Beta Emitters = No pesky neutrons, Gamma rays of alpha particles...
Not quite correct: most gamma ray sources are in fact beta emitters that decay into excited states of the daughter nucleus, which then decays via gamma emission.
There are exceptions: 35S, which you mention, decays entirely to the ground state of 35Cl.
There are still problems, though: bremmstralung radiation from the stopping electrons, modest (126 day) lifetime and long biological half-life (~45 days). The average decay energy is only 49 keV (endpoint is 167 keV) so to generate a watt assuming 100% conversion efficiency you need 1/(49*1000*1.6e-19) ~ 1e14 decays per second, which is up there in the mega-curries.
Keeping it out of the environment at current discharge limits (micro-curries per kg) would be impossible, and it tends to affect the lungs, which are particularly susceptible to radiation (about 10% of lung cancer from smoking is due to potassium-40 decay.)
So on the whole I'd rather invest in algal biodeisel, which fulfils the relatively simple mandate of the funded research: providing feedstock for existing liquid hydrocarbon energy infrastructure.
More likely, he's in solitary for his own protection.
Right, that explains why he isn't allowed to exercise in his cell, and has no sheets or pillow on his bed.
The difference between scientists and non-scientists is not formal training, but attention to detail and the willingness to draw logical inferences from the data.
In this case, if the reported facts are true it is clear his detention is punishment, before he has been charged with any crime. That may be ok under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or whatever governs the US armed forces these days, but it doesn't justify making things up as you have done.
And meanwhile, Roman Polanski is still free, and it took almost thirty years for the United States to get around to having an international warrant for his arrest issued despite his having actually admitted to sex crimes involving a thirteen year old girl. I guess that doesn't count very much compared to embarrassing powerful people.
Is the government of England really concerned with the sexual integrity of Swedish womanhood? Or are they just using the legal system to harrass someone who has made them look like the bunch of wankers they are?
A good capitalist would admit that he or she fucked up and do something about it.
Nope, a good capitalist would try to game the system, which almost always has a better cost/benefit ratio than admiting to a screw-up.
This is just a fact: it is almost always "better"--for some widely accepted standard of "better"--to lie, distract, bully and corrupt than it is to admit the truth, take responsibility for it, and move on.
I used to believe otherwise, but too many years of watching "good capitalists" make exactly that kind of rational economic calculation proved me wrong, and as a rational empiricist I changed my mind about the question.
The only stable, sane society is one in which various interests are maintained in a balance of power, and to balance the huge interests of dishonest, corrupt capitalists we need a large, democratic, transparent and relatively powerful government. The transparency and democracy are key, of course, as otherwise it will fall into all the well-known bad behaviour that humans get up to when given unchecked power.
They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them
The question is: what is the best way to fight them?
It is certainly not any application of the War Model, which involves massive invasions of random countries, some of which--like Iraq--were strongly opposed to Islamic radicalism.
Since you have identified the threat so clearly and are obviously concerned with it, I'm curiuous as to what you think the best way to oppose it is, and would also be interested to see any of your anti-war writings.
Education, urbanization and women's rights are all important things in fighting nutjobs like bin Laden. Funny cartoons work pretty well too, and I've often felt the West should issue an ultimatum to al Qaeda: "The funny pictures will continue until the killing stops."
That no one takes this idea seriously is a measure of how stupid and irrational everyone involved in the "debate" has become. Violence is always the least efficient, least effective means of settling any dispute between humans, but unreflective, stupid people always use it as their first resort.
The past decade has demonstrated conclusively how ineffective War Model violence is at stemming the tide of Islamic terrorism, and equally conclusively shown how effective ordinary police and intelligence work is.
The British government had to realise that there were genuine grievances and what it called "terrorists" saw themselves as soldiers.
It has less to do with recognizing the grievances than how they are responded to. What the stupid people here seem to think is that the only way to respond to violence is with violence, despite the many, many examples of how badly that works out, and how well things can be made to work out when just one side takes the road of peace.
The question is not "are their grievances?" but "how are they being addressed?" If they are being "addressed" by violence the cycle of killing will go on. If they are being "seen to be addressed" even if they don't fix the nominal underlying problems, peace has a good chance of breaking out.
Humans never use violence as a rational means of persuasion, because it isn't. It is an attempt to engage various relatively simple stimulus-response systems that were useful as a means of social control when we lived in small troops tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Violence feels rational to stupid people because they never stop to consider the actual "logic" of it, which is entirely based on emotional responses.
Right, because killing people has exactly the consequences you want and no others, like pissing off friends, relatives, co-religionists or other nutjobs to the extent that they now want to hurt your society.
does it REALLY matter that much who finds it first?
To whom?
