Note that "defense spending" is one of the better places to hide little tidbits that wouldn't get passed if proposed as stand-alone legislation. Or that someone doesn't want to admit to sponsoring, for whatever reason.
"Defense spending" includes, among other things, breast cancer research. Why anyone thinks he/she couldn't get a few dozen million spent on breast cancer research without hiding it in the DoD budget, I'm not sure. Nonetheless, it's been one of those things hidden in the "defense spending" from time to time since the '70s....
Here in the US, I think life is seen as the moment Jesus strikes his magical staff and says it is so, or at least, that's what they tell us. With each medical advance, it is apparently discovered he does this earlier and earlier in the process.
Here in the USA, a lot of people work on the assumption that they haven't a clue when life starts.
About half the people who haven't a clue decide to pick a nice, safe, easily spotted marker like "birth", and say life starts there.
The other half pick a nice, safe, (relatively) easily spotted marker like "conception", and say life starts there.
They're all wrong, of course. Life starts somewhere between those extremes. Alas, there's no easily marked point between them that we can use. Arguably, "quickening" would work - the time when the baby/fetus (depending on your perspective) starts to move, but that's not so clear-cut as all that.
So probably we'll muddle along as we have for another decade or three, until someone can come up with some nice, scientific test - say, some way to monitor brain activity in a fetus/baby (depending on your perspective) in vivo, and then declare that some particular level of brain activity shows the beginning of "life".
And then we'll spend a half century or so arguing about whether that particular level of brain activity REALLY shows the beginning of "life", or whether the beginning of "life" should be earlier or later, depending on the prejudice of the arguers.
What people will, as usual, forget is that we've always had some way of dealing with unwanted offspring. Once upon a time, we waited till they were born, then dropped them off on a convenient hillside, and let the wolves decide. Now, we use a dumpster for the same purpose. Or we have an abortion. Nothing much changes, other than the exact point we find it convenient to dispose of the unwanted, whether the unwanted is "life" or not.
In Canada, the current definition of a person requires that a fetus must exit the mother alive.
Theoretically, if you were to inseminate an egg, gestate it, and 'birth' a child completely outside of the mother (in some sort of 'iron womb' type gizmo) they would not be a person by legal definition.
Might not even be that hard. Arguably, if the egg were inseminated, then inserted into some woman other than the biological mother, it could be argued that it has NOT "exited the mother alive".
All depends on the definition of "mother" in use.
Which leaves open the interesting possibility that you murder someone, and in the process of putting together a defense, you discover that the victim was carried to term by a host-mother. Then your Lawyer can argue (eloquently, we hope) that since the victim never left his biological mother alive, he wasn't a person, and therefore killing him is not murder. At worst, it's "performing an abortion without a license"....
I wonder, how long it would take either Spirit or Opportunity to drive there from their present locations if something interesting was found?
Decades? Centuries? Even assuming they'd survive that long, those little rovers aren't very fast. Less than walking speed even when operational, and they have to hibernate every winter. And their point of view is low enough they'd be doubling back a lot, I'd imagine.
Have you ever? First, it's usually as good as pleading guilty in the eyes of a jury. Yeah, they may not use it, yaddayadda, sure. I sure want to see someone go free after taking the fifth when facing a jury.
Have I ever? Of course not. You have to be caught to go in front of a Jury. Of course, this isn't something that goes to a Jury, in any case. The cops (feds) ask the question, you say "I want to speak to my lawyer", interview with the cops ends.
Later, someone else may bring you a Search Warrant for the key. If the Warrant accurately describes the location, you have to let them look to their heart's content. If they don't find it, that's THEIR problem, not your problem. If they drag you in front of a Judge, you take the Fifth, the Judge maybe jails you for contempt, but there's more than enough caselaw to get you out of there as soon as your Lawyer can fill out the forms.
Then comes the countersuits, of course.
And second, I doubt it works when the Patriot Act comes into play.
Yes, it does. USA Patriot Act doesn't override the Constitution. It may take taking the case to the Supremes, but the Constitution always wins in the end.
Note, by the way, that non-citizens don't necessarily have the same Rights as citizens. They don't necessarily NOT have those Rights, either. That's what Lawyers are for.
