I believe the reason that the "name-calling" makes an assault a worse crime is that the intention of the attacker wasn't just to hurt the victim, but also to terrorize other people that are similar to the victim to some way, i.e. "I shot this person because he's X, and I may shoot one of you other X next".
So if I call someone a "dumb son of a bitch" before I shoot him, that means that pretty much every other "dumb son of a bitch" should be terrified that he's next? And would that be a "hate crime"? I suspect not, in both cases, since "hate crimes" don't seem to be about "hate" so much as "perceived racism". Not the same thing at all.
That may be the reasoning behind "hate crimes", but it's a stupid one. I can just as easily shoot some guy without shouting , even if I hate his guts.
Note, by the by, that I generally don't shoot people I like, so it can safely be assumed that there is some element of "hate" in any....
I don't know if you could consider this is part of the ring system around Saturn due to the fact that is start around 3.7 millions miles away from the planet and stretched out to its furthest at 7.4 millions miles; I'm not an astronomer by any means but I would consider this and asteroid belt of some sort; Saturn gravitation pulled cannot be that strong holding materials that far away.
Gravitational pull by Saturn at a distance of 7.4 million miles: ~0.275 mm/s^2.
Gravitational pull by Sol at the nearest point in those rings (7.4 million miles closer than Saturn's perihelion): 0/075 mm/s^2.
So, yes, Saturn exerts almost four times more force on the particles of this new ring than the Sun does. And this assuming the most favourable case for the sun, and the least favourable for Saturn.
The economy runs on work, any kind of work will do. It might mean some businesses fall while others are created, but that's how capitalism works.
No.
While it is true that most any kind of work will do, not all kinds of work will do. Useless work is, well, useless.
If any kind of work will do to make our economy function, then paying people to dig holes in their front yards every morning and fill them in every afternoon could make us all millionaires.
All other things being equal (and they seldom are), doing two hours of work to accomplish what used to be accomplished in one hour will lower standards of living, not raise them.
Nearly every civilization has fallen, which usually meant the death of > 99% of it's people.
No.
While it is true that many civilizations have "fallen", in almost no cases were those falls accompanies by loss of 99% of the people of those civilizations.
Note also that your definitions of "civilization" are largely arbitrary, and designed to support your conclusion. Lumping the various European civilizations together into one "Western Christian civilization" is misleading, at the least.
That's probably correct, I'm sure saving the lives of Japanese civilians did not factor into US war plans either.
We actually made an effort to save the Japanese civilians on Guam and Okinawa, futile though that effort was. So it's unlikely that our war plans didn't at least take into account the problem of preserving as much of the civilian population as was feasible, given the constraint that we weren't going to risk our soldiers' lives to preserve more Japanese civilians....
A much better solution would have been a blockade of Japan, with a low intensity bombing campaign. Japan would have never recovered and would have surrendered eventually, with much less loss of life than two nuclear attacks.
More people would have starved in Japan if we'd enforced a blockade through the end of 1946 than were killed in the Atomic Bombing of Japan.
More people were killed in one night in Tokyo during the conventional bombing than were killed by both Bombs.
The USA used the Bomb to avoid having Japan surrender to the Russians, who were about to become the enemy as soon as the second world war ended.
Alas, the war in Europe had ended three months earlier, and the Soviets showed no real interest in fighting the Japanese.
They did join in right after the Bombs were dropped, to have a place at the table when discussing the peace (sort of like the Italians did in 1940 in France), but if we'd not popped off those bombs, the Soviets would have (quite sensibly) stuck to their treaty with Japan and not intervened.
Actually, everyone who did "Federal Service" got to vote. The military was only one part of Federal Service.
Exactly so. Point was made in the book that few people who volunteered were in the military, and not even many of were in combat.
Personally, I like the idea of making people do, say, 2 years of federal service.
Whoosh.
Missed the boat completely on that one. Service in Starship Troopers was entirely voluntary. Because, as the author points out, you cannot instill a social conscience on someone by force.
I'd rather have ten cops that are doing it because they think it's the right thing to do than a hundred doing it because they're required to do it by law (or any other reason)....
