So apex predator/prey relationship is ok between different species as well as different alien races. What about different groups of humans?
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." -- Thucydides
How many rat deaths exactly is a person walking again worth? A million? Could you stomach the hundred thousand gallons of blood flowing from the chopping block, knowing it was saving someone's mobility?
You exaggerate, a rat has nowhere near a pint of blood in him. Probably not more than ten thousand gallons, tops.
Are you sure you're comfortable with the ramifications of throwing out a number like one human life = 1 million rat lives?
Yes, in fact I am.
You know, the only reason it's not the other way around (1 million human lives for 1 rat life) is because we're the apex predators with the cages and the needles and the power. But what if some alien civilization more intelligent than us needs a million human lives to save one of theirs?... fair?
"Fair" has nothing to do with it. We're the apex predator, and all those prey animals will just have to suck it up.
And if some alien civilization wanders in and displaces us as the apex predator in these parts, we'll just have to suck it up too.
Ah, but you do remember the accidental deployment, for which that top officer was fired over?
Yep. Too bad moving one from place to place (even by "accident") doesn't cause massive loss of life - it would be easier to be terrified of the things if it did.
Majority of citizens in almost every country now face innumerable problems due to the 'anti terrorist' agenda of their governments.
Hate to break it to you, but the "majority of citizens" don't even notice the "anti terrorist agenda".
Sure, a lot of people are inconvenienced when they get on airplanes. But that's not most of us - I've been on a plane maybe a dozen times in this century, my wife maybe twice, my daughter maybe once. My parents? Zero. My brothers and their wives? Zero. Ants, Uncles, Cousins? I can think of one who was on a plane once or twice this century.
Other than that, I can't think of much that affects even a significant fraction of the citizenry, much less a majority of citizens. I'm far more affected by which roads are under repair in any given week than I am by the "anti terrorist agenda" of my government.
It's funny that they have so much vigilance, but they can't stop billions of euros illegally leaving the US and European economies towards fiscal havens where they pay no taxes and there's no accountability whatsoever.
Legally. The correct word is "legally", not "illegally". Just because you disapprove of something doesn't make it a crime. Any more than GWB or BO disapproving of things makes those things crimes.
People get in hysterics about nuclear weapons not because the risk is high, but because the impact is.
True enough. There are, after all, a lot of very stupid people in the world.
In security, we use a calculation that goes something like this: Annualized loss expectancy is equal to likelihood times impact. Now, if you take that calculation for something like "getting hit by a bus", the impact is generally one person's life, so the likelihood has to be insanely high (call it 25000 percent?) if it's going to match the ALE of a nuclear weapon going off with a likelihood of 1%.
While it is impossible to actually evaluate the possibility of an "unintentional" detonation of a nuclear weapon, we can make some reasonable stabs at it, I expect.
There have been more than 10,000 such weapons in existence for the last 40 years. A great deal more than 10,000 for most of that time, but we'll use the smaller figure. None of them have detonated.
Admittedly, we might have been lucky. Let's arbitrarily assume that there has been a 50-50 chance of an unintentional detonation of any of those 10,000 warheads over the 40 year span that they've existed (yes, there were more at one time, yes, most of the existing ones haven't actually existed for the last 40 years - they're replaced from time to time).
So, pulling out my little number cruncher, looks like the chance of an unintentional detonation in any given year is (rather arbitrarily set high to) about 1.7%. Total. Per bomb, the chance would be 0.0002%.
Now, considering where the bombs are parked (most of the American warheads are parked in the middle of nowhere, for instance. I can't say where the USSR kept its bombs, or where Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, North Korea keep their bombs), the expected casualties per unintentional detonation would be on the order of two (or 170 per year for the whole arsenal).
Now, actually, the numbers are a bit better than that. Most of the bombs aren't actually stored somewhere where 10,000 people would die if one went off. And there have actually been far more than 10,000 bombs in existence for most of the last 40 years, so the chances of any one blowing up must be much lower than I've guesstimated for us to have a 50-50 chance of a detonation in the last forty years.
