Corn is a pretty bad crop selection for making ethanol. The water, fertilizer, direct and indirect energy requirements for growing corn are quite high. Pessimistic estimates put corn ethanol as a net negative production, but even optimistic estimates put the costs at a large fraction of the gross output. For ever gallon of corn ethanol you make you need to burn away most of that gallon to make the next gallon of corn ethanol.
yields between 500 to 800 gallons of ethanol per acre
requires one-half of the water required to grow corn and one third of the water required to grow sugarcane
can grow in marginal soils, ranging from heavy clay to light sand... marked resistance to drought and saline-alkaline soils, and tolerance to high temperature and waterlogging
requires the use of only 40 to 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre whereas corn growers use more than 150 pounds per acre
The energy requirement for converting sweet sorghum juice into ethanol is less than half of that required to convert corn into ethanol
(*)Note: The website appears to be an outlet for information from commercial sources. I have no particular reason to doubt this info on sweet sorghum, but it might be a good idea for someone to dig up a more authoritative source.
Ah, I thought you were objecting to the effect itself. I think we are now in agreement:) The infrared effect in glass greenhouses is real, but the heat effect there is overwhelmingly dominated by convection. The more layers of glass you have the more closely a glass greenhouse would match the infrared atmospheric effect (the chain of emission and adsorption), but usually that's not important with such an easy and large convection effect.
You're right that my phrase "additional layers of insulation" was a poor analogy. The point I was making about more CO2 increasing the heat trapping of the greenhouse was still correct however. More CO2 is like thicker glass, except even the thinest normal glass is already abundantly thick enough to be essentially 100 percent effective in the frequencies that it blocks. The most simple direct way to make that analogy therefore would have been unclear, so I kinda winged that aspect of the analogy for that (correct) point.
And as for "And CO2 doesn't cover the entire infrared spectrum - it's like there are parts of the greenhouse are open holes not covered by glass", that is dead on. It would be more precise to talk about different kinds of glass with different transparencies in the infrared range, but it's a useless explanation for someone who didn't already understand it anyway. Comparing holes in the infrared spectrum to holes in the glass coverage is an extremely accurate explanation. It makes it clear that there are holes where the heat leaks out, and covering those holes obviously traps even more of the heat.
He swore "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", and he's been pissing all over that document for the past seven years. Is that not good enough?
Nope. Not good enough. Not a lie. You overlooked the "to the best of my ability" part.
All they had to do was say "no more money" and cut his appropriations
Things have been pretty quiet in the U.S. since 9/11, but you know that sooner or later SOME sort of terror event is going to crop up. And I can't help thinking that it would just so happen to crop up immediately after Bush goes on a rant tarring Democrats for congress cutting even one cent of funding even remotely connected to His War On Terror.
Call it Murphy's law, call it deliberate and insidious terrorist timing, call it fate, call it an Evil-Bush-Conspiracy-Theory, call it the universe's perverse delight in irony.... but one way or another you just KNOW that's how it would play out.
parent comment proof the Slashdot modertation system is broken
You're right. It should have been modded +Insightful, not +Informative.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you suggesting he should have been modded DOWN? Sounds like a squeal of pain against a comment that hit a you dead on.
-
Note:grousing about rejected submissions is Offtop
on
ISO Puts OOXML On Hold
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally. Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
2008-06-02 19:06:05 Venezuela, Not Denmark, Is Fourth To Appeal OOXML (Index,Microsoft) (rejected) The recent report Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML is a bit of confusion. There have been many many protests, however the IEC acknowledges four appeals- Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela. It appears the letters from Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they come from the Chairmen of their respective Technical Committees rather than the administrative heads of the national organisations.
Ok, I won't grouse about rejected submissions. However I damn well will grouse about Slashdot editors re-posting wrong information after getting a submission informing them IT WAS WRONG THE FIRST TIME THEY RAN IT.
To truly prove her faithfulness, I told her that she was a whore, cut her off from everyone she loved, and kicked her out of her home. After ignoring her pleas for love, I called her ex and told him to come take care of her, then let her stew for a month.
The only thing that would help a creationist change his mind would be a zipper in his forehead.
