"The Constitution says the President is Command in Chief of the United States armed forces."
You misinterpret what "commander in chief" means. It is the president's job to decide how a war is to be prosecuted, but where, when and why has always been the role of Congress. This has been the case since Jefferson asked Congress if he could invade Tripoli.
The idea of "The president can send troops to foreign soil without asking Congress" is instead a recent product of our imperialism, with the president deciding he needs to protect "interests" abroad and Congress not wanting to stick their necks out to reassert their authority. In short, it's a matter of the president using authority that is not his and Congress not willing to defend what is rightfully theirs. The War Powers Resolution is simply a formal recognition of the pussification of the democratic process in this country.
And even today the White House has never actually acted in compliance with the War Powers Resolution, because that would mean admitting that the powers didn't always belong to the White House to begin with.
"Let's face it, do you want to be the one who has to train all these government employees how to use OpenOffice."
The point of the switch isn't to save money but to support the freedom of information. If commonwealth employees have to be retrained in order to ensure that commonwealth citizens will be able to have access to commonwealth-published documents without being locked into vendor-specific software (or worse, a specific version of said software), so be it.
The commonwealth is there to to serve the citizenry, not sell software from an out-of-state vendor for the sake of saving a few bucks.
"Nearly every media outlet in the US has an astrology column."
They also have comics, usually in the same section. Does that mean most Americans believe a certain beagle has regular encounters with the Red Baron?
I don't have statistics on the matter, but most of the times I know of people reading a horroscope it is for amusement and entertainment, gossipy stuff. I think you're the one here reading too much into it.
The earth is massive enough for the surface pressure of the atmosphere to be around 100 000 Pa, giving us a boiling point for liquid water around 373 K. On Mars, the maximum pressure is around 900 Pa, giving us a boiling point around 278 K (or 5 K over freezing). The highest temperature we've seen so far is 293 K, and a mean temperature of 210 K, so most surface water would quickly boil off or freeze, especially with the changing of the seasons. If Mars was massive enough to push the surface atmospheric pressure just up to 2 400 Pa (a little over twice the current pressure, but still nowhere near what we're used to on Earth), it would be high enough to keep water liquid even at Mars' hottest. You might not have precipitation and weather like we're used to, but it would still be on the surface for chemical reactions.
"There is a ridiculously large amount of buffer material between us and the core."
It's a lot, but it's finite and hard radiation/stray neutrons from a fission reaction active enough to heat the earth would eventually reach the surface over the course of a few million years. The energy we see coming from the sun was created millions of years ago and wormed its way through thicker and denser material before reaching the surface, but it's still enough to give us skin cancer from 150 Gm away.
The energy from the sun is different in that the magnetosphere deflects most of the harmful stuff, creating something of a plasma torch on the other side of the planet. But radiation from inside the earth would have nowhere else to go. While you do see radon in geologically active areas, you don't see volcanos dumping Mm^3 of the stuff into the atmosphere.
"a large slab of highly radioactive material will give off heat. "
For the short term, yes. But after plunging through ~4 km of supercooled water (which also acts as a neutron moderator), it won't be hot (in either sense of the word) for very long.
"What do you think that heat would do to the thermoclines?"
At the pressures down there, not much. First, the heat would have to fight the pressure enough for the local water to expand. Then the local water would have to be hot enough to retain enough heat to make it all the way up (kilometers) to the thermocline. Then it would still have to have enough heat to be drastically less dense than the water above the thermocline in order to punch through and continue up to the surface.
If the pile is sufficiently hot for local water to actually convect up to the thermocline (i. e. temperature similar to a volcanic vent), it'd probably be more inclined to raise the thermocline than to pierce it. Between the heat conduction and pressure drop of the surrounding water as a packet of hot water moves up (1 atm every 30 m), it's just not going to stay hot or organized enough.
First, there's friction between the layers of gooey nougat inside the earth as they move at different velocities with respect to each other. Secondly, friction from the tectonic plates moving on top of that gooey nougat (the continents, by providing thicker insulation in parts, also assure temperature differentials in the gooey nougat, causing yet more motion). Third, tidal forces from the moon and the sun that stir the gooey nougat up as they move around (bringing about yet more friction).
Toss in the monsterous pressures down there caused by the earth's own gravity, and you have a recipe for keeping the insides of the earth warm for the forseeable future.
"The heaviest elements tend to sink downward, to the core."
But the core is a hot fluid, and warm things tend to float upwards. It's also possible for denser objects to be caught in lateral currents, thereby kept in suspension.
