at least 135 years ago, but may be as much as 167 years or more.
Fiber Optics: About 130 years ago for illumination, and 115 years ago for data transmission
Microwaves (I assume you mean the cooking appliance): About 64 years ago
The transistor: Most recent invention at 63 years ago.
Nuclear Power: Reactor invented around 69 years ago, although not developed into a working model for a while after.
So, we're looking at an average age of at least (136+107+86+75+135+115+64+63+69)/9 = 94 years for the inventions you've listed if you only give credit to the most recent inventor. The most recent is still 63 years ago, meaning that the percentage of people in the population right now who were even alive at the time is tiny. John Bardeen, who was the last of the credited transistor inventors to die has been dead for 20 years. There were certainly more people involved in developing the concept and maybe some of them are alive now, but it's not very likely that they were younger than mid twenties at the time, so their chances of being alive today are slim. Too many people were involved in the invention of nuclear power to say for sure if any of them are alive, but they're almost certainly past their prime inventing years. Ditto on Microwave ovens. No-one who originally invented the computer is still alive. Everyone else involved in inventing the other inventions you mentioned is long dead, unless their side work in alchemy paid off and we just haven't heard about it. Only 2 of these inventions are younger than my parents, but they're still old enough that my parents will have grown up with those inventions being relatively commonplace items that they took for granted. Although I do know that they never had a microwave oven until about 22 years ago and I think my father was the first of them to actually use a computer at university.
So, I'd have to say you've hardly proven your point about how the West invents everything and Asians are just devilish copiers in the "recent history" that you say "speaks for itself". Maybe you can prove your point, but you'd better use some examples that aren't three or more human generations old.
You were saying that:
I don't think the link you provided supports that. It does lay out some different models for numbering and naming the continents, but all of them include one or two Americas. The link doesn't say anything supporting the idea that, to most people in the world, the term America precisely means "The United States of America".
Virtually no-one I've ever met who isn't from the USA, including myself seems to agree with you on this. Are you from the US? Most people do understand that when people talk about things or people being "American" that it's probably a reference to the USA, but usually people go by context on this rather than believing it's some sort of absolute. The kind of absolutist argument you're making seems to be the kind of argument you get from people who have never really learned another language or exposed themselves to another culture. The kind of person who thinks that the entire rest of the world is stupid for "incorrectly" saying football when they mean soccer.
The other big problem I have with your argument is that you seem to be claiming that there are two separate things: "The Americas" and "America". You seem to argue that they're somehow completely separate and explicitly state:
If that's the case, then where did the people who came up with the term "The United States of America" come up with that word at the end? Why isn't it "The United States of The Americas"? Without invoking time travel, or a GNU-style recursive naming convention, how would they name a country using a phrase where one of the words is derived from the phrase itself?
Ultimately we're really quibbling over a small point. I'm not arguing that "America" isn't generally synonymous with "The United States of America", I'm simply arguing with your ironclad view that it is the absolute definition of the term and everyone the world over agrees with you.
Hard to tell which is more important: groundwater or air. I was actually arguing for sealed batteries as opposed to liquid flow battery juice. Concentrating the job of filling batteries with highly reactive heavy metal containing liquid compounds seems like a job best done in a small number of well-regulated facilities with serious containment and trained, careful personnel rather than at tens of thousands of little stations maybe inspected once every few years with the filling done by commuters in a rush or other careless people. I don't see why you can't have strings of batteries on serpentine chain belts that you can feed into cars while replacing the old ones.
If someone could develop an actual 100% efficient quick-charging battery that could compete with a tank of gas, that would also be great, as well as a complete miracle. The problem without such a battery, and the reason something else is needed, is that the energy transfer rate from a typical gas pump is on the order of 10 MW, which is possible because it's a simple transfer of an inert substance. Charging a chemical battery requires energy conversion. If the conversion is 99% efficient, then that means that, to keep up with a gas pump, around 100 KW of heat is produced, which is a lot of heat to handle without the car melting and the person filling it bursting into flame, not to mention that the 99% efficiency is probably a pipe dream. Aside from that, it means that the electric equivalent of even a small four pump gas station has to be wired for 40 MW (buffering power somehow with ultracapacitors or a flywheel or something sounds doable until you look at what's actually available and do the math and realize they just wouldn't cut it for the usage patterns of a typical gas station) and so does the one right across the street.