Plus, of course, I don't really believe that we've just gotten lucky on a flip of the coin over the last forty years. I think the actual chance of an unintentional detonation over the last forty years has been a great deal lower than 50-50.
Which would suggest that a rational mind would have to conclude that the presence of a few thousand nuclear weapons are essentially far less a threat than the presence of the automobile (which actually kills hundreds of thousands per year, rather than the expected couple hundred, or the actual zero, of nuclear weapons).
In other words, people need to stop hyperventilating at the thought of the existence of nuclear weapons. They'd be better off worrying about being struck by lightning....
Yes, the overreaction to the word "nuclear" among supposedly intelligent and well-educated people continues to bug the crap out of me on a daily basis....
Sure, but submarines are not totally safe. Lets say a group of people manage to board the ship and with some aid from some crew, hey, they have 160 nukes that can reach pretty much an entire continent or more.
Of course, unless one of the "some of the crew" include the Captain, they can't actually arm the weapons. And if they have the captain, well, there are other people they have to have, any one of which can make the weapons unusable.
Plus, of course, the boats with the missiles are either underwater (and therefore the "group of people" can't reach it to take it over), or tied up alongside a subtender full of sailors and marines, in a port full of sailors and marines, all of whom have a very bad attitude about the notion of stealing a boomer.
Or lets say two subs manage to crash into each other as had previously happened ( http://i.gizmodo.com/5154315/two-nuclear-submarines-collide-in-the-atlantic [gizmodo.com] ) and lets say for some reason some safety measures failed and if this happens in a populated area it becomes another Chernobyl even with an incomplete detonation.
Aside from this being impossible (there is no scenario where an "incomplete detonation" can occur - nukes have been present on aircraft that crashed without doing anything other than laying there), there aren't actually too many "populated areas" in the middle of the ocean where these boats spend their time.
The USSR is no longer in power, and a nuke or two is all it takes to neutralize any potential other nuclear threat from a non-stable nation, so why risk it?
Because the USSR isn't the only threat conceivable. It never was, and never will be.
This ignoring the fact that there has never been an accidental detonation of a nuclear device, in ANY of the nuclear powers. So why assume that the risk is meaningful?
Hard to say what similar performance capability would be.
Well, they seem to think that 100 mph and 200 mile range qualifies it as having "similar performance capability".
While I don't doubt that 100 mph top speed is "similar" to most gasoline cars, I can't imagine a gasoline car made in the last couple decades that only gets 200 miles per tank of gas. Even Hummers do better than that.
It was the other way around. The Normans invaded in 1066 and annexed England. After that, things got complicated.
Not all that complicated. When Norman Willie died, he gave his eldest Normandy, since that was the valuable part of his lands, and left England for a younger son.
Because, after all, England wasn't really worth giving to your primary heir...;)
Remember, it's standing in the Gulf of Mexico so be sure to design for the storms that blow through there from time to time and a long life standing in seawater.
I'm sure if the design works in the North Atlantic, it'll work in the much milder weather of the Gulf.
Katrina was Cat 5 while it was in the Gulf. So was Rita. I take it you have a lot of those in the North Atlantic?
He did underestimate the size of the Earth and thus the length of his journey, even though Eratosthenes [wikipedia.org] had calculated it to reasonable accuracy more than 17 centuries earlier.
I suspect he knew perfectly well how big the Earth was. But telling the Queen of Spain that he intended to cross 12,000 miles of ocean to get to India would have gotten him laughed at.
So he lied, to get funding. Hmm, sounds like some startups I've heard of....
Americans have the most criminal society on the planet, what with having more than China. Somebody should just lock everyone in that country up and be done with it.
We have more than China because China is more willing to just shoot them rather than locking them up....
Yeah, except they often referred to them as "computers". At least until the "electronic" variety became popular.
No, back in the slide rule days, a "computer" was a woman who did your calculations for you by hand. After you'd roughed out the figures with a slide rule, you handed the problem to the "computers", who would do the calculations exactly...
I don't know about you, but if *I* went to Mars, I'd sure as hell want to come back to Earth afterwards. So let's say 180 days there + 180 days return = basically one entire year spent in transit.
About that. With about 1.5 years on Mars between the going and the returning.