I have explained to multiple YEC'ers that you can dig down in the antarctic icepack and visibly count down about 174,000 yearly snow layers, along with abundant surrounding evidence that they blatantly are in fact yearly snow layers, proving not only that the earth is at least 174,000 but also incidentally proving that there was no Global Flood within the last 174,000 years, and all I get in response is an incoherent babble that all science and all evidence is open to interpretation, with absolutely no offered competing alternate interpretation whatsoever.
My post only needs the minor clarification that Malaria is uniquely spread by Anopheline mosquitoes, which are indeed climate sensitive. Global warming has and will expand the range of that species of mosquito, and thus global warming has and will expand the range of malaria.
My question is what is the optimum temperature to sustain life on our planet?
You could change the temperature by a hundred degrees in either direction and the earth would cheerfully continue to sustain life. However the life sustained would not include us, nor most other species.
Talking about an "optimal" temperature isn't really meaningful. But I will tell you what *is* optimal and extremely meaningful for sustaining life... a constant temperature. Or at least one that only changes slowly over geological timescales.
Changing temperatures, especially rapidly changing temperatures, are extremely destructive to life. It only takes a fairly small change to start a cascade of extinctions. And it also only takes a small change to be extremely disruptive to us. Humans live everywhere from the equator to the deep arctic circle, but in every case we are highly adapted- to and reliant-on the expected conditions. If the climate changes even a small amount, the effects would be wide ranging and harmful to us. Not the least of such effects is changes in rain and other agricultural factors. Areas where we expect low rainfall can be inundated with flooding, while major farming areas and population centers can be hit with devastating droughts. A less deadly but still disruptive effect is is agricultural areas remain viable, but farmers have to figure out and adapt to different crops viable in the new climate conditions. Another major issue is that warming brings a massive increase in the range of mosquitoes and deadly mosquito-born diseases like malaria. Another issue is that many major cities and vast swaths of population live along low-lying coastal areas, and even a modest rise in sea level would be a disruption to humanity of colossal proportions. It's not merely about land that would fall below the new sea level, you have to consider hurricane storm surges. Every foot of higher sea level massively increases the frequency and range of land flooded under a storm surge. The disruptive effects on humanity just go on and on. We have built our civilization on hundreds of years of hard lessons about the local climate and what the water supply is and what grows where and what the various animal insect and disease ranges are and on the sea level and what the storm flood threats are and on and on and on. Change itself is enormously disruptive and costly.
It's simple physics. The atmosphere greenhouse effect ALREADY keeps the earth about 50 degrees F (about 28 C) warmer than it would be if there were no atmospheric greenhouse effect. Most of the earth would be an iceball if the greenhouse wasn't there already warming the earth quite substantially.
When you crank up the CO2 content of the atmosphere, it's like adding additional layers of insulation to an glass greenhouse. And CO2 doesn't cover the entire infrared spectrum - it's like there are parts of the greenhouse are open holes not covered by glass... when we add in methane and chlorofluorocarbons and other powerful greenhouse gases... well that's like closing those openings in the window - covering them with insulating glass too. Simple physics, additional gases have a particularly powerful effect because they cover parts of the infrared window that were previously uncovered and wide open.
It is simple irrefutable physics. The fact that human emissions will trap heat is absolutely undeniable. It's like we're spraying water around, and some people are denialists of "human caused wetness".
If the sun is having some effect on earth and jupiter and other planets, any such effect is strictly on top of the basic-physics-undeniable effect of humans dumping mass quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that it does trap thermal radiation.
Measuring the size of the effect is difficult. Separating the effect from sun or other simultaneous effects is difficult. Predicting the future size of the increasing effect is extremely difficult and carries significant error bars of uncertainty. And trying to accurately predict the cascade of secondary effects it *will* have on climate and general life on earth is crazy difficult and subject to enormous uncertainties.
However trying to denying the fundamental effect itself, well that is just pure blind denialism.