It's hardly a "radically new approach". The idea has been around for a long time and is easy to come up with off the the top of your head. I did in
this slashdot post. I'm not going to try to claim to have come up with a radically new approach there either since the idea has, in all likelihood, been around for about as long as batteries have (which is millenia, incidentally). Making it work is another matter altogether. If they have, it may be of some interest. Of course, in the post I linked to above, I speculated that such an approach was almost guaranteed to end up as an environmental disaster in one way or another. My view on that may have softened a little since that post, but it would take some extraordinary proof for me to believe that it wouldn't end up resulting in thousands of plumes of heavy metal laden electrolyte under filling stations everywhere.
No, my mission in life is not to "eat shit and spout nonsense". I'll leave the spouting nonsense to the Coca Cola mission statement. As for eating excrement, why would I want to make that my mission in life? If you didn't read what I wrote very carefully, I was saying that I _didn't_ like their mission statement, so why would I want to make eating it my mission? I did not say that actual lists of goals were a bad thing. I also know that any manager proposing to stop production to bottle water for a disaster area is going to make the argument you just made rather than saying "please refer to the bullet points Planet and Profit in our mission statements Vision section". There is a little bit in that mission statement that can count as actual guidance. Most of it was just rah-rah cheerleading nonsense which seems to enthuse some people but mostly is just annoying. That mission statement belongs thoroughly to the kind of person who things that they can inspire you by telling you how to feel rather than providing good leadership. The kind of person who writes about "leading the way in great customer service" or some other such tripe in a memo telling you that you have to cut the amount of time you spend helping customers in half. No-one respects people who try to dress things up in flowery doublespeak unless they're actually good at it. Most of the marketing types who write this stuff just aren't good enough.
In terms of mass, density, etc. you would expect it to probably act like regular matter with similar properties, but because the electromagnetic charges are swapped, would it look like regular matter since optical properties are all about how matter interacts with electromagnetic radiation? Would antimatter gold be yellow and shiny? Would antimatter water ice be transparent? Would incandescently hot antimatter iron actually be incandescent? In the same frequencies? What would the magnetic properties of antimatter iron be? Would antimatter carbon-14 have the same radioactive decay rate as regular carbon-14? For that matter, carbon-14 decays into Nitrogen 14 through beta decay, releasing an electron and an electron antineutrino, so does that mean anti-carbon-14 undergoes beta decay to produce a positron and an electron neutrino? Is the symmetry really so exact in all other details? If it is, then why isn't the universe split evenly between matter and antimatter? Would the other properties really be the same?
It's normal to think of atoms in a fairly simplistic fashion, but they're really quite complex structures. Exactly the same, but just opposite charges? Easy to imagine it that way, just like it's easy to imagine the solar system working on Newtonian principles until you take detailed enough measurements and discover that the orbit of Mercury doesn't quite fit the model. It seems to me that really small differences could add up to quite big differences in things like crystalline structure. So maybe anti-iron could have similar properties to iron but it turns out the crystals don't stick to each other, so solid anti-iron objects fall apart into powder like tin at low temperatures. Maybe you can't make antimatter analogues of various compounds. Water seems like it should work, but what about complex long-chain molecules like DNA? I can't tell what the real answers are to most of these questions. I think it would be very interesting to know.
Faggots are indeed also a kind of meatball. Once again, deriving from the same base meaning: a bunch of stuff rolled up and bound together. In this case a bunch of minced meat (well, animal product certainly... almost certainly anyway) rolled up and bound in a membrane. They're sort of like haggis in the sense that, while they're a traditional food and most people know of them, most modern English people don't actually regularly eat them or even ever eat them, just like most most modern Scottish people don't have haggis all that often. Anyway, using the term for cigarette is not as common as the abbreviation "fag" (incidentally, are you disputing that it's an abbreviation?), but I've certainly heard it used. I would argue that doesn't make me ignorant, but I suppose you're using a variation on the "No True Scotsman" argument from your end. So, if an Englishman (or woman actually, as the case may be) uses the term "faggot" to refer to a cigarette then they are No True Englishman, therefore they don't count for a discussion of whether any Englishman uses the term "faggot" for cigarette. I personally think that line of reasoning is idiotic and that therefore Hognoxious is an idiot. Of course maybe I'm only descending to insults because Hognoxious did first and I don't really mean it. Usually I try to keep the discussion civil even if it didn't start out that way because you can sometimes get some surprisingly reasonable discussion out of people who started in the conversation with flaming.