That's covered by the "Power to initiate constitutional amendments". Since Roosevelt tried to pack the Supremes, we've passed an Amendment mandating the size of the Court. Congress has no power to affect it further without another Amendment.
The US government doesn't seem to be interested in that, though, and here in Europe the tendency is to follow the US trend, slowly killing the social welfare systems.
And here I thought Europe's slow killing of the social welfare system was a result of the EU's requirement that deficit spending be kept under certain hard limits.
Note that the hard limits are actually about the same as the USA's current (excessive) deficits. but they ARE trying.
I'm curious, though. What can the EU actually do if a member state decides to NOT abide by the deficit limits set by the EU government? Besides kick them out of the EU, presumably?
If I was in the US, I couldn't say that about George W Bush without being arrested.
How odd. I say words to that effect daily, and haven't been arrested yet. And to add emphasis, I say much the same about Hillary, Obama, and McCain....
I read editorials that can be summarized that way almost daily. And yet the same editorialists are writing more or less the same thing the next week (perhaps from their prison cells?).
I think you are confusing an NYPD decision to limit potential riots near the Republican Convention with some sort of law applying anywhere or anytime other than that particular place and time.
I should also point out that there were similar decisions to limit riots near the Democratic Conventions over the last decades. Perhaps as a result of the major riots at the Democratic Convention in '68.
Well, one would also think that ATM companies like Diebold would have experience at this sort of thing.... Of course, when you realize the implications of this ineptitude on the banking industry, you suddenly get the distinct feeling you would be safer keeping your money in a box under your mattress.:-D
The banking machine industry thought that right up till their programmers pointed out that there is a big difference between a clear paper trail (required for banking), and anonymous use (required for voting).
Alas, by that time, they had the contracts already signed, and visions of BEEEELIONS and BEEEEELIONS of dollars dancing in their heads.
What I would like to see, however, is a national TV broadcast of this kind of speeches. That would be a heavily profitable investment on education.
I'd love to see this on TV. But it won't be profitable for the people who put it on. Because there are maybe 500 people besides myself who'd watch it.
It won't actually help science education, either. The lads and lasses who saw this would be excited, ready to get serious about science, then they'd ask a question of their science (physics/chemistry/whatever) teacher. The teacher would look briefly confused, then answer "we'll cover that next semester, now turn to page 184 of your text...."
And that'll be the end of that, as far as science education is concerned.
the faster the world knows about it, the faster help can be sent for the victims.
Realistically, no.
Technology has been sufficiently advanced to provide information about natural disasters effectively instantly for about a century. I say "effectively", because it doesn't much matter whether you hear about it 1 minute after it happened, or one day after it happened, if it takes you a minimum of two days to provide any meaningful response.
This quake in China is an example of that - we knew about it within minutes of occurrence. But we won't be able to get any meaningful aid into the area for a couple days. And that won't change in the foreseeable future, unless we keep airplane loads of emergency supplies on +10 all over the world, all the time.
Which won't happen. Even if everyone in the world wanted something like that, as soon as the price tag was seen, they'd be back to talking about Paris Hilton....
In addition, the US FOOLISHLY limited the number of representatives long ago. Is there a study showing the optimal ratio of people to representative?
I take it you've never tried to give a speech in a Football Stadium without a sound-system, then?
HINT: there were no sound-systems in 1787.
HINT: if we want a Representative to truly represent each of us, we'll want about one per 500 people. Which means we'd need 600,000. Consider the difficulties in holding a meeting with 60 people providing real-time inputs, much less 600,000.
You are correct, there DOES seem to be a maximum distance that a planet can form from it's primary...however we haven't declared that by fiat, rather nature seems to have made planets very unlikley as you go farther out....If you think about it, that makes perfect sense.
Well, no.
Actually, our definition of "planet" makes them unlikely as you go farther out. A different definition doesn't have to have that limitation. For instance, if we stuck with "big enough that gravity pulls it into a quasi-spherical shape", then planets could appear much farther out.
Therefore, it's not nature, it's astronomer fiat. A fiat established merely to avoid the possibility of our Solar System having hundreds of planets, in fact.