"Thusly, you get a concentration of radioactive elements near the core. This concentrated radioactivity contributes to keeping the core warm."
If that were so, we'd be irradiated. There's been more than enough time for the harmfull radiation from such processes to have reached the surface and killed us all.
Considering that "the public" is never asked for their opinion beyond "Republican or Democrat?" I don't see how you can pin this one on them so easily.
Also, I find it amusing that a governor elected by a plurality believes he's more connected to public opinion than any legislative body.
First off, assuming the reactor is actually capable of melting down (most modern designs aren't), the pile will melt through the bottom of the hull, fall down to the ocean floor, and then melt through that until it is spent. Uranium is quite a bit denser than water.
Secondly, it's already happened. Decades ago, the Soviets had a nuclear-powered icebreaker that had a meltdown, in the Bearing Sea, if I remember.
"You can't stop water from spreading to the rest of the world."
Yes, you can. I can't speak for the particular spot where this reactor will be placed, but there are large swaths of ocean where little or no mixing occurs, due to the influence of ocean and atmospheric currents. The Southern Ocean, for example, is pretty well cut-off from water in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans by circumpolar winds and currents.
As for vertical mixing (i. e. after the core has sunk to the bottom), this is even easier to accomplish. Except for near convection-causing volcanic vents, deeper water is cold and likes to stay down, and shallower water is warm and likes to stay up. Any sufficiently experienced submariner and many scuba divers can tell you about thermoclines.
"The earth also had a hot core but that isn't near enough to keep it heated. "
It's hot enough to keep certain organisms that rely on chemosynthesis alive at the ocean bottom, where no radiation from the sun reaches. There's little reason to believe this process couldn't happen on any reasonably volcanic body.
Low. From what I understand, most of the star systems we've been able to watch closely have superjovian planets in orbit around them, and they don't bode well for life. Jupiter itself is yet another "sweet spot," big enough to sweep the solar system of most of the extinction-causing comets/asteroids/etc, but not so big as to suck us up. Planets that are 10's or 100's of jovian masses don't allow for many other planets (let alone rocky planets with a fluid iron core at the correct distance from the system's star) to coexist.
"Of course, the the local politicians are the ones most likely to screw you over..."
That's the way it should be. Harm done by local politicians is too difficult to hide (harder to dilute wrongdoing into a smaller constituency) and they're much easier to eject.
Ultimately, I feel it's not so much that they're the ones most likely to screw you over so much as the ones most likely to get caught. Stealing $100 from 1 person is easier to catch than stealing $1 from 100 people.
" Why do they have to be stationed in the Astrodome? "
Because the way they got this place locked down, the only way to get information on what's going on inside of it in a timely manner is to actually be in there.
Odds are Governor Blanco was responding to popular pressure. Louisiana can be a very different place from the rest of the country and they like taking care of their problems in-house. I've heard reports that people (while perhaps not the state government) in Louisiana are shunning even relief efforts from the federal government.
Your average Louisiana citizen will be able to talk your ear off about how corrupt their state and municipal government is, but will still prefer either of those two over the federal government because they consider it their own.
"It won't be easier to get to Mars than to the Moon because the US manned space program is no longer run by engineers, but by greedy defense contractors,"
You do realize that Apollo was the first US space program that didn't use a stock ICBM from those "greedy defense contractors," right?
"they should be trained to incapacitate the target."
"Incapacitate" means "can't get away," and not necessarily "can't set off the bomb." If he had really been a suicide bomber, aiming for the brain would have been the proper course of action (he'd already be set to die, the only variable is how many others he'd take with him).
Double-edged sword. You can use it to claim it was the cause for changing their story afterward ("Blair is a bad, bad man!"), but I can use it to claim the story was flawed at the beginning ("Brown skinned people are trying to blow you up!")
I heard the same eye-witnesses, many of whom said he looked "Pakistani." He was Brazillian. Once they think they see someone who might try to blow them up, they can see a lot of things.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Constitution says the President is Command in Chief of the United States armed forces."
You misinterpret what "commander in chief" means. It is the president's job to decide how a war is to be prosecuted, but where, when and why has always been the role of Congress. This has been the case since Jefferson asked Congress if he could invade Tripoli.
The idea of "The president can send troops to foreign soil without asking Congress" is instead a recent product of our imperialism, with the president deciding he needs to protect "interests" abroad and Congress not wanting to stick their necks out to reassert their authority. In short, it's a matter of the president using authority that is not his and Congress not willing to defend what is rightfully theirs. The War Powers Resolution is simply a formal recognition of the pussification of the democratic process in this country.