I should note also that I am technically English as I was born while my parents were students at Cambridge, but they were New Zealanders themselves. I've lived in England, New Zealand and France before ending up in the United States where I've been for quite some time. In any case, I haven't actually visited England at all in nearly thirty years now, so I really am No True Englishman. I also don't smoke.
Interesting things I found out from some quick research on the word is that it goes back to the term Fascis which was a type of axe used by the Romans, often symbolically to represent justice or state power. It's where we get the term fascism. The axe handle was made of a number of strips of birch bound together to make one solid column. Apparently the Romans got the word from the greek phákelos which just means a bundle. Fascinating stuff to learn really. I find the fluid, organic, messy nature of language simultaneously fascinating and extremely frustrating. Frustrating because it means it's almost impossible to ever pin down the exact meaning of anything, or even to properly trace the development of words and language, but fascinating too because, fuzzy as it is, we've still managed to turn our grunts and scribblings on walls into this amazing system of communication.
Fag is just an abbreviation for faggot or fagot, which is a bundle of materials, generally sticks, bound together for the purposes of burning or firing in some manner. The definition could certainly stretch to include bundles of leaves, by which token a cigarette is literally a fagot. In any case, using fag for a cigarette is much more common than using faggot, but I've certainly heard both terms used in England for both cigarettes and homosexuals. As it happens, they are almost certainly literally the same word with the same origin. The likely derivation for homosexuals is apparently from a slang derogatory term for a woman, referring to her as a "faggot" in the same way some might refer to her as "old baggage". So, the usage for a cigarette is saying that something is literally a bundle of stuff to be burned, and the one for a homosexual is metaphorically saying that he is a woman by way of a second metaphor saying that a woman is a bundle of sticks to be carried around.
Yes, you can see antimatter. Except for transparent antimatter (actually, that is a pretty interesting thought, anyone know if anyone has done any reliable work on what the likely physical properties of antimatter elements would be) and, of course, the antimatter only present in microscopic amounts. As it turns out, we've only worked with it in microscopic amounts so far. If you were in a situation where you were dealing with a macroscopic amount of antimatter and you were looking right at it, you'd have to be really, really, really confident in the containment technology to not be escaping as fast as you could run/drive/fly. Anyway, there are sure to be ways to detect antimatter non-destructively although they may be difficult, but it certainly emits gamma radiation when it annihilates with regular matter, so you can certainly tell that you had antimatter in your container after the fact.
But the tendency in all such cases seems to be for all income to be spent on the sport itself and none to flow back to other school activities but in most cases, the sport still also gets school funds that otherwise could have gone to other classes. Just like with the the big stadiums for professional teams that get paid for by public money on the flimsy theory that it will produce economic activity that will return profits to the taxpayers. In the final accounting, those promises of a return on investment never seem to actually come true. The same seems to me to be true of supposedly "profitable" school sports.
The link you provided does not agree with you at all. It mentions the 7 continent model most of us are probably familiar with and two 6 continent models, one of which includes North and South America as separate continents, but has Eurasia as one continent and another which considers both North and South America to be one continent. In none of these models is America not the name of a continent or a set of two continents joined by an isthmus. Most people on the planet who count for purposes of this discussion (I don't consider people who can't find two or more of: North America, South America, or the United States of America, or anyone who thinks that Mexico is part of South America, to count in geography discussions on this subject) understand America to be a context-sensitive term that most of the time people use to mean the USA, even if incorrectly, but they would not argue that there is no such continent as America, but rather that America is a set of continents.