Mercury is significantly denser than Mars. Therefore while it IS less massive over all, it has a steeper gravity well and will cause a greater effective clearing.
Nonsense! Mercury's greater density has little, if any, greater effect on its "neighborhood" further out than the radius of Mars (the planet, not its orbit). Sure, Mercury's atmosphere will be affected by its greater density, but something passing 250,000 Km away will only notice its smaller mass, not its higher density.
THEREFORE, there is actually VERY little mass in Pluto's orbit however Pluto has not been able to clear it. Also remember that clearing doesn't necessarily mean "get rid of" but it does mean "control" by capturing as a satellite, capturing in a Lagrange point OR coercing into a synchronous orbit.
So, Pluto can't clear out a volume of space 1,000,000 times as great as Mercury is expected to clear out, and it therefore follows that Mercury (asked to do 0.0001% as much as Pluto) IS a planet, and Pluto is not. Makes perfect sense.
However I also saw something else while doing research for this response. This is all posited on Neptune NOT being there. Pluto is actually in orbital resonance with Neptune (3:2 I believe) therefore Pluto is under Neptune's control (another reason not to call it a planet). Since Neptune is a few times large than any terrestrial world, Mercury - Mars would also be captured like Pluto if placed in the identical orbit. Jupiter on up would even clear out Neptune. If placed in a similar but slightly different orbit then all planets should clear out the orbit.
I can buy this logic for calling Pluto a !Planet. However, one implication is that one object can orbit a star and be a planet, and an IDENTICAL object can orbit the same star elsewhere and be a !Planet. I suspect strongly that this is not a desirable outcome.
I also suspect that the lads who came up with this definition are going to be terribly upset one day when they find that Planet Three around some star is a Planet, and a nearly identical Planet Four is a !Planet.
They'll probably be even more pissed off if it turns out that !Planet Four is habitable, and Planet Three is not....
But the fact that we can read 1984 and that we have people who can speak out against the government without getting killed is proof enough that we don't live in an Orwellian dystopia.
Which is precisely what THEY want you to believe! Or do you really think that we haven't learned more about populace control in the last half century?
Disclaimer: I'm not really a paranoid nutcase, I just assume that pose for the sake of argument.
They understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory"
Most elected politicians would be delighted if that whole Democracy mess were swept under the rug - it keeps them from testing their "theories". In other words, they may "understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory"", but they hardly approve of it. And are determined that they will live OUR lives by the principles of THEIR theories....
If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
If it wasn't THOUGHT TO BE effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
Fixed that. A good ad campaign can convince anyone that they really desperately need this new security device. Note that my wife's family used to go that route - alarm, cameras, the works. They thought it was great that they were protected from robbery and other unpleasantness.
Came a time that they decided not to bother paying for the thing anymore - still not sure why. Since then, they've been assaulted exactly ZERO times, their house has been broken into exactly ZERO times, they've had exactly ZERO encounters with criminals (unless you count the guy who mows their grass - my Mother-in-Law thinks he's the biggest scoundrel that's ever walked the Earth because he insists on being paid more than they were paying lawn-maintenance guys in the '40's).
Actually, Jupiter would have cleared the orbit...as would Mercury, Venus, Earth, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Mars, the weakest, is questionable but still probably would have.
You'll have to explain that one. Mercury is less massive than Mars, but would definitely clear an orbit 12 terameters across, while Mars is only questionable?
So, why is Mars "questionable", when the only thing that should matter, within a given orbit, is the mass of the "planet" (or not-"planet"). I'd always thought Mars was the "weakest" in this context because of its proximity to the Asteroid Belt (and Jupiter, sometimes), not because of any innate characteristic of the big chunk of rock that makes up Mars.
Note that if Pluto is 0.02% of the mass in its orbit, Mars would be ~1% of the mass in that orbit, and farther from the rest of the mass in that orbit that Jupiter is, most of the time. Mercury, on the other hand, would be only 0.5% of the mass in that orbit, and just as far from everything else in that orbit as Mars would be (or Pluto is).
So, why would one planet be a "sure thing", but another, twice as massive, be only "questionable"?