I've never been able to figure out why these two completely different genres are always lumped together? Fantasy fiction almost always takes plece in the past, science fiction almost always takes place in the future. Fantasy deals with magic, scifi deals with science and technology.
I don't get it, unless it's that to so many people, technology IS magic. Since it isn't really, why do literature teachers lump the two together?
Mostly it's because both of them are a mirror of ourselves, using unreality to disguise the mirror.
Also, one must remember Clarke's Law - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (and it's corollary, "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" - note Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson).
And come to that, let's include some Poul Anderson. "The Man Who Counts", as a minimum, plus "Operation Chaos", "Mirkheim", and "The Avatar" if possible. And "A Midsummer's Tempest" for extra credit....
I think Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game would also make my list, it's I think the same topic as Starship Troopers, I haven't read that book, only seen the movie.
I agree that Ender's Game should be included.
But if all you know about Starship Troopers is the movie, then all you know is the title. Note that genocide wasn't even an issue in Starship Troopers the book.
The only way to use the A-bomb is to kill civilans en masse. Theres no military use of an A-bomb without 99% civil casualties.
Well, no.
During the Cold War period, the overwhelming majority of the nuclear weapons were targetted on the other side's nuclear weapons.
Which, oddly enough, were generally kept out in the boonies far from civilian populations.
Sure, there were Bombs targetted at command and control centers, and those tended to be in places that had civilians all around, but even if every command and control center in the USA were obliterated, there'd not have been more than 30% civilian casualties.
Now, one must, of course, keep in mind that 30% civilian casualties is horrendous. It would probably cause a complete breakdown of society above the local level....
In that war, Israel threatened to use nuclear weapons as a last resort, causing the US to send aid to make sure the war didn't reach that point.
They certainly suggested that they'd use their nuclear arsenal if needed.
But, the aid the USA sent was meaningless, except as a morale booster. The Israelis shot away more ordnance in the first few hours of the war than we were able to send them in the way of "aid".
Yeah, if the war had gone on for a few months, we could have (and would have) sent them enough aid to sink the entire country. But what we actually sent before peace was declared was a few planeloads of ordnance (and you fight wars with shiploads of ordnance, not planeloads).
it was just to show off (and then killing millions of people).
Umm, no.
The USA used the Bomb to avoid killing millions of people. Instead, we killed a couple hundred thousand between the two Bombs (we killed more people bombing Tokyo than both Bombs killed), and saved a few million of our own people (sorry, in the calculus of war, casualties on your side count for more than casualties on the other side).
As well as saving the millions of Japanese that would have been killed if we'd invaded the Home Islands. Not, I think, that we had nearly as much interest in saving Japanese civilians as in saving the lives of the American soldiers who would've died in an invasion.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any Repubs who really wanted the Olympics in Chicago, and the only Dems I can think of who did want it there were Obama and Daley and the Chicago Machine.
Of course, but without the "nigger" my example wouldn't necessarily be a hate crime, which was the point of the example.
My point was that the "hate" element is meaningless, since the act (hitting someone) produces the crime, and the act (hitting someone) is a crime, with or without the hate (calling someone names) being added to the mix.
Making an act (hitting someone) a worse crime if it is accompanied by name-calling seems perilously close to a First Amendment violation.
Note, by the by, that name-calling can, in certain circumstances, be a crime in itself (libel or slander are really nothing more than name-calling in public). In the case where the name-calling is a crime, hitting someone in addition produces two crimes....
Basically I understand that shouting "nigger" and hitting a black person is illegal,
Note, by the way, that hitting a black person without shouting "nigger" is illegal.
Come to that, hitting anyone, whether or not you shout "nigger" is illegal, no matter the race creed, color or national origin of your chosen punching bag. It's called "battery"....
Are you factoring in the cost of the exploration, drilling, pipelines, refineries, service stations and pollution to your £1 per litre
Well, unless someone is working at a loss somewhere along the way, then cost per litre gives a pretty good picture of total cost to produce (plus taxes and profits), including exploration, drilling, pipelines, refineries, etc....
Yes, I believe there are safe texting while driving scenarios
No, there are not. Please provide these "scenarios" or STFU.
I was once on a highway that ran straight for about 70 miles. Didn't see a single other vehicle in that whole stretch. I imagine it would have been pretty safe to text there.
