It does neither. "Hollywood", for lack of a better term, is a business. Pretty much everything they do is predicated on making money, like any other business.
Let's see if you're right.
According to OpenSecrets.org, Obama got $8,599,038 from the "TV/movies/music" industry.
Clinton for $3,320,048 from the same source.
McCain got %1,105,150 from them.
So, "Hollywood" gave the two major Democrat contenders over ten times as much as they gave the major Republican contender. And even the number two Dem got three times as much as the number one Rep (and more than ALL Republican candidates combined), much less the number one candidate (who, incidently, got almost twice as much as all other candidates (Republican and Democrat) combined.
Yes, if you include ALL of the candidates, Hollywood only gave the Dems about six times as much as they gave Reps. But even a six to one ratio suggests some slight bias in favour of one side or the other, don't you think?
Scalia voted to uphold the federal government's prerogative to go after medical consumers of homegrown pot, on the grounds that this activity supposedly affects interstate commerce. This ruling prompted Thomas to note in a caustic dissent, "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything--and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."
Note, for the record, that the government gave itself this power in FDR's administration, when it successfully prosecuted a farmer for growing feed for his own livestock.
In other words, be careful about wishing that the government had the power to do something you want them to do, because they may later come back and use the same excuse to do something you don't want them to do.
A technicality of the law. It is still treason by definition.
No, actually it's not. The Constitution very carefully defines treason. Giving aid and comfort to our ENEMIES is treason. Doing so to our allies isn't.
Is it sufficient reason to kick her out of the House? Yep. Send her to prison? Yep.
But you won't send her to prison on treason charges. Any shyster can get you off on those charges, with just a copy of the Constitution....
(A) What is the maximum acceleration that the human body can withstand?
Who cares, we're not going to be accelerating at much more than 1g in any case, and probably a great deal less.
(B) At that acceleration, how long does it take to reach a significant fraction of c?
0.95c is about turnover speed for a 1g trip to Alpha Centauri. It'll take about 21 months to reach that speed, and another 21 months to stop. So Alpha Centauri at 1g is about 3.5 years away.
Everything else is farther, of course. But not a lot farther, since you've done the slow part already. Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
So while the distance to the nearest star system is (let's say) 100 light years (in earth time frame), a traveler at a velocity 0.9 times the speed of light will make the trip in only a few years (in his time frame).
48 years to go 100 light years at 0.9c. That's a bit more than "a few years".
Not exactly that long. Earth-Moon takes 1/4 of a second. Earth-Sun takes 8 seconds. But still way too long. ^^
Speed of light: 300,000 km/s.
Earth to Moon: 384,000 km. I fail to see how we can manage a 0.25 second delay when we're more than 1.25 seconds away at lightspeed. 2.6 seconds turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Sun: 149,600,000 km. Looks a bit more than 8 light seconds. More like 8 light minutes. So nearly 16 minute turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Mars: varies from 90,000,000 km to 390,000,000 km. 5 light minutes to 23 light minutes, with turn-around double that.
I love Gandhi, but BS, the US is one of the richest countries in the world, but at the same time for sure the biggest polluter, thanks to ACs, SUVs, etc. and the lack of sidewalks, staircases (you must have been in an office building where people take the elevator from the 8th to the 9th floor), to name a few.
Never took the chance to tour Eastern Europe or Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I see. Those areas were like the USA BEFORE the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Ever since then there has been this myth that India and China are somehow completely and forever off the hook. Well, they probably will be because we're dragging our asses on what we committed to do.
Of course, last year, during the early discussions for the Kyoto follow-on, China and India told the committee that they wouldn't agree to any binding limits on their CO2 emissions this time around either.
Note that China is already emitting more CO2 than the USA. Not more per capita, but more overall. Note that if we wait till China and India are fully industrialized to regulate them, those two countries alone will be emitting more CO2 than the entire world is today (they have a considerably higher population than the entire industrialized world does today).
