So it blocks out all light from the stars behind it and somehow there are no stars in-front of it even though it's 500 LY away?
It's only half a light-year across. Given the distribution of stars near here, odds are it would have no more than one or two stars between here and there, and zero isn't terribly unlikely.
They went on to say that the US tanks were pretty useless against German tanks, and a German tank had little fear of damage unless hit by a lucky shot. The US tanks however could be everywhere and were effective against infantry. A single German tank could take out 20 or 30 US tanks if they were engaged, however after awhile the US figured this out and didn't engage them, tank on tank.
US tank doctrine in WW2 assumed tanks were intended to fight infantry and artillery. Which is why the Sherman was armed with that 75mm gun (which had a really great HE round).
The US intended for Tank Destroyers to fight German tanks. Unfortunately, the doctrine for use of the TDs required that they be used on the defensive. But the Germans were hardly ever on the offensive against the Amis, so that didn't work out so well.
Note that inability to make a good tank was not an issue in the USA. The Ordnance Department of the US Army spent the entire war designing better tanks, but couldn't get them accepted by the Armour Board, which didn't see much need for anything better.
Until the Battle of the Bulge...
The Battle of the Bulge finally broke the impasse between Ordnance and Armour Board, and got the M26 Pershing into the war. Which tank was at least as good as the Tiger, and better than any mark of T34.
Note, by the way, that one reason for the Armour Board refusing the M26 before the Bulge was that "tankers might use it to go hunting enemy tanks". Which was against Doctrine, and therefore a bad thing.
It should also be noted that as soon as American tankers got some M26s, well, they went hunting Tigers....
It should also be noted that the Sherman was roughly comparable to the T34/76. Better armour (yes, the Sherman had well-sloped armour like the T34, and unlike any German tanks before Panther and King Tiger), comparable gun, worse engine. The Sherman's turret layout was better than the T34's, and the provision of a radio in every Sherman more than compensated for the inferior engine (and therefore inferior mobility). Note that this is in not meant to imply that the Sherman was comparable to the T34/85. Which fixed most of the issues of the T34/76 (better gun, better turret layout, better armour, radio).
It is also an exaggeration to say that a single German tank was a match for 20-30 Shermans. Most German tanks were Pzkw IV, which were generally inferior to the Sherman. Panther was better than any Sherman variant other than the Sherman Firefly, but not overwhelmingly so. Tiger was comparable to Panther. King Tiger...that was the ballbreaker. King Tiger was overwhelmingly better than any version of Sherman. Legends (and that's all they are) about German tanks being worth 20-30 American tanks were based on the very few encounters between Shermans and King Tigers (only 487 built, and most were in the East).
You forget the USA wasn't at war at first. Had England been overcome in the early stages, it is unlikely the USA would ever have had the guts to take on Germany. As for Russia, they barely held on also, and probably wouldn't have without aid from the Allies (which wouldn't have existed at that point if England had been successfully invaded). True that Russia had some sweet tanks at the time, but they didn't have any good leaders. Stalin had purged the army and everyone from the grunt to the general were green.
Truly, if it hadn't been for England holding on in the Battle of Britain AND the Soviets holding on at Stalingrad, things might have been very different.
Stalingrad happened in the winter of 1942-43. USA was in the war by then.
In addition, Roosevelt had bent our neutrality laws out of shape before the USA entered the war, to the point that we were supplying both the UK and USSR with material long before we started shooting.
And note that Hitler had no real hope of invading England successfully. Examine the force required to invade France sometime. It's fairly safe to assume that the Germans would have required at least that much force to invade the UK (at least, since the Luftwaffe was not designed to provide the level of aerial support that we used, nor was the Kriegsmarine capable of providing the firesupport we provided with our Navy (much less what the Royal Navy brought to the Table for D-Day)), and there is no way in hell they could have built the ships required, much less the rest of it, unless they'd started in the early 30's.
Finally, it must be noted that lack of "guts" isn't why we didn't enter the war earlier. Lack if interest in what was, essentially, yet another European war was the issue. The assumption that the USA should have cared about border re-alignments in Europe for their own sake is just silly....
projections show that we will hit 1o billion by 2010.