Not that I'd know for sure, since I don't bother texting anyway....
There are many stories of soldiers on both sides of the American civil war putting down their guns on Christmas and socializing, just to go back to killing each other the next day. You don't have to know the person as an individual- if you connect culturally you already know them fairly well without having to talk to him.
World War One as well. The events of Christmas 1914 are something everyone should read about, if you'd like to know more about the nature of humans and war.
While these things don't always hold true, they are mostly true. If a company had to screen non-degree candidates for positions, it would take much, much longer and be a more complicated process - meaning HR costs would go up.
It would be an illegal process. Using tests to determine basic such things went out when it was determined that minorities didn't pass such tests at the same rates that whites did. So companies started to require HS diplomas and College degrees as a substitute for the tests that they had formerly done.
Increasingly, of course, they require college degrees, since a high school diploma increasingly means nothing at all....
Iran is huge and ancient. Iraq similar. North Korea is smaller (though still bigger than countries like Austria) so I guess that's what you had in mind.
Alaska is bigger than Iran.
Alaska and Texas are both bigger than Iraq.
We have 33 States that are larger than North Korea.
From the American perspective, they're all small countries.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I call someone a "dumb son of a bitch" before I shoot him, that means that pretty much every other "dumb son of a bitch" should be terrified that he's next? And would that be a "hate crime"? I suspect not, in both cases, since "hate crimes" don't seem to be about "hate" so much as "perceived racism". Not the same thing at all.
That may be the reasoning behind "hate crimes", but it's a stupid one. I can just as easily shoot some guy without shouting , even if I hate his guts.
Note, by the by, that I generally don't shoot people I like, so it can safely be assumed that there is some element of "hate" in any ....
Gravitational pull by Saturn at a distance of 7.4 million miles: ~0.275 mm/s^2.
Gravitational pull by Sol at the nearest point in those rings (7.4 million miles closer than Saturn's perihelion): 0/075 mm/s^2.
So, yes, Saturn exerts almost four times more force on the particles of this new ring than the Sun does. And this assuming the most favourable case for the sun, and the least favourable for Saturn.
No.
While it is true that most any kind of work will do, not all kinds of work will do. Useless work is, well, useless.
If any kind of work will do to make our economy function, then paying people to dig holes in their front yards every morning and fill them in every afternoon could make us all millionaires.
All other things being equal (and they seldom are), doing two hours of work to accomplish what used to be accomplished in one hour will lower standards of living, not raise them.
No.
While it is true that many civilizations have "fallen", in almost no cases were those falls accompanies by loss of 99% of the people of those civilizations.
Note also that your definitions of "civilization" are largely arbitrary, and designed to support your conclusion. Lumping the various European civilizations together into one "Western Christian civilization" is misleading, at the least.
Article says that even the designer of the group theory based one doesn't know if it has any predictive power.
Which makes me doubt seriously that it'll ever be worthwhile - comes across as back of the napkin engineering, not a real effort at improvement.
We actually made an effort to save the Japanese civilians on Guam and Okinawa, futile though that effort was. So it's unlikely that our war plans didn't at least take into account the problem of preserving as much of the civilian population as was feasible, given the constraint that we weren't going to risk our soldiers' lives to preserve more Japanese civilians....
More people would have starved in Japan if we'd enforced a blockade through the end of 1946 than were killed in the Atomic Bombing of Japan.
More people were killed in one night in Tokyo during the conventional bombing than were killed by both Bombs.
Alas, the war in Europe had ended three months earlier, and the Soviets showed no real interest in fighting the Japanese.
They did join in right after the Bombs were dropped, to have a place at the table when discussing the peace (sort of like the Italians did in 1940 in France), but if we'd not popped off those bombs, the Soviets would have (quite sensibly) stuck to their treaty with Japan and not intervened.
Exactly so. Point was made in the book that few people who volunteered were in the military, and not even many of were in combat.
Whoosh.
Missed the boat completely on that one. Service in Starship Troopers was entirely voluntary. Because, as the author points out, you cannot instill a social conscience on someone by force.
I'd rather have ten cops that are doing it because they think it's the right thing to do than a hundred doing it because they're required to do it by law (or any other reason)....