Megabucks of corporate relations and junk science was spent to create the confusion and FUD on the science, and unfortunately a couple of politicians jumped onboard early on and got the issue associated with partisan politics. Created the ridiculous association that if if you are Republican/Conservative you are supposed to be on one side of the issue, and if you are Democrat/Liberal you are supposed to be on the other side of the issue. An absolutely ridiculous association. What we should or shouldn't do about it is indeed a political question, however whether the effect is real or not is a question of basic physics. The gases we are pumping into the atmosphere either do or do not trap thermal radiation, a simple direct question of physics. And the answer is yes, it is impossible to deny that they do.
But as I said it's unfortunate that this got associated with politics at all. People hear that they are supposed to to be on one particular side of the issue because they have some political association, and then it is basic human nature to resist breaking that link and to resist changing position.
In fact I noticed some new TV ads on this lately - I'm not sure if there's multiple versions with different people, but the one I recall is with Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting side by side on a couch. They play up the fact that they are icons of the Left and the Right. They talk about how they disagree on almost everything, but that they agree on this. That this issue is NOT legitimately tied to political sides. That it's not Left vs Right or Liberal vs Conservative or Democrats vs Republicans, that it is REAL and that it's time to come together and figure out what we want to do about that fact.
There is not a bit of evidence that Al Qaeda or any of the Islamic terrorist groups are trying to undermine America by eroding our civil liberties.
Actually yes, there is.
As your post correctly says, it would be ridiculous to suggest they directly care about or are motivated by any issue of our civil liberties. However they do indeed consider it part of a means to an end.
From Sun Tzu's Art of War:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Bush (and his entire administration) has a simplistic cartoon image of the enemy. The administration has declared that any coverage of what bin Laden as been saying is giving him free airtime and is giving aid to terrorists, has even played any such coverage carring coded instructions for an attack. And thus the media has been cowed into self censoring any such coverage. No coverage of what he's actually saying and no media analysis of what he actually wants and no media analysis of the terrorist whys and hows.
This is why The War On Terror has been so badly botched. The administration has a cartoon image of the enemy, and the public has little-to-no understanding of the enemy. Bush blindly did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do.
Why did bin Laden instigate the 9/11 attack? What was the logic behind it?
Most people can't answer that. Saying bin Laden is evil is a hollow cartoon explanation, that evil people do evil things is a useless insightless answer. Saying "They hate our freedom" is a total fiction, a convenient administration soundbite to rally the public.
There was a chain of logic behind 9/11. It was an evil and tortured logic, but an identifiable and comprehensible logic. One must understand that logic to properly understand and fight that enemy, to understand not to unwittingly do what the enemy is hoping you to do.
First, what do bin Laden his cohorts ultimately want? What is the ultimate intent? A pan-Arab Caliphate. To unite the entire Arab world under one Islamic theocracy. That is bin Laden's utopia, that is his perfect answer that will supposed solve all the problems he sees of the world. bin Laden fundamentally doesn't give a shit about the Western World, he's perfectly happy for the rest of us to (figuratively and literally) go to hell.
So bin Laden's notion is that with the aid of Allah all Muslims should and would rise up and overthrow all of the corrupt Arab governments (and yeah those governments are generally pretty corrupt) to institute one unified Islamic rule. Of course bin Laden has gotten nowhere with that, and he decides that the only reason this plan has fails is because the Evil Western Nations have been protecting and propping up those corrupt Arab governments. And yeah, we have been protecting and propping up the Saudi Royal Family. And yeah, Saddam Hussein was all ours, he was a brutal dictator but he was a completely secular ruler and we gave him HUGE material support as a counter point to Iran. And we have been propping up other such governments for oil stability and other strategic interests. He doesn't "hate our freedoms", he hates us for stabilizing the Mideast and for working to keep Arab governments from collapsing in chaos, because he has the notion that such collapses and chaos would lead to an Islamic Utopia.
bin Laden's tactical and strategic ideas are based on his Afghanistan fighting against Russia, and his view of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. His view on rallying fighters to the cause is to provoke the enemy to overreact, to provoke the enemy to brutality, so that the enemy loses support and so that the enemy creates bin Laden's army for him. What is the purpose of the terrorist attacks on Israel? To provoke Israel to strike against the terrorists, and to provoke
Can juries recommend that somebody facing a prison term instead be assessed and booked for psychiatric evaluation?