Unlikely, since 2010 is seven months away, and we have less than 7 billion now.
Or did you mean 2050, as your source graph suggested? Note that increasing the population by about 50% in 40+ years is actually a pretty slow population growth rate.
Also, note that almost all the population growth expected in the next 40 years in the the so-called, "developing nations". Not the USA, not Europe. So, we've done our part on slowing population growth, talk to Africa and Asia and South America about them getting up to speed...
First, let me say that I've never heard about this before now, and have absolutely no opinion on whether it happened or not.
Most notable is the mixing of the innocent (plastic keys, children) with the taboo (clearing landmines by stepping on them).
It should be noted that in WW2, the Soviet Army believed that the fastest and most effective way to clear a minefield was to march a battalion across it. There generally aren't nearly as many mines in a minefield as an amateur might suspect, and you took far more casualties from artillery fire while you were pinned down waiting for sappers to clear a minefield.
Additionally, it should be noted that in any event the "children" are undisputedly over the age of 12, so we're not talking about elementary school aged kids that typically come to mind with the use of the word "children," but rather an age group that has traditionally been considered as adults up until (relatively) recently.
Interestingly, the gun control lobby in the USA does this when talking about "children killed by firearms" - their definition of "child" includes anyone up to the age of 21....
I'd love to see a standard measurement get used there...and honestly, not ONE of those measurements has any spacial familiarity in the US that people would need to get used to (people may know a foot when they see it, but they do not know a therm). The only one I am really OK with is the kWh because it is a sensible unit (and really only a time scale of joules=watt-seconds)
Note only do they not know a therm, they also never use one. Unless we're talking engineers, who not only use it, but they know it and can easily make the conversions.
Note that the KWh is basically a stupid unit. Use MJ instead (3.6 MJ per KWh), if you really want to do SI.
Not that people who use SI really use it properly, mind you. 20 cm? Should be 2 dm. 1000000 Km should be 1 Gm. If you're going to tout your perfect measurement system, at least use it correctly....
Besides, Hitler's advantage was the Blitzkrieg. He was too fast
Umm, no. The Blitzkrieg was dead by 1943. Alas, it couldn't function well without air superiority. Which the Germans didn't have anywhere after 1942.
Guderian wrote a book on Panzer warfare in the early 30's. It included a really insightful table listing engine production by the major powers, which Guderian considered to be the most obvious metric by which one could assess a nation's ability to fight effectively using AFVs properly.
He made the point that, at that time, Germany was comparable to its hypothetical enemies (UK, France, USSR, Germany, all had about 5% of the world's engine production at that time). But he also pointed out that the USA made 75% of the engines in the world....
It's easy to understand and far less easy to screw up when you're doing arithmetic on them.
Might be true if you use a slipstick or pen and paper to do your arithmetic. If, like most everyone, you use a calculator or computer, the ease of use argument vanishes. I can program in 12 inches per foot just as easily as 10 deciliters per liter.
I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
Not hardly, as Jacob McCandles would have said. The Germans biggest problem in the war wasn't their technology, it was their production. The USA built enough tanks that they could afford to give away more than the total German tank production. The Soviets built more tanks than the USA.
Airplanes, the USA built enough to give away more than the Germans made. The Soviets didn't build more than the USA, but they built nearly as many.
The USA built more ships than everyone else combined, much less the Germans.
And on and on like that. Nothing the Germans could have done would have mattered a hill of beans, really - the only way they could have won that war was if they'd started building up their industry to USA/USSR levels in the 20's.
And even then, their chances would have been slim at best - they didn't have the manpower to operate industry at our level and put 20 million men in the field at the same time.
Doesn't the constitution also describe a body or process that determines what is and isn't constitutional? If the Supreme Court says it's constitutional, then it's constitutional. Whether you agree with the Supreme Court or not isn't relevant.
Well, no.
The first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court pretty much declared that he had that power, and noone told him to pound sand.
In general, it works pretty well to have the Supremes as arbiters of what is and isn't Constitutional. But it is by no means carved in stone. Or even mentioned in the Constitution....