Humans are fundamentally driven by mate competition. It's the only thing that really gets us out of bed in the morning. Science and art are great examples of how to turn that basic drive to something creative and useful, as opposed to the destructive and stupid uses it is often put to, like politics and war.
To the humans actually involved in the search, it matters a great deal who's first, and expecting them to dedicate their lives to the discovery without that added impetus is asking for humans to be other than they actually are. Good luck with that. We demonstrably have a choice as to how we choose to compete. We do not have a choice as to whether or not we compete.
Furthermore, there are obvious practical advantages to having multiple experiments. You may have noticed that humans sometimes make mistakes, and are sometimes not honest. Monocultures and monopolies give no protections against those all too common characteristics, and if you think some protection isn't needed you are, unfortunately, naive.
Scientific fraud, and major errors in analysis-- even in large collaborations--are more common than you might think. Not putting all our experimental eggs in one basket really helps reduce these things, or at least catch them after the fact.
But wait, maybe killing more enemies ends up saving more lives in the long run?
History strongly suggests that not going to war saves more lives in the long run.
Tens of millions of people died fighting the NAZIs. Maybe thousands of people died fighting the Soviets. Do you see any Soviets around today?
It's almost as if there are solutions other than war to human problems.
Nice to link Borlaug, though. One of the primary reasons for Germany's war in the East was to secure food supplies. There were two ways of doing that:
1) Retool German industry so instead of maximizing useful production they maximized dead-weight loss military production, and invade their neighbours, prompting predictably irrational retaliation resulting in the wanton destruction of even more German productive capacity and decimation of the population.
2) Invest heavily in scientific agricultural research and growing productive capacity so that by a combination of greater domestic yields and greater external trade Germany's food needs could be satisfied.
The hormone-addled idiots in the Reichstag chose option 1 for reasons that had nothing to do with economic rationality and everything do to with the irrational dynamics of primate social groups and mate competition, and it worked out pretty badly for them, as it would have done even if they had not been met with a predictably irrational response from Great Britain.
In such situations, you really don't want to be emotional, as that soldier's survival depends on you thinking clearly, and that's where lifelike training is exactly what is great -- when confronted with such a situation, you do what you're trained to do
Since war is itself always the product of emotional rather than rational response to circumstances, it would be nice if training in rational thinking extended beyond field medics.
Presidents, kings, prime-ministers and generals all act like hormone-addled teenage girls when it comes to decision making. If they did not, there would be no wars.
Keep in mind that colonial control, secession, and a Nazi Europe are not acceptable outcomes in this game.
But thousands, tens of thousands and millions of dead young men are?
Give me a break.
It's time for warmongers to grow up and enter the real world.
War is an irrational activity carried out by rational means. No war is ever economically rational, and the "logic" of war makes no sense except in terms of the irrational mechanisms of social control employed by small troops of social primates, which are completley inappropriate to the kinds of problems that war supposedly solves.
In the cases in point: Canada became free of Britain without war. TIME took care of the problem for us, as it would have done for you had not a bunch of irrational hot-heads gotten a bunch of young men killed for the sake of speeding things up by a few years.
In Canada there was very little will for independence, and we got it anyway less than 100 years after you did. In the 13 colonies you could have negotiated greater independence--and secured for yourselves the rights of Englishmen--in less than a generation, if your short-sighted idiots hadn't insisted on war.
If that had happened seccession wouldn't have been an issue because slavery would have been outlawed in 1837 by the Crown, as it was in the rest of the British Empire.
In Europe, the mess in the '20's and '30's that made war seem like a good idea to the NAZIs was a product of the "Great War", a fact you fail to mention. NAZI-ism was no more effective than Sovietism, and would have moderated under its own inadequacies in a decade or so if left to itself, with a far lower body count than WWII produced.
You've stated the problem as if the German conquest of Europe would be a permanent feature, ignoring completely the equally lame attempt the Soviets to do the same after WWII.
You'll note that Poland et al are not under Soviet rule today, all without a shot fired. If some hot-headed idiot with zero grasp of economic rationality had whipped up the Poles into a frenzy of violent opposition resulting in a bloody and prolonged rebellion that after millions of deaths resulted in a free Poland you would no-doubt be asking, "How else could this have happened?"
Fortunately for Poland--and Russian--the Polish opposition was rational, and therefore chose peaceful, efficient, effective means of resistance, instead of the least efficient, least effective solution to any large-scale social or political problem: war.
Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists.
"Market fundamentalists" aren't even self-consistent. Corporations exist solely due to interference in the free market by the Nanny State in the form of various Companies Acts.
A "truly free" market would have no corporations, as it would not permit limited liability for individuals. That liability limitation is a huge interference with the legal basis of a free market.