Mostly it's because both of them are a mirror of ourselves, using unreality to disguise the mirror.
Also, one must remember Clarke's Law - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (and it's corollary, "Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" - note Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson).
And come to that, let's include some Poul Anderson. "The Man Who Counts", as a minimum, plus "Operation Chaos", "Mirkheim", and "The Avatar" if possible. And "A Midsummer's Tempest" for extra credit....
I agree that Ender's Game should be included.
But if all you know about Starship Troopers is the movie, then all you know is the title. Note that genocide wasn't even an issue in Starship Troopers the book.
Well, no.
During the Cold War period, the overwhelming majority of the nuclear weapons were targetted on the other side's nuclear weapons.
Which, oddly enough, were generally kept out in the boonies far from civilian populations.
Sure, there were Bombs targetted at command and control centers, and those tended to be in places that had civilians all around, but even if every command and control center in the USA were obliterated, there'd not have been more than 30% civilian casualties.
Now, one must, of course, keep in mind that 30% civilian casualties is horrendous. It would probably cause a complete breakdown of society above the local level....
They certainly suggested that they'd use their nuclear arsenal if needed.
But, the aid the USA sent was meaningless, except as a morale booster. The Israelis shot away more ordnance in the first few hours of the war than we were able to send them in the way of "aid".
Yeah, if the war had gone on for a few months, we could have (and would have) sent them enough aid to sink the entire country. But what we actually sent before peace was declared was a few planeloads of ordnance (and you fight wars with shiploads of ordnance, not planeloads).
Umm, no.
The USA used the Bomb to avoid killing millions of people. Instead, we killed a couple hundred thousand between the two Bombs (we killed more people bombing Tokyo than both Bombs killed), and saved a few million of our own people (sorry, in the calculus of war, casualties on your side count for more than casualties on the other side).
As well as saving the millions of Japanese that would have been killed if we'd invaded the Home Islands. Not, I think, that we had nearly as much interest in saving Japanese civilians as in saving the lives of the American soldiers who would've died in an invasion.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any Repubs who really wanted the Olympics in Chicago, and the only Dems I can think of who did want it there were Obama and Daley and the Chicago Machine.
Of course, we're not talking about a local subway trip, we're talking an 800 mile trip.
My point was that the "hate" element is meaningless, since the act (hitting someone) produces the crime, and the act (hitting someone) is a crime, with or without the hate (calling someone names) being added to the mix.
Making an act (hitting someone) a worse crime if it is accompanied by name-calling seems perilously close to a First Amendment violation.
Note, by the by, that name-calling can, in certain circumstances, be a crime in itself (libel or slander are really nothing more than name-calling in public). In the case where the name-calling is a crime, hitting someone in addition produces two crimes....
No. A typical not-terribly-large American car (my Buick) has about a 64 liter tank.
And gets better than 12 km/l.
Note, by the way, that hitting a black person without shouting "nigger" is illegal.
Come to that, hitting anyone, whether or not you shout "nigger" is illegal, no matter the race creed, color or national origin of your chosen punching bag. It's called "battery"....
Well, unless someone is working at a loss somewhere along the way, then cost per litre gives a pretty good picture of total cost to produce (plus taxes and profits), including exploration, drilling, pipelines, refineries, etc....
I was once on a highway that ran straight for about 70 miles. Didn't see a single other vehicle in that whole stretch. I imagine it would have been pretty safe to text there.
Not that I'd know for sure, since I don't bother texting anyway....
World War One as well. The events of Christmas 1914 are something everyone should read about, if you'd like to know more about the nature of humans and war.
It would be an illegal process. Using tests to determine basic such things went out when it was determined that minorities didn't pass such tests at the same rates that whites did. So companies started to require HS diplomas and College degrees as a substitute for the tests that they had formerly done.
Increasingly, of course, they require college degrees, since a high school diploma increasingly means nothing at all....
Laser weapons. It specifically bans laser weapons where the primary purpose is permanently blinding people.
Oddly, it doesn't ban laser weapons where the primary purpose is killing people.
Alaska is bigger than Iran.
Alaska and Texas are both bigger than Iraq.
We have 33 States that are larger than North Korea.
From the American perspective, they're all small countries.