No. Juries only get to vote guilty or not guilty on the specific charges listed by the prosecution.
If someone collects newspaper clipping photos of arsons, or he draws fictional arson images, or someone produces a Friday The 13th mass murder movie, is that an actual criminal act and do we arrest and imprison them for it?
Why is it that in this ONE area, we throw out all of the normal rules of law? Lose sight of the of the line of an actual criminal act? If someone commits an arson, we throw them in prison. We don't imagine it appropriate to imprison an otherwise innocent person for possessing newspaper clippings of arson, and we most certainly don't do so for fictional images of arson.
a jury would have to strongly consider that no evidence of abuse was found
The point here is that according to the law, and according to the juror who posted here, people are to be imprisoned even when there is no abuse.
If someone takes a pair of scissors to a Sears catalog and cuts out the heads of children and glues them onto the bodies in a Playboy magazine, the law and this juror declare that a crime. Declare that men with guns shall arrest that person and imprison him for a decade or so, and after that decade in prison to then place him under a life sentence of tracing and varied restraints under the sex offender registries, and more specifically under the most extreme provisions of child predator sex offenses. For the crime of cutting up magazines and gluing them together to make offensive fiction images.
And obviously anyone who suggests we shouldn't do that, anyone who suggests that criminal laws and men with guns and prisons should only apply to actual physical criminal acts against actual children, well that person is defending pedophiles and they must be a pedophile as well, and it would be really swell if we could lock them in prison too just for suggesting such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of idiot do you take me for?
Oh I dunno....
the kind that was working for the prosecution?
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So, what do you do to get to work during winter?
Oh, that's easy. Just work during the summer.
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Corn is a pretty bad crop selection for making ethanol. The water, fertilizer, direct and indirect energy requirements for growing corn are quite high. Pessimistic estimates put corn ethanol as a net negative production, but even optimistic estimates put the costs at a large fraction of the gross output. For ever gallon of corn ethanol you make you need to burn away most of that gallon to make the next gallon of corn ethanol.
According to this source(*) on sweet sorghum:
yields between 500 to 800 gallons of ethanol per acre
requires one-half of the water required to grow corn and one third of the water required to grow sugarcane
can grow in marginal soils, ranging from heavy clay to light sand... marked resistance to drought and saline-alkaline soils, and tolerance to high temperature and waterlogging
requires the use of only 40 to 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre whereas corn growers use more than 150 pounds per acre
The energy requirement for converting sweet sorghum juice into ethanol is less than half of that required to convert corn into ethanol
(*)Note: The website appears to be an outlet for information from commercial sources. I have no particular reason to doubt this info on sweet sorghum, but it might be a good idea for someone to dig up a more authoritative source.
-
Ah, I thought you were objecting to the effect itself. I think we are now in agreement :) The infrared effect in glass greenhouses is real, but the heat effect there is overwhelmingly dominated by convection. The more layers of glass you have the more closely a glass greenhouse would match the infrared atmospheric effect (the chain of emission and adsorption), but usually that's not important with such an easy and large convection effect.
-
You're right that my phrase "additional layers of insulation" was a poor analogy. The point I was making about more CO2 increasing the heat trapping of the greenhouse was still correct however. More CO2 is like thicker glass, except even the thinest normal glass is already abundantly thick enough to be essentially 100 percent effective in the frequencies that it blocks. The most simple direct way to make that analogy therefore would have been unclear, so I kinda winged that aspect of the analogy for that (correct) point.
And as for "And CO2 doesn't cover the entire infrared spectrum - it's like there are parts of the greenhouse are open holes not covered by glass", that is dead on. It would be more precise to talk about different kinds of glass with different transparencies in the infrared range, but it's a useless explanation for someone who didn't already understand it anyway. Comparing holes in the infrared spectrum to holes in the glass coverage is an extremely accurate explanation. It makes it clear that there are holes where the heat leaks out, and covering those holes obviously traps even more of the heat.
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This is Slashdot. Please correct to gibibarrels and repost.
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He swore "to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", and he's been pissing all over that document for the past seven years. Is that not good enough?
Nope. Not good enough. Not a lie.
You overlooked the "to the best of my ability" part.