And because corporations would not exist in a free market, they cannot reasonably expect to operate in one: the state, which protects corporate owners from liability, clearly also has a warrant to make laws that protect non-corporate entities from the actions that those same owners take in the non-free market that allows corporations to exist.
The crew dogs stated they managed to change the brakes on 5 C-130s with it before it started to bend, so it survived longer than any other they had on hand before bending!
That's the difference between a good tool and a great tool: merely good tools fail by shattering.
People versed in quantum field theory talk in a way that implies that it comes from the theory.
The Pauli exclusion principle is a consequence of a deeper principle: the total anti-symmetry of the fermion wavefunction. "Anti-symmetry" means that the joint wavefunction of two fermions must change sign if you swap the particles around. This is only possible if any two fermions are in different states: if they were in the same state then they could be exchanged and the overall wavefunction would be identical, which is what happens with bosons.
One might reasonably ask why that is so, and there are reasons related to the behaviour of fermioic and bosonic wavefunctions under rotations of the co-ordinate system, but it becomes pretty abstract, and at some point, as always in science, the answer becomes, "Because that seems to be the simplest way we know of to describe the world we see."
For the same reason innocent people are being held in Guantanamo Bay: all power gets used, and without the check of a robust legal system police powers will be used however the police feel like using them. In this case the "police" are the various DHS agencies and the US military, and they have been given free reign by the American government to operate beyond the law.
Unless people being held in Gauntanamo have full access to the US legal system there will be a very substantial levening of innocents and people guilty of crimes unrelated to terrorism there.
Unless they're going to Gitmo-ize him, but I can't see that happening. He's not a combatant of any kind.
No, no: he's an "Information Combatant".
One of the biggest lessons that the New Right took from the Post-Structuralist Left in the '90's was the role of language-creation in dominating the public discourse.
The post-structuralists rightly observed that groups in power tend to dominate how language is used, but rather than making a case for more objective, empirically-oriented language they concluded from this that the meaning of words was pretty much completely up for grabs. Like Humpty-Dumpty, words were to mean only what the powerful meant them to mean, and the only question was "who is to be master."
For some reason the Left thought this would be them, as the Old Right had a modium of objectivity about it.
The New Right took this idea and ran with it, abandoning the vestigal objectivity of the Old Right and imposing new meaning and new language on the political discourse in the United States.
Ever wonder how the term "Homeland" just happened to be all ready and waiting after 9/11? Conspiracy theories aside, the New Right was clearly looking for a new enemy and new language to allow them to continue the Cold War strategies that had worked so well in teh '80's, and 9/11 was a gift to them.
So don't be surprised when language like "information combatant", or on reflection, "information terrorist" or "cyber terrorist" get applied to Assange. They probably already have.
This is actually consistent with the modern usage of the word "terrorist", which is "anyone who does anything that the bi-partisan ruling class in the US doesn't like."
While maybe possible in theory, it's hard to imagine it being practical. ignoring the size issue and the clutter in earth orbit, the amount of time it would take for a solar sail to escape the earth gravity well seems like it would be incredibly long.
What you find difficult or easy to imagine is not an arbiter of reality. It has zero epistemic value, and it's a little weird you would bring it up.
I find it hard to imagine anyone would be dumb enough to engage in a war of choice in Iraq, but one demonstrably exists. I find it hard to imagine that people think what they find hard or easy to imagine has any bearing whatsoever on what is real, but clearly lots of people think that.
Science has been transforming the world for three hundred years, and is based on the discipline of publically testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and consistent, precise mathematics. It works because it recognizes that what anyone can or cannot imagine is irrelevant to what is real.
In the case of solar sails, they can lift a satelite out of Earth orbit in days to weeks, depending on the initial orbit. From geostationary it's a couple of days. From LEO it's more in the month-ish range.
Typical solar sail configurations should be able to produce 1/1000 of a g: 0.01 m/s^2. So 1 m/s delta v after 100 seconds, 36 m/s after an hour, 3600 m/s after 100 hours (4 days), 36000 m/s after five or six weeks. For missions to other planets that would last years, that's a trivial amount of time.
Yet it provides information that anyone seeking to harm the US would find quite valuable.
Value is related to scarcity or difficulty of acquistion. How exactly is it difficult to acquire information that any of the items on the list are important to the US?
Glancing over the list for Canada there is nothing but a bunch of bridges and dams and industrial facilities, including nuclear facilities, that are obviously important. But vital? Or secret? Don't make me laugh.
And don't forget the basics; incorporating a company is a non-trivial expense at this level.
Your estimates are not unreasonable, except for this. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Canada you can incorporate nationally (with the provincial incorporation docs filed automagically from the Industry Canada website) for $220, including name search.