The American economy recovered from the great depression by draining UK's coffers via the lend-lease act.
We drained the UK's coffers by giving them hundreds of ships, thousands of planes and tanks, and megatons of food, fuel and ammunition?!
Somehow, I think not.
Though building them certainly got Americans employed again, the stuff the Brits got through lend-lease were paid for by US taxpayers, not by the British.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Would it still be a one minute flight if ALL the commuters you deal with every morning were in the air with you every morning?
Or is your assertion only true when you're the only guy with the flying car?
The Vandenburg has a draft of 24 feet. So the waterline should be 115 feet down. From pictures of the ship, it looks like the bridge is about 50 feet above the waterline, so the top of the wreck ought to be no more than 60 feet below the surface.
it realizes that the things it is killing are as sentient as itself.
But, they're NOT as sentient as itself.
Would you consider something as sentient as you if it took, say, 4 months to say "hello"?
The speed of thought difference between an AI and a human are more than sufficient to make the human look dumber (to the AI) than an ant looks to a human.
This ignoring in its entirety that the assumption that Christian virtues would apply to a created intelligence (no, there's nothing intrinsic in sapience to imply that a sapient being must empathize with any other sapient being).
I wonder, Europium being quite heavy and with radioactive isotopes, what pressure till you reach critical mass?
Neither of those qualities implies that Europium will fission.
As a minimum, it requires an isotope that emits neutrons, plus a large enough neutron-capture cross section. Neither of which Europium has.
So the answer is, if you can squeeze it hard enough (say, pressures similar to the core of the Sun), it might fuse (absorbing a moderately enormous amount of energy in the process), but otherwise, it has no "critical mass".
Social security is not federal income tax. That's why it's a separate line item on your pay stub, and it's not lumped into the general fund, unless you mean by the way the government lends social security funds to itself through treasury bonds.
No, it's not Federal Income Tax. It's Federal Social Security Tax. And it IS lumped into the General Fund. Note that the "treasury bonds" used to "pay back" the Social Security Trust Fund are ZERO INTEREST T-Bills. In other words, large denomination IOU's.
Consider a thought experiment: in 2016 (latest projection, it'll prolly be a year sooner, might be a year later), the Social Security outlays will exceed Social Security income. At that time, the Government will have to either increase Social Security taxes, or acquire the money some other way.
"Some other way" basically falls into two categories: Borrow more money, or redeem the Social Security Trust Fund. If we borrow more money to pay SS, then the national debt will increase.
On the other hand, if we redeem the Social Security Trust Fund...the national debt will increase. Because every one of those T-Bills will then have to be paid for by...borrowing more money.
Note that if we raise SS taxes, we effectively make the SS Trust Fund meaningless. A "Trust Fund" that is never used is the same as no Trust Fund.
If having a SS Trust Fund is exactly the same as NOT having one, then it's safe to assume it doesn't exist. Except as an accounting fiction.
Note, by the way, that the "deficit" as currently executed assumes the income from SS is tossed into the General Fund.
Note also that we do NOT account money owed by one department of the government to another department of the government as part of the "national debt".
So, come 2016, I expect we'll be raising Social Security taxes. Since the alternative is going to be increasingly large deficits stretching out into eternity.
On the other hand, I expect Obama won't want to preside over that particular decision, so it's possible they'll put it off until 2017, and leave the new President to take the blame.
How do you "spend" Social Security? We pay into Social Security, and we get money back out.
Well, no. We pay Social Security taxes, they're tossed into the General Fund like any other tax, and are spent like any other tax. Or do you perhaps believe in the Social Security Trust Fund?
If you add the DoD, nuclear arms spending in the DoE, and funding provided to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's one trillion dollars per year, according to official government sources.
Umm, no. You're quoting figures from Wikipedia, which is not an "official government source". You're also looking at the 2009 budget, which is rather larger than the 2008 budget, and in no way comprises "per year", except for the year 2009.
Note also that even is you assume that that figure was true every year, $1 trillion is only about 35% of the Federal budget. Still a long way from a majority of the budget. And since some of that trillion is extra-budgetary (specifically, the $170 billion for the wars), the $1 trillion should be rated against the total_budget+$170 billion, making the military portion smaller still (33% of the total spent).