But punishment from government for speaking is pretty much _the_ defining example of when you don't have free speech. When Henry Ford says that he wants his employees to speak their minds, even if it gets them fired (paraphrasing here, and not 100% sure it was Ford since I can't find the quote now), then it's not necessarily a free speech issue. When the government says, you're free to speak your mind, even if it gets you thrown into a gulag by us, then it is a free speech issue, even when it's not a gulag, but just an indefinite suspension from school.
The problem is that cause and effect are a little hard to figure out in brain development, or indeed in any other kind of development. Try to figure out if someone is well-muscled because they're an athlete or if they're an athlete because they're well muscled. In most cases, it's both and the cause and effect are hard to find. Same with brain development. Do certain regions of the brain develop at certain ages and that's why we develop certain patterns of thought, mental abilities and ability to accept certain kinds of responsibility, or does our learning certain patterns of thought, exercising mental abilities and accepting certain kinds of responsibility cause certain regions of the brain to develop?
Do sports bring in the bucks before University? Even then, do they really bring in the bucks? I hear this argument a lot, usually when someone is proposing spending a boatload of money on things like new sports stadiums and so forth. As far as I can tell, the promised bucks, even for big municipal stadium projects for rich professional teams, never seem to materialize for the people who actually shelled out the "investment" in the first place. So, I would have to say that academics, art, band _and_ sports cost money unless there are some good figures to demonstrate otherwise.
Also, I have to say that your former employer sounds horrible.
Man, that Coca Cola mission statement is a load of sales tripe. Personally, over the years I've become completely sick of working in places where you get in trouble for not expressing the expected enthusiasm for stupid, so-called, "mission statements" like that. There is nothing in that Coca Cola mission statement that isn't either blindingly obvious standard operating procedure for the business they're in or overblown fill-in-the-bullet-point busy work. Seriously, when their "vision" is a bullet point pseudo-alliterative list that looks like an early teen wrote it, people who have real work to do tend to feel nothing but contempt when their supervisors expect them to get excited about this stuff.
Not to discount the idea of a mission statement. If Coca Cola decided to build a moon base by 2035, or even just to completely change their business model, or just developed some new goal other than: "make and sell beverages" (from which all of the stuff about doing market research, developing new recipes, advertising, etc. can be simply inferred), a mission statement might make some sense. If it's defining real goals it makes sense. When the "mission" can be pretty clearly stated as "business as usual", then they should just pencil that in and get back to work. If they really, truly want to make some part of their statement a true goal, such as "be a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities", then they shouldn't plop it down in among a bunch of stuff they clearly put in there just to fill space.
But that should be less a reason not to legalize it, and more a reason to stamp on the insurance companies throats if they try to pull that, surely? From a strict resource-usage point of view, suicide by terminally ill patients (or those who will need lifelong full-time care), is a desirable thing since those patients use most of the resources (of course, medical accounting seems to be even wackier than military accounting, so who can ever really know) and so clearly it would be desirable to the insurance companies. The slippery slope where they, or the hospitals, or the law itself, starts to push "suicide" on people is clearly undesirable. It's clearly not something that could "never happen" as there are numerous historical (many well within living memory) examples of it happening and not just to the terminally ill. That's no reason to keep it illegal however, it's just a reason to be extremely vigilant, if it's made legal, at making sure that every last person who does get assisted suicide really considers it to be the best possible choice for them.
The initial cause of the Great Famine was potato blight, but most of the actual human tragedy was caused by human nature. A poisonous soup of politics, racial and religious hatred, and moronic attempts to "fix" social problems from the top down.
"We shall become all powerful, crush the lesser races, conquer the galaxy, unimaginable power..."
" unlimited Rice Pudding etc etc..."
Yes, but that would be covered by the "generally speaking". In the Five and Three Doctors series the collective powers of the Time Lords was being used to allow the doctors to co-exist. In the Two Doctors, the Second Doctor was on a mission for the time lords, so they may have been intervening to allow it as well. Collectively (and individually with individuals such as the Doctor himself) the Time Lords are meant to be scary powerful and can turn off, or at least work around laws of physics. Basically, the current series and episodes like _The Waters of Mars_ seem to indicate that the Laws of Time that the Time Lords follow are laws of physics for the rest of us, but are more like regulatory laws for them. So, they can break them and potentially contain and repair the damage, with some violations being worse than others