You need to know what you're doing, but even if you don't there are boilerplate services that will let you fill in the forms with reasonable legal language based on plain-English choices, although if you're going to go into business its probably a better idea to learn enough to do it yourself [I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice...]
My total start-up costs, ten years ago, were about $1000, most of which went into website design--pretty pictures and stuff--and various legal costs.
My impression is that the US is less business-friendly than Canada: your wacky health-care system, your mish-mash of local, state and federal laws, and your extremely complex tax code all make it harder to start a business there. But I don't think it's that much worse.
So their "great ideas" may well be "impossible pipe dreams." I have a friend who is all the time bothering another friend with ideas for development that are impossible, things that would require an AI to do.
I worked for a while with a philosopher who thought they had hard AI cracked. They had a little coding experience and hacked up something that had all the usual problems of rule-based AI's.
They "just needed a programmer" to fix up that part, and were not happy at all when I tried to explain that they had basically re-invented stuff from the '70's and it--unsurprisingly--had the same problems that had been seen in the '70's with the same approach.
Try explaining that to someone? Forget it. They'll hate you for giving them the facts.
Oh yeah. I used to run a consulting company that specialized in getting projects out of the lab and into the world. I worked closely with the IP licensing organization of a large university. A significant amount of my work was identifying clients I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole: profs who believed that they were the center of the universe due to their great ideas. They hated anyone who suggested otherwise, and were impossible to work with.
On the upside, it made me appreciate more than ever the few who really understood their role in the business development process: they were the vital, indespensible, grain of sand around which the entire awkward and messy mechanism of the oyster--VCs, managers, engineers, sales and marketing people--would createa beautiful pearl of a company.
Of course we know of such things as Cherenkov and Hawking radiation, which could -- just maybe -- serve to preserve that "lost information".
Cherenkov radiation is emitted when a charged particle travels faster than light in a medium (such a electrons in water, where the speed of light is 25% or so less than in vacuum) and has absolutely nothing to do with the information dynamics of black holes, of which the GP gives a somewhat garbled but not entirely wrong account of.
I can fully appreciate the necessity of distinguishing between certain quantum states, but there is no excuse to confuse that with gross structural molecular form, which is what is being referred to when someone says "isomer".
Shape isomers are a well-known type of highly deformed electromagnetic excitation of heavy nuclei that cannot de-excite easily due to their high angular momentum. Photons carry only one unit of spin angular momentum, and to dexcite a shape isomer requires a photon be emitted in a state with very high orbital angular momentum. This gives shape isomers extremely long lives relative to their excitation energy.
The island of stability is not a result of shape isomerism, it is a product of high angular momentum nuclei that are stable against nuclear decay due to the way the orbital momentum state of the nucleons increases the binding energy.
The difficulty is that the cranked shell model, which is where we get these predictions, is not exactly a stellar physical theory, and the island of stability exists a long way from where it is known to work.
So probably just assumed every element could be found in a piece of gold
Yes, you have correctly identified exactly how scientists think: we just kind of randomly assume stuff with no basis, and then spend thousands of hours on expensive and difficult experiments and observations hoping our random assumptions are correct.
Or sometimes, just for a change of pace, we consider carefully things like the chemistry and geology of gold deposits and the known processes of fractionation of heavy elements in the Earth's crust, and design our experiments and observations around a good understanding of all known and relevant facts.
But then we go back to the tried and true method of "probably just assuming" because really, why wouldn't we?
Just provide an X server on top of the Wayland graphics engine, and continue to use your old X apps. This allows for an easy transition to Wayland for those apps that would benefit from it.
"JUST for EASY "
You're a manager, aren't you?
Any time anyone says you "JUST" have to do X to get Y you can bet you aren't dealing with a person who knows what is actually involved or who will be doing the real work.
Have you tested X11+Wayland on the hardware I actually own? I you haven't, then your claim of EASY is completely unjustified.
It might be easy in some cases, assuming the process is well-documented and well-supported, although honestly I haven't done any fancy xconfig stuff for years and hope never to do so again, so if it requires me to do any of that it fails the "easy" test.
If I can turn on the machine and it "just works", that's easy. Everything else is me wasting my time doing something that should be invisible.
Furthermore, anyone who has actually built Qt or wxWidgets apps on different platforms knows that there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences in behaviour, different bugs, etc.
Most people who use these kinds of toolkit are in fact building for only one platform, so they aren't aware of the real issues that come with them. I've routinely written code that runs on both Windows and Linux using Qt or wx for the past decade, and while they are great there is nothing "just" or "easy" about handling the small differences: they are a disproportionate pain.
Slashdot Mirror
Beta Emitters = No pesky neutrons, Gamma rays of alpha particles...
Not quite correct: most gamma ray sources are in fact beta emitters that decay into excited states of the daughter nucleus, which then decays via gamma emission.