(Head-on collisions are basically unheard of: one object would have to be orbiting the other way entirely, and no one does that due to the launch costs of orbiting against the Earth's spin.)
Qualifier: polar orbits allow this geometry of impact.
It's just that, its not actually the armor, as I claimed. Its the naval gun barrels. The reason the Japanese have a plant that can do it is that they are basically using the same stuff they used to make the 18" guns on the Yamato for make the reactor vessel in one piece. It makes sense, as you figure a gun barrel has to contain some fairly massive pressures in it.
This may be why the Japs are still in the business. It has little to do with why we're NOT still in the business. Our reactors were never made by the people who made naval gun barrels.
The pressures required for a reactor are a minute fraction of those required for a gun barrel, so that is pretty much irrelevant.
What is important is that capabilities can quite easily be lost, when the foundries that do the work stop getting contracts. We made our own back in the day (we still make our own for the US Navy - every carrier and every submarine since the 60's has had at least one in it), but we can't do it anymore. We can start again, but it'll be ten years before we're actually producing reactor vessels.
Unless, of course, we treat the problem like a real shooting war. If we decided we wanted the capability in five years, and money were no object, we could be mass-producing them in five years. But with the NIMBY crowd, and the more specialized anti-nuke crowd, and lots of lawyers to throw at any problem to delay it, it won't happen.
Note, by the way, that we could probably start mass-producing naval-style reactors in just a few years - we still have the expertise and the equipment to make them, they're a standardized design, we have a superb training program to teach people to operate them safely. But that won't happen either, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone familiar with naval nuclear power plants....
I agree that today's ships aren't built that way, but was the cutoff at the end of WWII, or was it really more like the 1970s.
Well, the Enterprise was built in the 50's (commissioned in 1961), not the 70's.
And 8" armour is, well, more like a tank than a battleship. And the armour belt on the Enterprise is aluminium, not steel. So it'd make for rather light tank armour (we put more armour on the M26 Pershing, which was a WW2 tank).
In other words, the cutoff for heavily armoured ships was the end of WW2.
While I agree that we should take another look at nuclear, I think nuclear did the scaring all by itself.
Once upon a time, in the mid 90's, I read that when we got a chance to look in the KGB's files after the collapse of the USSR, we found that the KGB heavily funded anti-nuclear movements in the West. Not because they were anti-nuclear power, mind you, but because "nuclear" was equated with "bomb" in much of the West.
Alas, they didn't quite achieve their objectives - they convinced a lot of people to be anti-nuclear power (which they didn't care about), and not so many to be anti-nuclear weapons (which they did care about).
I think the deal is really more that steelworks that could make really thick plates just aren't used that much anymore, and I'd bet principally because the world's warships don't use thick steel plates.
No. We stopped doing heavy armour on warships better than 50 years ago (the last battleship was commissioned in the late 40's). Any effect of that loss would have been felt decades ago, back when we were still making reactor vessels.
Note also that a reactor vessel is much thinner than the armour belt of a battleship. More like the armour on a tank, but with different alloys.
If you want to hide something that is in plain sight, the LAST thing you want to do is be seen trying to keep it out of sight. Call it a launch-pad for target balloons for night-fighter practice, if you like.
If you want to hide something in plain sight, the first thing you want is an interesting distraction. Area 51 would have served nicely for that, since everyone was convinced the government was covering something up there....
When it is obviously the right thing to do, the President can invoke the "Necessary and Proper" clause of the Constitution.
You are aware, perhaps, that not everyone will agree with you on the meaning of "obviously the right thing to do", correct? That it's just barely possible that a President could do something that you considered downright evil that seems to be "obviously the right thing to do"?
Do not make the mistake of giving the President the power to make the law whatever he decrees it to be - that way lies tyranny. Even if he's doing what is "obviously the right thing to do".
Note, by the way, that the Supremes look unkindly on laws with selective enforcement. They can only rule on them if a case goes all the way, but don't bet on them deciding the merits of a case using the "obviously the right thing to do" standard - they tend to be a bit pickier about the Constitution than that.