Pluto's orbit is littered with Kupier belt objects which it has no real control over.
And the fact that those Kuiper Belt objects in question are generally farther from Pluto (which is smaller than Earth) than, say, Earth is from Neptune doesn't mean much, eh? Face it, if Jupiter were that far out, it wouldn't have cleared that orbit either (note that Jupiter is closer to Pluto than most of the Kuiper Belt objects sharing Pluto's orbit)
We seem to've set up a definition that pretty much puts a maximum distance from the primary for a planet. Interesting. Not really a very meaningful definition, but interesting.
You say we will inevitably find an earth sized object...you may be right, but finding one or two won't change anything....when you find HUNDREDS we will chat.
I must've missed the part where we found HUNDREDS of objects the size of Pluto. Seems to me we've only found two or three so far.
Oh, wait! My bad. Changing the definition of planets to exclude Earth would be fundamentally wrong on so many levels, wouldn't it? Which is why the current definition had to be tweaked so much to exclude Pluto without accidently excluding anything else, or including anything else.
There are more than eight planets. Pluto is a plant. Xena (or whatever official name they've assigned it) is a planet. Get over it.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?
Slashdot Mirror
Nessus. Not Messus.
Note that "defense spending" is one of the better places to hide little tidbits that wouldn't get passed if proposed as stand-alone legislation. Or that someone doesn't want to admit to sponsoring, for whatever reason.
"Defense spending" includes, among other things, breast cancer research. Why anyone thinks he/she couldn't get a few dozen million spent on breast cancer research without hiding it in the DoD budget, I'm not sure. Nonetheless, it's been one of those things hidden in the "defense spending" from time to time since the '70s....
Here in the USA, a lot of people work on the assumption that they haven't a clue when life starts.
About half the people who haven't a clue decide to pick a nice, safe, easily spotted marker like "birth", and say life starts there.
The other half pick a nice, safe, (relatively) easily spotted marker like "conception", and say life starts there.
They're all wrong, of course. Life starts somewhere between those extremes. Alas, there's no easily marked point between them that we can use. Arguably, "quickening" would work - the time when the baby/fetus (depending on your perspective) starts to move, but that's not so clear-cut as all that.
So probably we'll muddle along as we have for another decade or three, until someone can come up with some nice, scientific test - say, some way to monitor brain activity in a fetus/baby (depending on your perspective) in vivo, and then declare that some particular level of brain activity shows the beginning of "life".
And then we'll spend a half century or so arguing about whether that particular level of brain activity REALLY shows the beginning of "life", or whether the beginning of "life" should be earlier or later, depending on the prejudice of the arguers.
What people will, as usual, forget is that we've always had some way of dealing with unwanted offspring. Once upon a time, we waited till they were born, then dropped them off on a convenient hillside, and let the wolves decide. Now, we use a dumpster for the same purpose. Or we have an abortion. Nothing much changes, other than the exact point we find it convenient to dispose of the unwanted, whether the unwanted is "life" or not.
Might not even be that hard. Arguably, if the egg were inseminated, then inserted into some woman other than the biological mother, it could be argued that it has NOT "exited the mother alive".
All depends on the definition of "mother" in use.
Which leaves open the interesting possibility that you murder someone, and in the process of putting together a defense, you discover that the victim was carried to term by a host-mother. Then your Lawyer can argue (eloquently, we hope) that since the victim never left his biological mother alive, he wasn't a person, and therefore killing him is not murder. At worst, it's "performing an abortion without a license"....
Decades? Centuries? Even assuming they'd survive that long, those little rovers aren't very fast. Less than walking speed even when operational, and they have to hibernate every winter. And their point of view is low enough they'd be doubling back a lot, I'd imagine.
Have I ever? Of course not. You have to be caught to go in front of a Jury. Of course, this isn't something that goes to a Jury, in any case. The cops (feds) ask the question, you say "I want to speak to my lawyer", interview with the cops ends.
Later, someone else may bring you a Search Warrant for the key. If the Warrant accurately describes the location, you have to let them look to their heart's content. If they don't find it, that's THEIR problem, not your problem. If they drag you in front of a Judge, you take the Fifth, the Judge maybe jails you for contempt, but there's more than enough caselaw to get you out of there as soon as your Lawyer can fill out the forms.