There are exceptions: 35S, which you mention, decays entirely to the ground state of 35Cl.
There are still problems, though: bremmstralung radiation from the stopping electrons, modest (126 day) lifetime and long biological half-life (~45 days). The average decay energy is only 49 keV (endpoint is 167 keV) so to generate a watt assuming 100% conversion efficiency you need 1/(49*1000*1.6e-19) ~ 1e14 decays per second, which is up there in the mega-curries.
Keeping it out of the environment at current discharge limits (micro-curries per kg) would be impossible, and it tends to affect the lungs, which are particularly susceptible to radiation (about 10% of lung cancer from smoking is due to potassium-40 decay.)
So on the whole I'd rather invest in algal biodeisel, which fulfils the relatively simple mandate of the funded research: providing feedstock for existing liquid hydrocarbon energy infrastructure.
More likely, he's in solitary for his own protection.
Right, that explains why he isn't allowed to exercise in his cell, and has no sheets or pillow on his bed.
The difference between scientists and non-scientists is not formal training, but attention to detail and the willingness to draw logical inferences from the data.
In this case, if the reported facts are true it is clear his detention is punishment, before he has been charged with any crime. That may be ok under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or whatever governs the US armed forces these days, but it doesn't justify making things up as you have done.
And meanwhile, Roman Polanski is still free, and it took almost thirty years for the United States to get around to having an international warrant for his arrest issued despite his having actually admitted to sex crimes involving a thirteen year old girl. I guess that doesn't count very much compared to embarrassing powerful people.
And why exactly is Assange being harrassed for doing something that is far less serious than what this English woman has admitted doing in a major newspaper: having sex with men using condoms deliberately tampered with so she can get pregnant?
Is the government of England really concerned with the sexual integrity of Swedish womanhood? Or are they just using the legal system to harrass someone who has made them look like the bunch of wankers they are?
A good capitalist would admit that he or she fucked up and do something about it.
Nope, a good capitalist would try to game the system, which almost always has a better cost/benefit ratio than admiting to a screw-up.
This is just a fact: it is almost always "better"--for some widely accepted standard of "better"--to lie, distract, bully and corrupt than it is to admit the truth, take responsibility for it, and move on.
I used to believe otherwise, but too many years of watching "good capitalists" make exactly that kind of rational economic calculation proved me wrong, and as a rational empiricist I changed my mind about the question.
The only stable, sane society is one in which various interests are maintained in a balance of power, and to balance the huge interests of dishonest, corrupt capitalists we need a large, democratic, transparent and relatively powerful government. The transparency and democracy are key, of course, as otherwise it will fall into all the well-known bad behaviour that humans get up to when given unchecked power.
They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them
The question is: what is the best way to fight them?
It is certainly not any application of the War Model, which involves massive invasions of random countries, some of which--like Iraq--were strongly opposed to Islamic radicalism.
Since you have identified the threat so clearly and are obviously concerned with it, I'm curiuous as to what you think the best way to oppose it is, and would also be interested to see any of your anti-war writings.
Education, urbanization and women's rights are all important things in fighting nutjobs like bin Laden. Funny cartoons work pretty well too, and I've often felt the West should issue an ultimatum to al Qaeda: "The funny pictures will continue until the killing stops."
That no one takes this idea seriously is a measure of how stupid and irrational everyone involved in the "debate" has become. Violence is always the least efficient, least effective means of settling any dispute between humans, but unreflective, stupid people always use it as their first resort.
The past decade has demonstrated conclusively how ineffective War Model violence is at stemming the tide of Islamic terrorism, and equally conclusively shown how effective ordinary police and intelligence work is.
The British government had to realise that there were genuine grievances and what it called "terrorists" saw themselves as soldiers.
It has less to do with recognizing the grievances than how they are responded to. What the stupid people here seem to think is that the only way to respond to violence is with violence, despite the many, many examples of how badly that works out, and how well things can be made to work out when just one side takes the road of peace.
The question is not "are their grievances?" but "how are they being addressed?" If they are being "addressed" by violence the cycle of killing will go on. If they are being "seen to be addressed" even if they don't fix the nominal underlying problems, peace has a good chance of breaking out.
Humans never use violence as a rational means of persuasion, because it isn't. It is an attempt to engage various relatively simple stimulus-response systems that were useful as a means of social control when we lived in small troops tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Violence feels rational to stupid people because they never stop to consider the actual "logic" of it, which is entirely based on emotional responses.
Unless you kill them.
Right, because killing people has exactly the consequences you want and no others, like pissing off friends, relatives, co-religionists or other nutjobs to the extent that they now want to hurt your society.
does it REALLY matter that much who finds it first?
To whom?