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Of course the glove doesn't fit. Even Monica's hands are fat.
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Kucinich's voting record is really good on (almost all) the issues, but President?? No way.
What if the mothership lands and takes him away?
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All they had to do was say "no more money" and cut his appropriations
Things have been pretty quiet in the U.S. since 9/11, but you know that sooner or later SOME sort of terror event is going to crop up. And I can't help thinking that it would just so happen to crop up immediately after Bush goes on a rant tarring Democrats for congress cutting even one cent of funding even remotely connected to His War On Terror.
Call it Murphy's law, call it deliberate and insidious terrorist timing, call it fate, call it an Evil-Bush-Conspiracy-Theory, call it the universe's perverse delight in irony.... but one way or another you just KNOW that's how it would play out.
-
parent comment proof the Slashdot modertation system is broken
You're right. It should have been modded +Insightful, not +Informative.
Oh, I'm sorry, were you suggesting he should have been modded DOWN?
Sounds like a squeal of pain against a comment that hit a you dead on.
-
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
Note: grousing about rejected submissions is Offtopic and usually gets moderated that way. It happens, don't take it personally.
2008-06-02 19:06:05 Venezuela, Not Denmark, Is Fourth To Appeal OOXML (Index,Microsoft) (rejected)
The recent report Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML is a bit of confusion. There have been many many protests, however the IEC acknowledges four appeals- Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela. It appears the letters from Denmark and Norway are being disregarded, as they come from the Chairmen of their respective Technical Committees rather than the administrative heads of the national organisations.
Ok, I won't grouse about rejected submissions. However I damn well will grouse about Slashdot editors re-posting wrong information after getting a submission informing them IT WAS WRONG THE FIRST TIME THEY RAN IT.
-
To truly prove her faithfulness, I told her that she was a whore, cut her off from everyone she loved, and kicked her out of her home. After ignoring her pleas for love, I called her ex and told him to come take care of her, then let her stew for a month.
God, is that you?
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The only thing that would help a creationist change his mind would be a zipper in his forehead.
I have explained to multiple YEC'ers that you can dig down in the antarctic icepack and visibly count down about 174,000 yearly snow layers, along with abundant surrounding evidence that they blatantly are in fact yearly snow layers, proving not only that the earth is at least 174,000 but also incidentally proving that there was no Global Flood within the last 174,000 years, and all I get in response is an incoherent babble that all science and all evidence is open to interpretation, with absolutely no offered competing alternate interpretation whatsoever.
-
How could Jesus have died approximately 2000 years ago AND be seen on a Moped on I-50 without some Divinity thrown in?
Ummm, some shrooms thrown in instead?
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My post only needs the minor clarification that Malaria is uniquely spread by Anopheline mosquitoes, which are indeed climate sensitive. Global warming has and will expand the range of that species of mosquito, and thus global warming has and will expand the range of malaria.
-
My question is what is the optimum temperature to sustain life on our planet?
You could change the temperature by a hundred degrees in either direction and the earth would cheerfully continue to sustain life. However the life sustained would not include us, nor most other species.
Talking about an "optimal" temperature isn't really meaningful. But I will tell you what *is* optimal and extremely meaningful for sustaining life... a constant temperature. Or at least one that only changes slowly over geological timescales.
Changing temperatures, especially rapidly changing temperatures, are extremely destructive to life. It only takes a fairly small change to start a cascade of extinctions. And it also only takes a small change to be extremely disruptive to us. Humans live everywhere from the equator to the deep arctic circle, but in every case we are highly adapted- to and reliant-on the expected conditions. If the climate changes even a small amount, the effects would be wide ranging and harmful to us. Not the least of such effects is changes in rain and other agricultural factors. Areas where we expect low rainfall can be inundated with flooding, while major farming areas and population centers can be hit with devastating droughts. A less deadly but still disruptive effect is is agricultural areas remain viable, but farmers have to figure out and adapt to different crops viable in the new climate conditions. Another major issue is that warming brings a massive increase in the range of mosquitoes and deadly mosquito-born diseases like malaria. Another issue is that many major cities and vast swaths of population live along low-lying coastal areas, and even a modest rise in sea level would be a disruption to humanity of colossal proportions. It's not merely about land that would fall below the new sea level, you have to consider hurricane storm surges. Every foot of higher sea level massively increases the frequency and range of land flooded under a storm surge. The disruptive effects on humanity just go on and on. We have built our civilization on hundreds of years of hard lessons about the local climate and what the water supply is and what grows where and what the various animal insect and disease ranges are and on the sea level and what the storm flood threats are and on and on and on. Change itself is enormously disruptive and costly.