In the short term the solution for this is for the president to order the IRS to withhold these payouts until congress can close the loophole. If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
Alas, we live in a nation where rule of law is paramount.
The letter of the law is what the law is, not the "intent" of the law.
Which means it would be illegal to withhold payments specified by law, and any lawsuit challenging such an act would likely succeed, with penalties.
In other words, you're stuck with the law as written until someone changes it. The government trying to game the law by not obeying it is, if anything, worse than some corporation gaming it by taking advantage of something not foreseen by the lawmakers.
After all, if the government can choose to not obey this law that you dislike, what's to prevent them from disobeying a law you like?
That is true. North Korea is one of the most literate countries in the world, with a literacy rate of 99% for adults.
By the U.N. definition of literacy. Which basically means they can read and write "a simple sentence". Since that definition means that most six year olds in civilized countries are literate, I'm not impressed.
Something is front will be protected by the hull but the hull does not offer much protection on the side does it?. Regarding the side, doesn't sonar ping all around ships? If not that's a big black void.
Yes, actually it does. Depends, of course, on how close to the side you are. But if you're not close, the ping isn't going to be particularly deafening either.
Sonar has a limited arc that it will ping, or even hear. How limited, you can either look up on the web (and take the answer with the appropriate grain of salt), or join the Navy as a sonarman. I won't tell you.
The goal of any military is to accomplish its missions with minimal collateral damage. At the very least, it's important to know the extent of damages that are being caused and if the cost is worth the benefit. Killing local marine wildlife every time they do a sub-hunting excercise might be cause to change their procedures a bit.
You have an intriguing idea of the history of the military. I can think of a couple of militaries in history that tried to minimize collateral damage. But the overwhelming majority of them haven't given a flying fig for collateral damage.
Killing local marine wildlife isn't enough reason to stop a sub-hunting exercise. Because you have to know how to hunt subs BEFORE you need to do it for real. And the only way to do that is practice.
And contrary to popular rumour, simulators are not enough. There's a reason why ships and subs practice on each other, and drill more or less constantly - so that you don't fumble when it hits the fan for real.
About the only thing you don't do regularly is actually let fly with warshot. And that's only because they're expensive as hell.
Note a bit of history: before WW2, we didn't practice with live torpedoes, ever. During WW2, it was found that our torpedoes didn't explode when they hit their targets, and didn't maintain proper depth control. Which meant that subs and destroyers going in harm's way were effectively firing blanks at people who were firing back for real.
Even the infrequent live fire exercises we do now, if done then, would have revealed that little problem before we lost men and boats....
I may be wrong but I think active sonar sends a loud blast all at once and doesn't slowly build up. Dolphins are not given the chance to get out of the way.
If you're pinging at all, you don't ping just the once. Usually. And when you're in continuous ping, the pings are coming way too fast for a dolphin to get to you without hearing at least a few thousand first.
Yes, there's a small chance a dolphin is in front of your sonar dome when you begin pinging. Think of it as evolution in action....
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Let's see if you're right.
According to OpenSecrets.org, Obama got $8,599,038 from the "TV/movies/music" industry.
Clinton for $3,320,048 from the same source.
McCain got %1,105,150 from them.
So, "Hollywood" gave the two major Democrat contenders over ten times as much as they gave the major Republican contender. And even the number two Dem got three times as much as the number one Rep (and more than ALL Republican candidates combined), much less the number one candidate (who, incidently, got almost twice as much as all other candidates (Republican and Democrat) combined.
Yes, if you include ALL of the candidates, Hollywood only gave the Dems about six times as much as they gave Reps. But even a six to one ratio suggests some slight bias in favour of one side or the other, don't you think?
Note, for the record, that the government gave itself this power in FDR's administration, when it successfully prosecuted a farmer for growing feed for his own livestock.