Then comes the countersuits, of course.
Yes, it does. USA Patriot Act doesn't override the Constitution. It may take taking the case to the Supremes, but the Constitution always wins in the end.
Note, by the way, that non-citizens don't necessarily have the same Rights as citizens. They don't necessarily NOT have those Rights, either. That's what Lawyers are for.
That's covered by the "Power to initiate constitutional amendments". Since Roosevelt tried to pack the Supremes, we've passed an Amendment mandating the size of the Court. Congress has no power to affect it further without another Amendment.
And here I thought Europe's slow killing of the social welfare system was a result of the EU's requirement that deficit spending be kept under certain hard limits.
Note that the hard limits are actually about the same as the USA's current (excessive) deficits. but they ARE trying.
I'm curious, though. What can the EU actually do if a member state decides to NOT abide by the deficit limits set by the EU government? Besides kick them out of the EU, presumably?
No. Can you say "I take the Fifth"? Sure you can....
How odd. I say words to that effect daily, and haven't been arrested yet. And to add emphasis, I say much the same about Hillary, Obama, and McCain....
I read editorials that can be summarized that way almost daily. And yet the same editorialists are writing more or less the same thing the next week (perhaps from their prison cells?).
I think you are confusing an NYPD decision to limit potential riots near the Republican Convention with some sort of law applying anywhere or anytime other than that particular place and time.
I should also point out that there were similar decisions to limit riots near the Democratic Conventions over the last decades. Perhaps as a result of the major riots at the Democratic Convention in '68.
The banking machine industry thought that right up till their programmers pointed out that there is a big difference between a clear paper trail (required for banking), and anonymous use (required for voting).
Alas, by that time, they had the contracts already signed, and visions of BEEEELIONS and BEEEEELIONS of dollars dancing in their heads.
Oddly enough, everyone in a POW camp in the USA during WW2 was also an innocent man according to our laws. Even the Germans.
I'd love to see this on TV. But it won't be profitable for the people who put it on. Because there are maybe 500 people besides myself who'd watch it.
It won't actually help science education, either. The lads and lasses who saw this would be excited, ready to get serious about science, then they'd ask a question of their science (physics/chemistry/whatever) teacher. The teacher would look briefly confused, then answer "we'll cover that next semester, now turn to page 184 of your text...."
And that'll be the end of that, as far as science education is concerned.
Realistically, no.
Technology has been sufficiently advanced to provide information about natural disasters effectively instantly for about a century. I say "effectively", because it doesn't much matter whether you hear about it 1 minute after it happened, or one day after it happened, if it takes you a minimum of two days to provide any meaningful response.
This quake in China is an example of that - we knew about it within minutes of occurrence. But we won't be able to get any meaningful aid into the area for a couple days. And that won't change in the foreseeable future, unless we keep airplane loads of emergency supplies on +10 all over the world, all the time.
Which won't happen. Even if everyone in the world wanted something like that, as soon as the price tag was seen, they'd be back to talking about Paris Hilton....
No Such Agency? Whatever gave you the idea that enough information about NSA was put into the USC to make a big law document?
I take it you've never tried to give a speech in a Football Stadium without a sound-system, then?
HINT: there were no sound-systems in 1787.
HINT: if we want a Representative to truly represent each of us, we'll want about one per 500 people. Which means we'd need 600,000. Consider the difficulties in holding a meeting with 60 people providing real-time inputs, much less 600,000.
Well, no.
Actually, our definition of "planet" makes them unlikely as you go farther out. A different definition doesn't have to have that limitation. For instance, if we stuck with "big enough that gravity pulls it into a quasi-spherical shape", then planets could appear much farther out.
Therefore, it's not nature, it's astronomer fiat. A fiat established merely to avoid the possibility of our Solar System having hundreds of planets, in fact.
Nonsense! Mercury's greater density has little, if any, greater effect on its "neighborhood" further out than the radius of Mars (the planet, not its orbit). Sure, Mercury's atmosphere will be affected by its greater density, but something passing 250,000 Km away will only notice its smaller mass, not its higher density.