And even today the White House has never actually acted in compliance with the War Powers Resolution, because that would mean admitting that the powers didn't always belong to the White House to begin with.
When, if ever, did Kim Il Sung give you the impression of being a calm, rational, reasonable man?
"Let's face it, do you want to be the one who has to train all these government employees how to use OpenOffice."
The point of the switch isn't to save money but to support the freedom of information. If commonwealth employees have to be retrained in order to ensure that commonwealth citizens will be able to have access to commonwealth-published documents without being locked into vendor-specific software (or worse, a specific version of said software), so be it.
The commonwealth is there to to serve the citizenry, not sell software from an out-of-state vendor for the sake of saving a few bucks.
Want ice without electricity? Drive the compressor with a small diesel power plant.
"Nearly every media outlet in the US has an astrology column."
They also have comics, usually in the same section. Does that mean most Americans believe a certain beagle has regular encounters with the Red Baron?
I don't have statistics on the matter, but most of the times I know of people reading a horroscope it is for amusement and entertainment, gossipy stuff. I think you're the one here reading too much into it.
The earth is massive enough for the surface pressure of the atmosphere to be around 100 000 Pa, giving us a boiling point for liquid water around 373 K. On Mars, the maximum pressure is around 900 Pa, giving us a boiling point around 278 K (or 5 K over freezing). The highest temperature we've seen so far is 293 K, and a mean temperature of 210 K, so most surface water would quickly boil off or freeze, especially with the changing of the seasons. If Mars was massive enough to push the surface atmospheric pressure just up to 2 400 Pa (a little over twice the current pressure, but still nowhere near what we're used to on Earth), it would be high enough to keep water liquid even at Mars' hottest. You might not have precipitation and weather like we're used to, but it would still be on the surface for chemical reactions.
"There is a ridiculously large amount of buffer material between us and the core."
It's a lot, but it's finite and hard radiation/stray neutrons from a fission reaction active enough to heat the earth would eventually reach the surface over the course of a few million years. The energy we see coming from the sun was created millions of years ago and wormed its way through thicker and denser material before reaching the surface, but it's still enough to give us skin cancer from 150 Gm away.
The energy from the sun is different in that the magnetosphere deflects most of the harmful stuff, creating something of a plasma torch on the other side of the planet. But radiation from inside the earth would have nowhere else to go. While you do see radon in geologically active areas, you don't see volcanos dumping Mm^3 of the stuff into the atmosphere.
"a large slab of highly radioactive material will give off heat. "
For the short term, yes. But after plunging through ~4 km of supercooled water (which also acts as a neutron moderator), it won't be hot (in either sense of the word) for very long.
"What do you think that heat would do to the thermoclines?"
At the pressures down there, not much. First, the heat would have to fight the pressure enough for the local water to expand. Then the local water would have to be hot enough to retain enough heat to make it all the way up (kilometers) to the thermocline. Then it would still have to have enough heat to be drastically less dense than the water above the thermocline in order to punch through and continue up to the surface.
If the pile is sufficiently hot for local water to actually convect up to the thermocline (i. e. temperature similar to a volcanic vent), it'd probably be more inclined to raise the thermocline than to pierce it. Between the heat conduction and pressure drop of the surrounding water as a packet of hot water moves up (1 atm every 30 m), it's just not going to stay hot or organized enough.
"That's not the point. Surface life"
Actually, the point of this thread was whether or not planetary mass was important in keeping $CHEMICAL in liquid state indefinately.
Actually I did mean Bering Sea (body of water between Alaska and Siberia). I was thinking the ship's home port was Vladivostok.
" but there's no internal heat generator."
First, there's friction between the layers of gooey nougat inside the earth as they move at different velocities with respect to each other. Secondly, friction from the tectonic plates moving on top of that gooey nougat (the continents, by providing thicker insulation in parts, also assure temperature differentials in the gooey nougat, causing yet more motion). Third, tidal forces from the moon and the sun that stir the gooey nougat up as they move around (bringing about yet more friction).
Toss in the monsterous pressures down there caused by the earth's own gravity, and you have a recipe for keeping the insides of the earth warm for the forseeable future.
"The heaviest elements tend to sink downward, to the core."
But the core is a hot fluid, and warm things tend to float upwards. It's also possible for denser objects to be caught in lateral currents, thereby kept in suspension.