Nice test, but of course a Hohmann trajectory to Mars takes nine months-- 275 days, not 105.
True enough. However, the most likely trajectory will be an Earth-return trajectory, so that they'll come back here if something goes wrong along the way. Which is only 180 days long.
So they made it MORE than halfway before they exited the spacecraft, not less than halfway...
Note, by the way, that some of the crews of Mir spent six months on Mir, which is smaller than a Mars craft is likely to be.
just think a nuclear power plant about the size of two shipping containers could manage an entire city or burrough,
No. It couldn't.
Even the generators for an entire city are larger than that physically, much less the nuclear reactor, much less the steam generators, much less the cooling towers, much less the control systems for same.
Yes but what makes you think wind power could ever take a 'significant' chunk of energy out of the atmosphere? A windmill only takes a tiny fraction of the energy out of the wind that moves through the area described by its rotation. The wind passing through that area is a tiny, tiny fraction of the atmosphere energy that passes over the windmill. You could cover the earth with wind farms, and you'd be taking a tiny, tiny fraction of the atmosphere's energy.
All true. On the other hand, the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere has changed the atmospheric composition by a tiny fraction, and look where that's gotten us.
Personally, I doubt there'll be big problems with wind power, or solar power. Or Nuclear power. But, fact is, we won't know till we try it....
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"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." -- Thucydides
And neither did I....
You exaggerate, a rat has nowhere near a pint of blood in him. Probably not more than ten thousand gallons, tops.
Yes, in fact I am.
"Fair" has nothing to do with it. We're the apex predator, and all those prey animals will just have to suck it up.
And if some alien civilization wanders in and displaces us as the apex predator in these parts, we'll just have to suck it up too.
Yep. Too bad moving one from place to place (even by "accident") doesn't cause massive loss of life - it would be easier to be terrified of the things if it did.
No, that was Tamboura, as I recall.
Hate to break it to you, but the "majority of citizens" don't even notice the "anti terrorist agenda".
Sure, a lot of people are inconvenienced when they get on airplanes. But that's not most of us - I've been on a plane maybe a dozen times in this century, my wife maybe twice, my daughter maybe once. My parents? Zero. My brothers and their wives? Zero. Ants, Uncles, Cousins? I can think of one who was on a plane once or twice this century.
Other than that, I can't think of much that affects even a significant fraction of the citizenry, much less a majority of citizens. I'm far more affected by which roads are under repair in any given week than I am by the "anti terrorist agenda" of my government.
Legally. The correct word is "legally", not "illegally". Just because you disapprove of something doesn't make it a crime. Any more than GWB or BO disapproving of things makes those things crimes.
In cash. You forgot that key qualifier. Not sure I've ever had $10000 in cash, myself.
Note also that that's some of the money-laundering rules that have been in effect for decades.
And note finally that the $10000 has been lowered. I think it's $5000 now.
True enough. There are, after all, a lot of very stupid people in the world.
While it is impossible to actually evaluate the possibility of an "unintentional" detonation of a nuclear weapon, we can make some reasonable stabs at it, I expect.
There have been more than 10,000 such weapons in existence for the last 40 years. A great deal more than 10,000 for most of that time, but we'll use the smaller figure. None of them have detonated.
Admittedly, we might have been lucky. Let's arbitrarily assume that there has been a 50-50 chance of an unintentional detonation of any of those 10,000 warheads over the 40 year span that they've existed (yes, there were more at one time, yes, most of the existing ones haven't actually existed for the last 40 years - they're replaced from time to time).
So, pulling out my little number cruncher, looks like the chance of an unintentional detonation in any given year is (rather arbitrarily set high to) about 1.7%. Total. Per bomb, the chance would be 0.0002%.
Now, considering where the bombs are parked (most of the American warheads are parked in the middle of nowhere, for instance. I can't say where the USSR kept its bombs, or where Russia, China, United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, North Korea keep their bombs), the expected casualties per unintentional detonation would be on the order of two (or 170 per year for the whole arsenal).