So, Pluto can't clear out a volume of space 1,000,000 times as great as Mercury is expected to clear out, and it therefore follows that Mercury (asked to do 0.0001% as much as Pluto) IS a planet, and Pluto is not. Makes perfect sense.
I can buy this logic for calling Pluto a !Planet. However, one implication is that one object can orbit a star and be a planet, and an IDENTICAL object can orbit the same star elsewhere and be a !Planet. I suspect strongly that this is not a desirable outcome.
I also suspect that the lads who came up with this definition are going to be terribly upset one day when they find that Planet Three around some star is a Planet, and a nearly identical Planet Four is a !Planet.
They'll probably be even more pissed off if it turns out that !Planet Four is habitable, and Planet Three is not....
Which is precisely what THEY want you to believe! Or do you really think that we haven't learned more about populace control in the last half century?
Disclaimer: I'm not really a paranoid nutcase, I just assume that pose for the sake of argument.
Most elected politicians would be delighted if that whole Democracy mess were swept under the rug - it keeps them from testing their "theories". In other words, they may "understand democracy as a check upon the excesses of "theory"", but they hardly approve of it. And are determined that they will live OUR lives by the principles of THEIR theories....
If it wasn't THOUGHT TO BE effective, it wouldn't be a big industry.
Fixed that. A good ad campaign can convince anyone that they really desperately need this new security device. Note that my wife's family used to go that route - alarm, cameras, the works. They thought it was great that they were protected from robbery and other unpleasantness.
Came a time that they decided not to bother paying for the thing anymore - still not sure why. Since then, they've been assaulted exactly ZERO times, their house has been broken into exactly ZERO times, they've had exactly ZERO encounters with criminals (unless you count the guy who mows their grass - my Mother-in-Law thinks he's the biggest scoundrel that's ever walked the Earth because he insists on being paid more than they were paying lawn-maintenance guys in the '40's).
You'll have to explain that one. Mercury is less massive than Mars, but would definitely clear an orbit 12 terameters across, while Mars is only questionable?
So, why is Mars "questionable", when the only thing that should matter, within a given orbit, is the mass of the "planet" (or not-"planet"). I'd always thought Mars was the "weakest" in this context because of its proximity to the Asteroid Belt (and Jupiter, sometimes), not because of any innate characteristic of the big chunk of rock that makes up Mars.
Note that if Pluto is 0.02% of the mass in its orbit, Mars would be ~1% of the mass in that orbit, and farther from the rest of the mass in that orbit that Jupiter is, most of the time. Mercury, on the other hand, would be only 0.5% of the mass in that orbit, and just as far from everything else in that orbit as Mars would be (or Pluto is).
So, why would one planet be a "sure thing", but another, twice as massive, be only "questionable"?
And the fact that those Kuiper Belt objects in question are generally farther from Pluto (which is smaller than Earth) than, say, Earth is from Neptune doesn't mean much, eh? Face it, if Jupiter were that far out, it wouldn't have cleared that orbit either (note that Jupiter is closer to Pluto than most of the Kuiper Belt objects sharing Pluto's orbit)
We seem to've set up a definition that pretty much puts a maximum distance from the primary for a planet. Interesting. Not really a very meaningful definition, but interesting.
I'll bite. What is the definition of "neighborhood" in this context?
Is Cruithne in Earth's "neighborhood"?
If not, what is closer to Pluto than Cruithne that it hasn't cleared?
Besides Charon?
If Charon isn't excluded, does this mean that any binary planet is, by definition, NOT a planet?
I must've missed the part where we found HUNDREDS of objects the size of Pluto. Seems to me we've only found two or three so far.
Oh, wait! My bad. Changing the definition of planets to exclude Earth would be fundamentally wrong on so many levels, wouldn't it? Which is why the current definition had to be tweaked so much to exclude Pluto without accidently excluding anything else, or including anything else.
There are more than eight planets. Pluto is a plant. Xena (or whatever official name they've assigned it) is a planet. Get over it.
Or has science devolved to the point where we just change the definitions to give us the answers we want, rather than looking at the evidence and following it to where it leads?