Humans are fundamentally driven by mate competition. It's the only thing that really gets us out of bed in the morning. Science and art are great examples of how to turn that basic drive to something creative and useful, as opposed to the destructive and stupid uses it is often put to, like politics and war.
To the humans actually involved in the search, it matters a great deal who's first, and expecting them to dedicate their lives to the discovery without that added impetus is asking for humans to be other than they actually are. Good luck with that. We demonstrably have a choice as to how we choose to compete. We do not have a choice as to whether or not we compete.
Furthermore, there are obvious practical advantages to having multiple experiments. You may have noticed that humans sometimes make mistakes, and are sometimes not honest. Monocultures and monopolies give no protections against those all too common characteristics, and if you think some protection isn't needed you are, unfortunately, naive.
Scientific fraud, and major errors in analysis-- even in large collaborations--are more common than you might think. Not putting all our experimental eggs in one basket really helps reduce these things, or at least catch them after the fact.
But wait, maybe killing more enemies ends up saving more lives in the long run?
History strongly suggests that not going to war saves more lives in the long run.
Tens of millions of people died fighting the NAZIs. Maybe thousands of people died fighting the Soviets. Do you see any Soviets around today?
It's almost as if there are solutions other than war to human problems.
Nice to link Borlaug, though. One of the primary reasons for Germany's war in the East was to secure food supplies. There were two ways of doing that:
1) Retool German industry so instead of maximizing useful production they maximized dead-weight loss military production, and invade their neighbours, prompting predictably irrational retaliation resulting in the wanton destruction of even more German productive capacity and decimation of the population.
2) Invest heavily in scientific agricultural research and growing productive capacity so that by a combination of greater domestic yields and greater external trade Germany's food needs could be satisfied.
The hormone-addled idiots in the Reichstag chose option 1 for reasons that had nothing to do with economic rationality and everything do to with the irrational dynamics of primate social groups and mate competition, and it worked out pretty badly for them, as it would have done even if they had not been met with a predictably irrational response from Great Britain.
In such situations, you really don't want to be emotional, as that soldier's survival depends on you thinking clearly, and that's where lifelike training is exactly what is great -- when confronted with such a situation, you do what you're trained to do
Since war is itself always the product of emotional rather than rational response to circumstances, it would be nice if training in rational thinking extended beyond field medics.
Presidents, kings, prime-ministers and generals all act like hormone-addled teenage girls when it comes to decision making. If they did not, there would be no wars.
Keep in mind that colonial control, secession, and a Nazi Europe are not acceptable outcomes in this game.
But thousands, tens of thousands and millions of dead young men are?
Give me a break.
It's time for warmongers to grow up and enter the real world.
War is an irrational activity carried out by rational means. No war is ever economically rational, and the "logic" of war makes no sense except in terms of the irrational mechanisms of social control employed by small troops of social primates, which are completley inappropriate to the kinds of problems that war supposedly solves.
In the cases in point: Canada became free of Britain without war. TIME took care of the problem for us, as it would have done for you had not a bunch of irrational hot-heads gotten a bunch of young men killed for the sake of speeding things up by a few years.
In Canada there was very little will for independence, and we got it anyway less than 100 years after you did. In the 13 colonies you could have negotiated greater independence--and secured for yourselves the rights of Englishmen--in less than a generation, if your short-sighted idiots hadn't insisted on war.
If that had happened seccession wouldn't have been an issue because slavery would have been outlawed in 1837 by the Crown, as it was in the rest of the British Empire.
In Europe, the mess in the '20's and '30's that made war seem like a good idea to the NAZIs was a product of the "Great War", a fact you fail to mention. NAZI-ism was no more effective than Sovietism, and would have moderated under its own inadequacies in a decade or so if left to itself, with a far lower body count than WWII produced.
You've stated the problem as if the German conquest of Europe would be a permanent feature, ignoring completely the equally lame attempt the Soviets to do the same after WWII.
You'll note that Poland et al are not under Soviet rule today, all without a shot fired. If some hot-headed idiot with zero grasp of economic rationality had whipped up the Poles into a frenzy of violent opposition resulting in a bloody and prolonged rebellion that after millions of deaths resulted in a free Poland you would no-doubt be asking, "How else could this have happened?"
Fortunately for Poland--and Russian--the Polish opposition was rational, and therefore chose peaceful, efficient, effective means of resistance, instead of the least efficient, least effective solution to any large-scale social or political problem: war.
Your logic is impecable; however, it will bounch straight off of market fundamentalists.
"Market fundamentalists" aren't even self-consistent. Corporations exist solely due to interference in the free market by the Nanny State in the form of various Companies Acts.
A "truly free" market would have no corporations, as it would not permit limited liability for individuals. That liability limitation is a huge interference with the legal basis of a free market.