In other words, be careful about wishing that the government had the power to do something you want them to do, because they may later come back and use the same excuse to do something you don't want them to do.
Technically, what Onan was condemned for was refusing to produce a child by his brother's widow to be his brother's heir.
It's an odd quirk of law that he was required to do this when his brother died without issue, to carry on his brother's line.
No, actually it's not. The Constitution very carefully defines treason. Giving aid and comfort to our ENEMIES is treason. Doing so to our allies isn't.
Is it sufficient reason to kick her out of the House? Yep. Send her to prison? Yep.
But you won't send her to prison on treason charges. Any shyster can get you off on those charges, with just a copy of the Constitution....
Who cares, we're not going to be accelerating at much more than 1g in any case, and probably a great deal less.
(B) At that acceleration, how long does it take to reach a significant fraction of c?
0.95c is about turnover speed for a 1g trip to Alpha Centauri. It'll take about 21 months to reach that speed, and another 21 months to stop. So Alpha Centauri at 1g is about 3.5 years away.
Everything else is farther, of course. But not a lot farther, since you've done the slow part already. Twenty years can get you anywhere in the galaxy at one g.
Speed of light: 300,000 km/s.
Earth to Moon: 384,000 km. I fail to see how we can manage a 0.25 second delay when we're more than 1.25 seconds away at lightspeed. 2.6 seconds turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Sun: 149,600,000 km. Looks a bit more than 8 light seconds. More like 8 light minutes. So nearly 16 minute turn-around for input-response.
Earth to Mars: varies from 90,000,000 km to 390,000,000 km. 5 light minutes to 23 light minutes, with turn-around double that.
Never took the chance to tour Eastern Europe or Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I see. Those areas were like the USA BEFORE the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
Of course, last year, during the early discussions for the Kyoto follow-on, China and India told the committee that they wouldn't agree to any binding limits on their CO2 emissions this time around either.
Note that China is already emitting more CO2 than the USA. Not more per capita, but more overall. Note that if we wait till China and India are fully industrialized to regulate them, those two countries alone will be emitting more CO2 than the entire world is today (they have a considerably higher population than the entire industrialized world does today).
Qualifier: polar orbits allow this geometry of impact.
This may be why the Japs are still in the business. It has little to do with why we're NOT still in the business. Our reactors were never made by the people who made naval gun barrels.
The pressures required for a reactor are a minute fraction of those required for a gun barrel, so that is pretty much irrelevant.
What is important is that capabilities can quite easily be lost, when the foundries that do the work stop getting contracts. We made our own back in the day (we still make our own for the US Navy - every carrier and every submarine since the 60's has had at least one in it), but we can't do it anymore. We can start again, but it'll be ten years before we're actually producing reactor vessels.
Unless, of course, we treat the problem like a real shooting war. If we decided we wanted the capability in five years, and money were no object, we could be mass-producing them in five years. But with the NIMBY crowd, and the more specialized anti-nuke crowd, and lots of lawyers to throw at any problem to delay it, it won't happen.
Note, by the way, that we could probably start mass-producing naval-style reactors in just a few years - we still have the expertise and the equipment to make them, they're a standardized design, we have a superb training program to teach people to operate them safely. But that won't happen either, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone familiar with naval nuclear power plants....
Well, the Enterprise was built in the 50's (commissioned in 1961), not the 70's.
And 8" armour is, well, more like a tank than a battleship. And the armour belt on the Enterprise is aluminium, not steel. So it'd make for rather light tank armour (we put more armour on the M26 Pershing, which was a WW2 tank).
In other words, the cutoff for heavily armoured ships was the end of WW2.
Once upon a time, in the mid 90's, I read that when we got a chance to look in the KGB's files after the collapse of the USSR, we found that the KGB heavily funded anti-nuclear movements in the West. Not because they were anti-nuclear power, mind you, but because "nuclear" was equated with "bomb" in much of the West.