Now, actually, the numbers are a bit better than that. Most of the bombs aren't actually stored somewhere where 10,000 people would die if one went off. And there have actually been far more than 10,000 bombs in existence for most of the last 40 years, so the chances of any one blowing up must be much lower than I've guesstimated for us to have a 50-50 chance of a detonation in the last forty years.
Plus, of course, I don't really believe that we've just gotten lucky on a flip of the coin over the last forty years. I think the actual chance of an unintentional detonation over the last forty years has been a great deal lower than 50-50.
Which would suggest that a rational mind would have to conclude that the presence of a few thousand nuclear weapons are essentially far less a threat than the presence of the automobile (which actually kills hundreds of thousands per year, rather than the expected couple hundred, or the actual zero, of nuclear weapons).
In other words, people need to stop hyperventilating at the thought of the existence of nuclear weapons. They'd be better off worrying about being struck by lightning....
Yes, the overreaction to the word "nuclear" among supposedly intelligent and well-educated people continues to bug the crap out of me on a daily basis....
You must have missed the keyword "only"....
As opposed, say, to the "tactical nuclear weapons" that we've had since the 60's? Or don't you remember Atomic Annie?
And the Pershing missile?
And....
Of course, unless one of the "some of the crew" include the Captain, they can't actually arm the weapons. And if they have the captain, well, there are other people they have to have, any one of which can make the weapons unusable.
Plus, of course, the boats with the missiles are either underwater (and therefore the "group of people" can't reach it to take it over), or tied up alongside a subtender full of sailors and marines, in a port full of sailors and marines, all of whom have a very bad attitude about the notion of stealing a boomer.
Aside from this being impossible (there is no scenario where an "incomplete detonation" can occur - nukes have been present on aircraft that crashed without doing anything other than laying there), there aren't actually too many "populated areas" in the middle of the ocean where these boats spend their time.
Because the USSR isn't the only threat conceivable. It never was, and never will be.
This ignoring the fact that there has never been an accidental detonation of a nuclear device, in ANY of the nuclear powers. So why assume that the risk is meaningful?
He didn't. Euthanasia is allowed there, if your doctor doesn't think your "quality of life" will be high enough.
Well, they seem to think that 100 mph and 200 mile range qualifies it as having "similar performance capability".
While I don't doubt that 100 mph top speed is "similar" to most gasoline cars, I can't imagine a gasoline car made in the last couple decades that only gets 200 miles per tank of gas. Even Hummers do better than that.
What about this?
all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts
Seems to me that suggests it should have greater performance than it does. 200 mile range? I can manage about 500 in my Buick...
Not all that complicated. When Norman Willie died, he gave his eldest Normandy, since that was the valuable part of his lands, and left England for a younger son.
Because, after all, England wasn't really worth giving to your primary heir...;)
Katrina was Cat 5 while it was in the Gulf. So was Rita. I take it you have a lot of those in the North Atlantic?
Columbus was from Genoa (probably), which was an Italian city-state. So he almost certainly was Italian.
We have more than China because China is more willing to just shoot them rather than locking them up....
No, back in the slide rule days, a "computer" was a woman who did your calculations for you by hand. After you'd roughed out the figures with a slide rule, you handed the problem to the "computers", who would do the calculations exactly...
Alaska is 1,717,854 km^2. Texas doesn't come close to being "a little more than half the size of the largest, Alaska".
Says the Sourdough....
About that. With about 1.5 years on Mars between the going and the returning.
True enough. However, the most likely trajectory will be an Earth-return trajectory, so that they'll come back here if something goes wrong along the way. Which is only 180 days long.
So they made it MORE than halfway before they exited the spacecraft, not less than halfway...
Note, by the way, that some of the crews of Mir spent six months on Mir, which is smaller than a Mars craft is likely to be.
No. It couldn't.
Even the generators for an entire city are larger than that physically, much less the nuclear reactor, much less the steam generators, much less the cooling towers, much less the control systems for same.
All true. On the other hand, the CO2 we've pumped into the atmosphere has changed the atmospheric composition by a tiny fraction, and look where that's gotten us.
Personally, I doubt there'll be big problems with wind power, or solar power. Or Nuclear power. But, fact is, we won't know till we try it....