And because corporations would not exist in a free market, they cannot reasonably expect to operate in one: the state, which protects corporate owners from liability, clearly also has a warrant to make laws that protect non-corporate entities from the actions that those same owners take in the non-free market that allows corporations to exist.
The crew dogs stated they managed to change the brakes on 5 C-130s with it before it started to bend, so it survived longer than any other they had on hand before bending!
That's the difference between a good tool and a great tool: merely good tools fail by shattering.
People versed in quantum field theory talk in a way that implies that it comes from the theory.
The Pauli exclusion principle is a consequence of a deeper principle: the total anti-symmetry of the fermion wavefunction. "Anti-symmetry" means that the joint wavefunction of two fermions must change sign if you swap the particles around. This is only possible if any two fermions are in different states: if they were in the same state then they could be exchanged and the overall wavefunction would be identical, which is what happens with bosons.
One might reasonably ask why that is so, and there are reasons related to the behaviour of fermioic and bosonic wavefunctions under rotations of the co-ordinate system, but it becomes pretty abstract, and at some point, as always in science, the answer becomes, "Because that seems to be the simplest way we know of to describe the world we see."
Why are drug smugglers being kept in Guantanamo?
For the same reason innocent people are being held in Guantanamo Bay: all power gets used, and without the check of a robust legal system police powers will be used however the police feel like using them. In this case the "police" are the various DHS agencies and the US military, and they have been given free reign by the American government to operate beyond the law.
Unless people being held in Gauntanamo have full access to the US legal system there will be a very substantial levening of innocents and people guilty of crimes unrelated to terrorism there.
Unless they're going to Gitmo-ize him, but I can't see that happening. He's not a combatant of any kind.
No, no: he's an "Information Combatant".
One of the biggest lessons that the New Right took from the Post-Structuralist Left in the '90's was the role of language-creation in dominating the public discourse.
The post-structuralists rightly observed that groups in power tend to dominate how language is used, but rather than making a case for more objective, empirically-oriented language they concluded from this that the meaning of words was pretty much completely up for grabs. Like Humpty-Dumpty, words were to mean only what the powerful meant them to mean, and the only question was "who is to be master."
For some reason the Left thought this would be them, as the Old Right had a modium of objectivity about it.
The New Right took this idea and ran with it, abandoning the vestigal objectivity of the Old Right and imposing new meaning and new language on the political discourse in the United States.
Ever wonder how the term "Homeland" just happened to be all ready and waiting after 9/11? Conspiracy theories aside, the New Right was clearly looking for a new enemy and new language to allow them to continue the Cold War strategies that had worked so well in teh '80's, and 9/11 was a gift to them.
So don't be surprised when language like "information combatant", or on reflection, "information terrorist" or "cyber terrorist" get applied to Assange. They probably already have.
This is actually consistent with the modern usage of the word "terrorist", which is "anyone who does anything that the bi-partisan ruling class in the US doesn't like."
While maybe possible in theory, it's hard to imagine it being practical. ignoring the size issue and the clutter in earth orbit, the amount of time it would take for a solar sail to escape the earth gravity well seems like it would be incredibly long.
What you find difficult or easy to imagine is not an arbiter of reality. It has zero epistemic value, and it's a little weird you would bring it up.
I find it hard to imagine anyone would be dumb enough to engage in a war of choice in Iraq, but one demonstrably exists. I find it hard to imagine that people think what they find hard or easy to imagine has any bearing whatsoever on what is real, but clearly lots of people think that.
Science has been transforming the world for three hundred years, and is based on the discipline of publically testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and consistent, precise mathematics. It works because it recognizes that what anyone can or cannot imagine is irrelevant to what is real.
In the case of solar sails, they can lift a satelite out of Earth orbit in days to weeks, depending on the initial orbit. From geostationary it's a couple of days. From LEO it's more in the month-ish range.
Typical solar sail configurations should be able to produce 1/1000 of a g: 0.01 m/s^2. So 1 m/s delta v after 100 seconds, 36 m/s after an hour, 3600 m/s after 100 hours (4 days), 36000 m/s after five or six weeks. For missions to other planets that would last years, that's a trivial amount of time.
Imagine that!
Yet it provides information that anyone seeking to harm the US would find quite valuable.
Value is related to scarcity or difficulty of acquistion. How exactly is it difficult to acquire information that any of the items on the list are important to the US?
Glancing over the list for Canada there is nothing but a bunch of bridges and dams and industrial facilities, including nuclear facilities, that are obviously important. But vital? Or secret? Don't make me laugh.
And don't forget the basics; incorporating a company is a non-trivial expense at this level.