And note finally that the DoD budget occasionally includes interesting things like funding for breast cancer research. It's always been a good place to get that little bit of your favorite earmark stashed so it won't get noticed. So not all the DoD budget is military in any case.
I say this because of this Rishathra thing indicates that the different hominids can't interbreed.
It was written a long time ago, by a physicist, not a biologist...
He was wrong about the Ringworld's stability, he was wrong about close passage by a Neutron Star, he can be wrong about different species interbreeding.
Note, for the record, that most of those hominids on the Ringworld diverged from Home Sapiens at the time of Homo Habilis, and diverged from each other on much the same time-scale. That's a long time to maintain the ability to interbreed.
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Lucky thing most hunting rifles are more powerful than any "assault weapon".
A .30-06 will go through any body armour worn today with no difficulty at all. And it's far from the most powerful hunting round in use in the USA.
We don't buy oil from Iraq. Mostly Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Nigeria.
Luckily, I do, after a quick Wikipedia check on the Sun...
Actually, that's 1.368 kW/m^2 in orbit. In the form of sunlight.
I presume you're surprised by now, since it's not, in fact, "a few (at least) orders of magnitude higher"?
It's only half a light-year across. Given the distribution of stars near here, odds are it would have no more than one or two stars between here and there, and zero isn't terribly unlikely.
US tank doctrine in WW2 assumed tanks were intended to fight infantry and artillery. Which is why the Sherman was armed with that 75mm gun (which had a really great HE round).
The US intended for Tank Destroyers to fight German tanks. Unfortunately, the doctrine for use of the TDs required that they be used on the defensive. But the Germans were hardly ever on the offensive against the Amis, so that didn't work out so well.
Note that inability to make a good tank was not an issue in the USA. The Ordnance Department of the US Army spent the entire war designing better tanks, but couldn't get them accepted by the Armour Board, which didn't see much need for anything better.
Until the Battle of the Bulge...
The Battle of the Bulge finally broke the impasse between Ordnance and Armour Board, and got the M26 Pershing into the war. Which tank was at least as good as the Tiger, and better than any mark of T34.
Note, by the way, that one reason for the Armour Board refusing the M26 before the Bulge was that "tankers might use it to go hunting enemy tanks". Which was against Doctrine, and therefore a bad thing.
It should also be noted that as soon as American tankers got some M26s, well, they went hunting Tigers....
It should also be noted that the Sherman was roughly comparable to the T34/76. Better armour (yes, the Sherman had well-sloped armour like the T34, and unlike any German tanks before Panther and King Tiger), comparable gun, worse engine. The Sherman's turret layout was better than the T34's, and the provision of a radio in every Sherman more than compensated for the inferior engine (and therefore inferior mobility). Note that this is in not meant to imply that the Sherman was comparable to the T34/85. Which fixed most of the issues of the T34/76 (better gun, better turret layout, better armour, radio).
It is also an exaggeration to say that a single German tank was a match for 20-30 Shermans. Most German tanks were Pzkw IV, which were generally inferior to the Sherman. Panther was better than any Sherman variant other than the Sherman Firefly, but not overwhelmingly so. Tiger was comparable to Panther. King Tiger...that was the ballbreaker. King Tiger was overwhelmingly better than any version of Sherman. Legends (and that's all they are) about German tanks being worth 20-30 American tanks were based on the very few encounters between Shermans and King Tigers (only 487 built, and most were in the East).
Stalingrad happened in the winter of 1942-43. USA was in the war by then.
In addition, Roosevelt had bent our neutrality laws out of shape before the USA entered the war, to the point that we were supplying both the UK and USSR with material long before we started shooting.
And note that Hitler had no real hope of invading England successfully. Examine the force required to invade France sometime. It's fairly safe to assume that the Germans would have required at least that much force to invade the UK (at least, since the Luftwaffe was not designed to provide the level of aerial support that we used, nor was the Kriegsmarine capable of providing the firesupport we provided with our Navy (much less what the Royal Navy brought to the Table for D-Day)), and there is no way in hell they could have built the ships required, much less the rest of it, unless they'd started in the early 30's.