-
It's simple physics. The atmosphere greenhouse effect ALREADY keeps the earth about 50 degrees F (about 28 C) warmer than it would be if there were no atmospheric greenhouse effect. Most of the earth would be an iceball if the greenhouse wasn't there already warming the earth quite substantially.
When you crank up the CO2 content of the atmosphere, it's like adding additional layers of insulation to an glass greenhouse. And CO2 doesn't cover the entire infrared spectrum - it's like there are parts of the greenhouse are open holes not covered by glass... when we add in methane and chlorofluorocarbons and other powerful greenhouse gases... well that's like closing those openings in the window - covering them with insulating glass too. Simple physics, additional gases have a particularly powerful effect because they cover parts of the infrared window that were previously uncovered and wide open.
It is simple irrefutable physics. The fact that human emissions will trap heat is absolutely undeniable. It's like we're spraying water around, and some people are denialists of "human caused wetness".
If the sun is having some effect on earth and jupiter and other planets, any such effect is strictly on top of the basic-physics-undeniable effect of humans dumping mass quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that it does trap thermal radiation.
Measuring the size of the effect is difficult. Separating the effect from sun or other simultaneous effects is difficult. Predicting the future size of the increasing effect is extremely difficult and carries significant error bars of uncertainty. And trying to accurately predict the cascade of secondary effects it *will* have on climate and general life on earth is crazy difficult and subject to enormous uncertainties.
However trying to denying the fundamental effect itself, well that is just pure blind denialism.
Megabucks of corporate relations and junk science was spent to create the confusion and FUD on the science, and unfortunately a couple of politicians jumped onboard early on and got the issue associated with partisan politics. Created the ridiculous association that if if you are Republican/Conservative you are supposed to be on one side of the issue, and if you are Democrat/Liberal you are supposed to be on the other side of the issue. An absolutely ridiculous association. What we should or shouldn't do about it is indeed a political question, however whether the effect is real or not is a question of basic physics. The gases we are pumping into the atmosphere either do or do not trap thermal radiation, a simple direct question of physics. And the answer is yes, it is impossible to deny that they do.
But as I said it's unfortunate that this got associated with politics at all. People hear that they are supposed to to be on one particular side of the issue because they have some political association, and then it is basic human nature to resist breaking that link and to resist changing position.
In fact I noticed some new TV ads on this lately - I'm not sure if there's multiple versions with different people, but the one I recall is with Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting side by side on a couch. They play up the fact that they are icons of the Left and the Right. They talk about how they disagree on almost everything, but that they agree on this. That this issue is NOT legitimately tied to political sides. That it's not Left vs Right or Liberal vs Conservative or Democrats vs Republicans, that it is REAL and that it's time to come together and figure out what we want to do about that fact.
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but to an elf- you look like a native of Brobdingnag with pores the size of quarters....
:D
Yeah, but in elf terms I'm hung like one too.
-
Actually yes, there is.
As your post correctly says, it would be ridiculous to suggest they directly care about or are motivated by any issue of our civil liberties. However they do indeed consider it part of a means to an end.
From Sun Tzu's Art of War:
Bush (and his entire administration) has a simplistic cartoon image of the enemy. The administration has declared that any coverage of what bin Laden as been saying is giving him free airtime and is giving aid to terrorists, has even played any such coverage carring coded instructions for an attack. And thus the media has been cowed into self censoring any such coverage. No coverage of what he's actually saying and no media analysis of what he actually wants and no media analysis of the terrorist whys and hows.
This is why The War On Terror has been so badly botched. The administration has a cartoon image of the enemy, and the public has little-to-no understanding of the enemy. Bush blindly did exactly what bin Laden wanted him to do.