Alas, they didn't quite achieve their objectives - they convinced a lot of people to be anti-nuclear power (which they didn't care about), and not so many to be anti-nuclear weapons (which they did care about).
Kids don't have a union in this country.
Or did you mean "miners"?
No. We stopped doing heavy armour on warships better than 50 years ago (the last battleship was commissioned in the late 40's). Any effect of that loss would have been felt decades ago, back when we were still making reactor vessels.
Note also that a reactor vessel is much thinner than the armour belt of a battleship. More like the armour on a tank, but with different alloys.
at 35K Km, the Earth is about 20 degrees wide.
For reference, the moon is about 0.5 degrees wide.
While it's true that the satellite will be in Earth-shadow only a few hours a year, it's not true that the Earth is a "tiny dot"
If you want to hide something in plain sight, the first thing you want is an interesting distraction. Area 51 would have served nicely for that, since everyone was convinced the government was covering something up there....
You are aware, perhaps, that not everyone will agree with you on the meaning of "obviously the right thing to do", correct? That it's just barely possible that a President could do something that you considered downright evil that seems to be "obviously the right thing to do"?
Do not make the mistake of giving the President the power to make the law whatever he decrees it to be - that way lies tyranny. Even if he's doing what is "obviously the right thing to do".
Note, by the way, that the Supremes look unkindly on laws with selective enforcement. They can only rule on them if a case goes all the way, but don't bet on them deciding the merits of a case using the "obviously the right thing to do" standard - they tend to be a bit pickier about the Constitution than that.
Alas, we live in a nation where rule of law is paramount.
The letter of the law is what the law is, not the "intent" of the law.
Which means it would be illegal to withhold payments specified by law, and any lawsuit challenging such an act would likely succeed, with penalties.
In other words, you're stuck with the law as written until someone changes it. The government trying to game the law by not obeying it is, if anything, worse than some corporation gaming it by taking advantage of something not foreseen by the lawmakers.
After all, if the government can choose to not obey this law that you dislike, what's to prevent them from disobeying a law you like?
By the U.N. definition of literacy. Which basically means they can read and write "a simple sentence". Since that definition means that most six year olds in civilized countries are literate, I'm not impressed.
Yeah, mercury doesn't last for tens of thousands of years...it lasts forever....
Yes, actually it does. Depends, of course, on how close to the side you are. But if you're not close, the ping isn't going to be particularly deafening either.
Sonar has a limited arc that it will ping, or even hear. How limited, you can either look up on the web (and take the answer with the appropriate grain of salt), or join the Navy as a sonarman. I won't tell you.
Small chance.
The sonar dome is on the bottom of the ship.
Yes, it pings forward, but something swimming on the surface is going to be protected by the hull of the ship from the worst of the noise.
You have an intriguing idea of the history of the military. I can think of a couple of militaries in history that tried to minimize collateral damage. But the overwhelming majority of them haven't given a flying fig for collateral damage.
Killing local marine wildlife isn't enough reason to stop a sub-hunting exercise. Because you have to know how to hunt subs BEFORE you need to do it for real. And the only way to do that is practice.
And contrary to popular rumour, simulators are not enough. There's a reason why ships and subs practice on each other, and drill more or less constantly - so that you don't fumble when it hits the fan for real.
About the only thing you don't do regularly is actually let fly with warshot. And that's only because they're expensive as hell.
Note a bit of history: before WW2, we didn't practice with live torpedoes, ever. During WW2, it was found that our torpedoes didn't explode when they hit their targets, and didn't maintain proper depth control. Which meant that subs and destroyers going in harm's way were effectively firing blanks at people who were firing back for real.
Even the infrequent live fire exercises we do now, if done then, would have revealed that little problem before we lost men and boats....
If you're pinging at all, you don't ping just the once. Usually. And when you're in continuous ping, the pings are coming way too fast for a dolphin to get to you without hearing at least a few thousand first.
Yes, there's a small chance a dolphin is in front of your sonar dome when you begin pinging. Think of it as evolution in action....