Finally, it must be noted that lack of "guts" isn't why we didn't enter the war earlier. Lack if interest in what was, essentially, yet another European war was the issue. The assumption that the USA should have cared about border re-alignments in Europe for their own sake is just silly....
Unlikely, since 2010 is seven months away, and we have less than 7 billion now.
Or did you mean 2050, as your source graph suggested? Note that increasing the population by about 50% in 40+ years is actually a pretty slow population growth rate.
Also, note that almost all the population growth expected in the next 40 years in the the so-called, "developing nations". Not the USA, not Europe. So, we've done our part on slowing population growth, talk to Africa and Asia and South America about them getting up to speed...
First, let me say that I've never heard about this before now, and have absolutely no opinion on whether it happened or not.
It should be noted that in WW2, the Soviet Army believed that the fastest and most effective way to clear a minefield was to march a battalion across it. There generally aren't nearly as many mines in a minefield as an amateur might suspect, and you took far more casualties from artillery fire while you were pinned down waiting for sappers to clear a minefield.
Interestingly, the gun control lobby in the USA does this when talking about "children killed by firearms" - their definition of "child" includes anyone up to the age of 21....
Note only do they not know a therm, they also never use one. Unless we're talking engineers, who not only use it, but they know it and can easily make the conversions.
Note that the KWh is basically a stupid unit. Use MJ instead (3.6 MJ per KWh), if you really want to do SI.
Not that people who use SI really use it properly, mind you. 20 cm? Should be 2 dm. 1000000 Km should be 1 Gm. If you're going to tout your perfect measurement system, at least use it correctly....
Umm, no. The Blitzkrieg was dead by 1943. Alas, it couldn't function well without air superiority. Which the Germans didn't have anywhere after 1942.
Guderian wrote a book on Panzer warfare in the early 30's. It included a really insightful table listing engine production by the major powers, which Guderian considered to be the most obvious metric by which one could assess a nation's ability to fight effectively using AFVs properly.
He made the point that, at that time, Germany was comparable to its hypothetical enemies (UK, France, USSR, Germany, all had about 5% of the world's engine production at that time). But he also pointed out that the USA made 75% of the engines in the world....
One shot from that JS2, and BAM! That Tiger is on the ground.
Sorry, the myth of German superiority is a myth. When they invaded the USSR, the tanks they had were junk compared to the T34/76.
By the time the Germans had an effective counter to it, the Soviets had the T34/85.
By the end of the war, the new Soviet tanks (JS2 and JS3) were better than anything the Germans put in the field.
Might be true if you use a slipstick or pen and paper to do your arithmetic. If, like most everyone, you use a calculator or computer, the ease of use argument vanishes. I can program in 12 inches per foot just as easily as 10 deciliters per liter.
Not hardly, as Jacob McCandles would have said. The Germans biggest problem in the war wasn't their technology, it was their production. The USA built enough tanks that they could afford to give away more than the total German tank production. The Soviets built more tanks than the USA.
Airplanes, the USA built enough to give away more than the Germans made. The Soviets didn't build more than the USA, but they built nearly as many.
The USA built more ships than everyone else combined, much less the Germans.
And on and on like that. Nothing the Germans could have done would have mattered a hill of beans, really - the only way they could have won that war was if they'd started building up their industry to USA/USSR levels in the 20's.
And even then, their chances would have been slim at best - they didn't have the manpower to operate industry at our level and put 20 million men in the field at the same time.
Haven't seen a message header on /. in days. And I'm also using 3.0.10 on XP.
You can sell it for any price you care to name. The source, on the other hand, you're required to provide for reasonable distribution costs.
Well, no.
The first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court pretty much declared that he had that power, and noone told him to pound sand.
In general, it works pretty well to have the Supremes as arbiters of what is and isn't Constitutional. But it is by no means carved in stone. Or even mentioned in the Constitution....
We drained the UK's coffers by giving them hundreds of ships, thousands of planes and tanks, and megatons of food, fuel and ammunition?!
Somehow, I think not.