Why did bin Laden instigate the 9/11 attack? What was the logic behind it?
Most people can't answer that. Saying bin Laden is evil is a hollow cartoon explanation, that evil people do evil things is a useless insightless answer. Saying "They hate our freedom" is a total fiction, a convenient administration soundbite to rally the public.
There was a chain of logic behind 9/11. It was an evil and tortured logic, but an identifiable and comprehensible logic. One must understand that logic to properly understand and fight that enemy, to understand not to unwittingly do what the enemy is hoping you to do.
First, what do bin Laden his cohorts ultimately want? What is the ultimate intent? A pan-Arab Caliphate. To unite the entire Arab world under one Islamic theocracy. That is bin Laden's utopia, that is his perfect answer that will supposed solve all the problems he sees of the world. bin Laden fundamentally doesn't give a shit about the Western World, he's perfectly happy for the rest of us to (figuratively and literally) go to hell.
So bin Laden's notion is that with the aid of Allah all Muslims should and would rise up and overthrow all of the corrupt Arab governments (and yeah those governments are generally pretty corrupt) to institute one unified Islamic rule. Of course bin Laden has gotten nowhere with that, and he decides that the only reason this plan has fails is because the Evil Western Nations have been protecting and propping up those corrupt Arab governments. And yeah, we have been protecting and propping up the Saudi Royal Family. And yeah, Saddam Hussein was all ours, he was a brutal dictator but he was a completely secular ruler and we gave him HUGE material support as a counter point to Iran. And we have been propping up other such governments for oil stability and other strategic interests. He doesn't "hate our freedoms", he hates us for stabilizing the Mideast and for working to keep Arab governments from collapsing in chaos, because he has the notion that such collapses and chaos would lead to an Islamic Utopia.
bin Laden's tactical and strategic ideas are based on his Afghanistan fighting against Russia, and his view of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. His view on rallying fighters to the cause is to provoke the enemy to overreact, to provoke the enemy to brutality, so that the enemy loses support and so that the enemy creates bin Laden's army for him. What is the purpose of the terrorist attacks on Israel? To provoke Israel to strike against the terrorists, and to provoke
Just out of curiosity, are these male or female magical elves?
Female elves are sexy.
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for example powering iPods by plugging them into batteries placed in the owners' heels
I have a better idea. How about we put the batteries in the shoes instead?
I'd really rather not have a Sony Battery surgically implanted in my foot.
Results 1 - 10 of about 289 from slashdot.org for battery fire Sony. (0.08 seconds)
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...and when it asks "Install ActiveX Zombie Client", click OK -- it's an ordinary dialog.
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Can juries recommend that somebody facing a prison term instead be assessed and booked for psychiatric evaluation?
No. Juries only get to vote guilty or not guilty on the specific charges listed by the prosecution.
If someone collects newspaper clipping photos of arsons, or he draws fictional arson images, or someone produces a Friday The 13th mass murder movie, is that an actual criminal act and do we arrest and imprison them for it?
Why is it that in this ONE area, we throw out all of the normal rules of law? Lose sight of the of the line of an actual criminal act? If someone commits an arson, we throw them in prison. We don't imagine it appropriate to imprison an otherwise innocent person for possessing newspaper clippings of arson, and we most certainly don't do so for fictional images of arson.
-
a jury would have to strongly consider that no evidence of abuse was found
The point here is that according to the law, and according to the juror who posted here, people are to be imprisoned even when there is no abuse.
If someone takes a pair of scissors to a Sears catalog and cuts out the heads of children and glues them onto the bodies in a Playboy magazine, the law and this juror declare that a crime. Declare that men with guns shall arrest that person and imprison him for a decade or so, and after that decade in prison to then place him under a life sentence of tracing and varied restraints under the sex offender registries, and more specifically under the most extreme provisions of child predator sex offenses. For the crime of cutting up magazines and gluing them together to make offensive fiction images.
And obviously anyone who suggests we shouldn't do that, anyone who suggests that criminal laws and men with guns and prisons should only apply to actual physical criminal acts against actual children, well that person is defending pedophiles and they must be a pedophile as well, and it would be really swell if we could lock them in prison too just for suggesting such a thing.
-