Your estimates are not unreasonable, except for this. I don't know what the situation is in the US, but in Canada you can incorporate nationally (with the provincial incorporation docs filed automagically from the Industry Canada website) for $220, including name search.
You need to know what you're doing, but even if you don't there are boilerplate services that will let you fill in the forms with reasonable legal language based on plain-English choices, although if you're going to go into business its probably a better idea to learn enough to do it yourself [I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice...]
My total start-up costs, ten years ago, were about $1000, most of which went into website design--pretty pictures and stuff--and various legal costs.
My impression is that the US is less business-friendly than Canada: your wacky health-care system, your mish-mash of local, state and federal laws, and your extremely complex tax code all make it harder to start a business there. But I don't think it's that much worse.
So their "great ideas" may well be "impossible pipe dreams." I have a friend who is all the time bothering another friend with ideas for development that are impossible, things that would require an AI to do.
I worked for a while with a philosopher who thought they had hard AI cracked. They had a little coding experience and hacked up something that had all the usual problems of rule-based AI's.
They "just needed a programmer" to fix up that part, and were not happy at all when I tried to explain that they had basically re-invented stuff from the '70's and it--unsurprisingly--had the same problems that had been seen in the '70's with the same approach.
Try explaining that to someone? Forget it. They'll hate you for giving them the facts.
Oh yeah. I used to run a consulting company that specialized in getting projects out of the lab and into the world. I worked closely with the IP licensing organization of a large university. A significant amount of my work was identifying clients I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole: profs who believed that they were the center of the universe due to their great ideas. They hated anyone who suggested otherwise, and were impossible to work with.
On the upside, it made me appreciate more than ever the few who really understood their role in the business development process: they were the vital, indespensible, grain of sand around which the entire awkward and messy mechanism of the oyster--VCs, managers, engineers, sales and marketing people--would createa beautiful pearl of a company.
Of course we know of such things as Cherenkov and Hawking radiation, which could -- just maybe -- serve to preserve that "lost information".
Cherenkov radiation is emitted when a charged particle travels faster than light in a medium (such a electrons in water, where the speed of light is 25% or so less than in vacuum) and has absolutely nothing to do with the information dynamics of black holes, of which the GP gives a somewhat garbled but not entirely wrong account of.
I can fully appreciate the necessity of distinguishing between certain quantum states, but there is no excuse to confuse that with gross structural molecular form, which is what is being referred to when someone says "isomer".
Shape isomers are a well-known type of highly deformed electromagnetic excitation of heavy nuclei that cannot de-excite easily due to their high angular momentum. Photons carry only one unit of spin angular momentum, and to dexcite a shape isomer requires a photon be emitted in a state with very high orbital angular momentum. This gives shape isomers extremely long lives relative to their excitation energy.
The island of stability is not a result of shape isomerism, it is a product of high angular momentum nuclei that are stable against nuclear decay due to the way the orbital momentum state of the nucleons increases the binding energy.
The difficulty is that the cranked shell model, which is where we get these predictions, is not exactly a stellar physical theory, and the island of stability exists a long way from where it is known to work.
So probably just assumed every element could be found in a piece of gold
Yes, you have correctly identified exactly how scientists think: we just kind of randomly assume stuff with no basis, and then spend thousands of hours on expensive and difficult experiments and observations hoping our random assumptions are correct.
Or sometimes, just for a change of pace, we consider carefully things like the chemistry and geology of gold deposits and the known processes of fractionation of heavy elements in the Earth's crust, and design our experiments and observations around a good understanding of all known and relevant facts.
But then we go back to the tried and true method of "probably just assuming" because really, why wouldn't we?
Just provide an X server on top of the Wayland graphics engine, and continue to use your old X apps. This allows for an easy transition to Wayland for those apps that would benefit from it.
"JUST for EASY "
You're a manager, aren't you?
Any time anyone says you "JUST" have to do X to get Y you can bet you aren't dealing with a person who knows what is actually involved or who will be doing the real work.
Have you tested X11+Wayland on the hardware I actually own? I you haven't, then your claim of EASY is completely unjustified.
It might be easy in some cases, assuming the process is well-documented and well-supported, although honestly I haven't done any fancy xconfig stuff for years and hope never to do so again, so if it requires me to do any of that it fails the "easy" test.
If I can turn on the machine and it "just works", that's easy. Everything else is me wasting my time doing something that should be invisible.
Furthermore, anyone who has actually built Qt or wxWidgets apps on different platforms knows that there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences in behaviour, different bugs, etc.
Most people who use these kinds of toolkit are in fact building for only one platform, so they aren't aware of the real issues that come with them. I've routinely written code that runs on both Windows and Linux using Qt or wx for the past decade, and while they are great there is nothing "just" or "easy" about handling the small differences: they are a disproportionate pain.