Though building them certainly got Americans employed again, the stuff the Brits got through lend-lease were paid for by US taxpayers, not by the British.
Would it still be a one minute flight if ALL the commuters you deal with every morning were in the air with you every morning?
Or is your assertion only true when you're the only guy with the flying car?
The Vandenburg has a draft of 24 feet. So the waterline should be 115 feet down. From pictures of the ship, it looks like the bridge is about 50 feet above the waterline, so the top of the wreck ought to be no more than 60 feet below the surface.
But, they're NOT as sentient as itself.
Would you consider something as sentient as you if it took, say, 4 months to say "hello"?
The speed of thought difference between an AI and a human are more than sufficient to make the human look dumber (to the AI) than an ant looks to a human.
This ignoring in its entirety that the assumption that Christian virtues would apply to a created intelligence (no, there's nothing intrinsic in sapience to imply that a sapient being must empathize with any other sapient being).
Neither of those qualities implies that Europium will fission.
As a minimum, it requires an isotope that emits neutrons, plus a large enough neutron-capture cross section. Neither of which Europium has.
So the answer is, if you can squeeze it hard enough (say, pressures similar to the core of the Sun), it might fuse (absorbing a moderately enormous amount of energy in the process), but otherwise, it has no "critical mass".
No, it's not Federal Income Tax. It's Federal Social Security Tax. And it IS lumped into the General Fund. Note that the "treasury bonds" used to "pay back" the Social Security Trust Fund are ZERO INTEREST T-Bills. In other words, large denomination IOU's.
Consider a thought experiment: in 2016 (latest projection, it'll prolly be a year sooner, might be a year later), the Social Security outlays will exceed Social Security income. At that time, the Government will have to either increase Social Security taxes, or acquire the money some other way.
"Some other way" basically falls into two categories: Borrow more money, or redeem the Social Security Trust Fund. If we borrow more money to pay SS, then the national debt will increase.
On the other hand, if we redeem the Social Security Trust Fund...the national debt will increase. Because every one of those T-Bills will then have to be paid for by...borrowing more money.
Note that if we raise SS taxes, we effectively make the SS Trust Fund meaningless. A "Trust Fund" that is never used is the same as no Trust Fund.
If having a SS Trust Fund is exactly the same as NOT having one, then it's safe to assume it doesn't exist. Except as an accounting fiction.
Note, by the way, that the "deficit" as currently executed assumes the income from SS is tossed into the General Fund.
Note also that we do NOT account money owed by one department of the government to another department of the government as part of the "national debt".
So, come 2016, I expect we'll be raising Social Security taxes. Since the alternative is going to be increasingly large deficits stretching out into eternity.
On the other hand, I expect Obama won't want to preside over that particular decision, so it's possible they'll put it off until 2017, and leave the new President to take the blame.
Well, no. We pay Social Security taxes, they're tossed into the General Fund like any other tax, and are spent like any other tax. Or do you perhaps believe in the Social Security Trust Fund?
Umm, no. You're quoting figures from Wikipedia, which is not an "official government source". You're also looking at the 2009 budget, which is rather larger than the 2008 budget, and in no way comprises "per year", except for the year 2009.
Note also that even is you assume that that figure was true every year, $1 trillion is only about 35% of the Federal budget. Still a long way from a majority of the budget. And since some of that trillion is extra-budgetary (specifically, the $170 billion for the wars), the $1 trillion should be rated against the total_budget+$170 billion, making the military portion smaller still (33% of the total spent).
And note finally that the DoD budget occasionally includes interesting things like funding for breast cancer research. It's always been a good place to get that little bit of your favorite earmark stashed so it won't get noticed. So not all the DoD budget is military in any case.
It was written a long time ago, by a physicist, not a biologist...
He was wrong about the Ringworld's stability, he was wrong about close passage by a Neutron Star, he can be wrong about different species interbreeding.
Note, for the record, that most of those hominids on the Ringworld diverged from Home Sapiens at the time of Homo Habilis, and diverged from each other on much the same time-scale. That's a long time to maintain the ability to interbreed.
I've never thought of the people shooting at me as "non-combatants"...