"Thusly, you get a concentration of radioactive elements near the core. This concentrated radioactivity contributes to keeping the core warm."
If that were so, we'd be irradiated. There's been more than enough time for the harmfull radiation from such processes to have reached the surface and killed us all.
Considering that "the public" is never asked for their opinion beyond "Republican or Democrat?" I don't see how you can pin this one on them so easily.
Also, I find it amusing that a governor elected by a plurality believes he's more connected to public opinion than any legislative body.
"What happens when there is a melt down?"
First off, assuming the reactor is actually capable of melting down (most modern designs aren't), the pile will melt through the bottom of the hull, fall down to the ocean floor, and then melt through that until it is spent. Uranium is quite a bit denser than water.
Secondly, it's already happened. Decades ago, the Soviets had a nuclear-powered icebreaker that had a meltdown, in the Bearing Sea, if I remember.
"You can't stop water from spreading to the rest of the world."
Yes, you can. I can't speak for the particular spot where this reactor will be placed, but there are large swaths of ocean where little or no mixing occurs, due to the influence of ocean and atmospheric currents. The Southern Ocean, for example, is pretty well cut-off from water in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans by circumpolar winds and currents.
As for vertical mixing (i. e. after the core has sunk to the bottom), this is even easier to accomplish. Except for near convection-causing volcanic vents, deeper water is cold and likes to stay down, and shallower water is warm and likes to stay up. Any sufficiently experienced submariner and many scuba divers can tell you about thermoclines.
"The earth also had a hot core but that isn't near enough to keep it heated. "
It's hot enough to keep certain organisms that rely on chemosynthesis alive at the ocean bottom, where no radiation from the sun reaches. There's little reason to believe this process couldn't happen on any reasonably volcanic body.
Low. From what I understand, most of the star systems we've been able to watch closely have superjovian planets in orbit around them, and they don't bode well for life. Jupiter itself is yet another "sweet spot," big enough to sweep the solar system of most of the extinction-causing comets/asteroids/etc, but not so big as to suck us up. Planets that are 10's or 100's of jovian masses don't allow for many other planets (let alone rocky planets with a fluid iron core at the correct distance from the system's star) to coexist.
"Yes, its true that a smaller planet will retain less heat,"
We don't just retain heat, we generate heat. Otherwise the earth's core would have solidified a long time ago, and we'd be very irradiated.
If a smaller planet were in earth's orbit, it might not generate enough heat on its own to thaw out of an ice age.
"Of course, the the local politicians are the ones most likely to screw you over..."
That's the way it should be. Harm done by local politicians is too difficult to hide (harder to dilute wrongdoing into a smaller constituency) and they're much easier to eject.
Ultimately, I feel it's not so much that they're the ones most likely to screw you over so much as the ones most likely to get caught. Stealing $100 from 1 person is easier to catch than stealing $1 from 100 people.
"HAVE FEWER CHILDREN."
This is Slashdot. The only way we could have children is through a sperm bank.
Beyond that, the countries with the highest birth rates are the ones who are not limiting their CO2 output to begin with.
" Why do they have to be stationed in the Astrodome? "
Because the way they got this place locked down, the only way to get information on what's going on inside of it in a timely manner is to actually be in there.
Odds are Governor Blanco was responding to popular pressure. Louisiana can be a very different place from the rest of the country and they like taking care of their problems in-house. I've heard reports that people (while perhaps not the state government) in Louisiana are shunning even relief efforts from the federal government.
Your average Louisiana citizen will be able to talk your ear off about how corrupt their state and municipal government is, but will still prefer either of those two over the federal government because they consider it their own.
"It won't be easier to get to Mars than to the Moon because the US manned space program is no longer run by engineers, but by greedy defense contractors,"
You do realize that Apollo was the first US space program that didn't use a stock ICBM from those "greedy defense contractors," right?
Would you rather "Red State Neighbor?"
"they should be trained to incapacitate the target ."
"Incapacitate" means "can't get away," and not necessarily "can't set off the bomb." If he had really been a suicide bomber, aiming for the brain would have been the proper course of action (he'd already be set to die, the only variable is how many others he'd take with him).
"but the power of suggestion can be incredible,"
Double-edged sword. You can use it to claim it was the cause for changing their story afterward ("Blair is a bad, bad man!"), but I can use it to claim the story was flawed at the beginning ("Brown skinned people are trying to blow you up!")
I heard the same eye-witnesses, many of whom said he looked "Pakistani." He was Brazillian. Once they think they see someone who might try to blow them up, they can see a lot of things.