Rush Holt, the author of H.R. 811, has a Ph.D. in Physics.
Which means exactly zero when it comes to election reform.
Also note that a bill does not always represent what the law maker thinks is best, but rather it's the best thing they think can actually pass.
I am aware that getting SOMETHING done is often seen as necessary. However, I have a prejudice in favour of getting something done RIGHT. If more of our lawmakers worked on the assumption that a bad bill is worse than no bill, we'd all be better off.
The dems are fighting against this admin, accuse it of being corrupt (which it obviously is), is possibly about to lose the ability to monitor the WH (if they lose the up-coming battle in SCOTUS), and YET, they want to put voting admin under the WH.
The Dems don't expect this bill to be effective till there is a Democrat President in the White House. That way the Dems can ensure that there will never be another Republican President.
Of course, the Republicans would like the bill to be law with a Republican President, so they can ensure there will never be another Democrat President.
A socket may not be of the correct size: The assembly line might have malfunctioned at some point, or a worker might have been sleepy during work.
This is certainly possible. However, when you reach for a 3/4" socket, do you also reach for a ruler at the same time to verify that the socket was the correct size? If not, then you trust that the socket is the correct size. Your trust may be misplaced, but nonetheless you have trusted.
Although the heroine (which was unusual in itself, in it's day) of Podkayne of Mars was black
No, she wasn't. She was part Maori. Her Uncle Tom looked like a Maori (black), but she did not. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a deep tan (typical of Marsmen in that reality).
Remember, there were people on the ship to Venus who thought that she could not possibly be his niece, since he was black, and she wasn't.
Which wasn't really about sex, but about time travel paradoxes. An extreme variant of "By His Bootstraps", where the main character's trip into the far future and subsequent takeover of the local region occurs because his future self accidently pulled him forward to the far future after taking over the local region....
In "All You Zombies", the main character becomes his own mother and father in the process of recruiting himself into the time patrol, or whatever they called it (Time Patrol was Poul Anderson, as I recall).
Probably downloaded the language update from Starscream when he went active. I'm assuming he can manage a reasonable bandwidth for communications. If not, he's a pretty crappy super-tech AI computer....
My daughter went to the most recent BotCon. She learned there that the subtitle was just a mistake that noone noticed until it was too late. The script said Brawl, someone turned that into Devastator when adding subtitles...get over it.
Assuming that the GP was in the market for a new vehicle anyways
That is the question, of course. If he were in the market for a new car, and decided to buy a fuel efficient one, then there's nothing wrong with the decision. If, on the other hand, he decided to buy a new car just because gas prices were high, then his decision might very well qualify as idiotic.
Absolutely wrong. They chose to install the sensors in cold areas like Canada becase they didn't like shorting themselves. They chose not to install the sensors in hot areas because they don't mind the extra money they get from shorting us.
Or, just possibly, they installed the sensors in Canada because Canadian law requires it, and didn't install them here because US State/Federal law doesn't require it.
I changed my fuel consumption by a 70% decrease in cost by changing to a diesel engine and bio-diesel. Now I can get 46MPG for $2.79 a gallon. Sure beats my wifes 16MPG at $3.09 in her SUV. Her choice, my savings.
Seems to me that if you paid $15000 for the diesel car, and if you were getting the 16mpg in whatever you were driving before, that you'll have to drive better than 113000 miles before you pay off the cost of the new car. Of course, the diesel car may have had a net cost of less than $15000, so you'd have to scale that 113000 miles proportionally. And it may have had a net cost of rather more than $15000, too....
While I might let gas prices affect m new car buying decisions, letting them decide WHEN to buy a new car (switching cars when the gas prices go up), would be an insane waste of money, not a savings.
I'd say it would have been at least conceivable with the advent of powered flight. Within a few short decades of the Kittyhawk, one could fly (though not directly) from Australia to North America in a few days, and I'm sure even the Nazis realized the long-term repercussions of the development of the jet engine.
Powered flight is 104 years old. The notion of crossing oceans by air was inconceivable four years after Kittyhawk.
It took around 30 years before there were any trans-Pacific flights, as you say.
And the jet engine didn't mean what you think it did in WW2 - jets were VERY short range compared to prop-jobs at that time. Mostly because they drank fuel like it was going out of style. Which is why the Germans and British had more interest in it than the USA did - they had opponents near enough for jets to make the flights, whereas we were a bit farther away.
By the '50s, there were aircraft capable of flying non-stop from Australia to LA (the B-36, if nothing else), but that's a lot closer to 50 years ago than to 100 years ago.
Seriously, do you really believe that anyone in 1907 was thinking in terms of one-day flights of that distance? If you do, just change "100" to "200"....
point is that the changes being described were MUCH quicker than a 10000 year span. Which just suggests that the next 10000 years will likely usher in even more dramatic changes in the limits of "the possible"....
I could tell right away that it was misleading. You can pretty much orbit the earth in 90 minutes. And it's not like they were just hovering; 90 minutes of hover is 9.8 m/s^2 * 60 * 90 = ~53,000 m/s delta-V, compared to the necessary ~7,800 m/s for LEO.
Of course, you can glide for 90 minutes using no fuel whatsoever. Once you spend a relatively small amount of deltaV to put yourself into a ballistic trajectory that takes you up 100 Km. 2 Km/s or so should be in the timezone of enough. Then glide for the best part of 90 minutes at mach 2+....
It's not like hovering gives you zero-G or anything - if you were to hover for 90 minutes, you'd experience zero seconds of zero-G
For instance, the Vietnam war is a success if you consider the objective to be standing up to and halting the spread of worldwide communism
The Vietnam War can be considered a success if one understands its purpose - it was a "training war". We got a lot of officers and NCO's with combat experience out of it. Which are always useful, for training the next generation of soldiers.
By pretty much any other measure, it was a failure. Though not a military failure - it was a political/PR failure.
It's not quite 1400 years old actually. Regardless, maturity does not directly relate to age, though it is a general indicator which I maintain holds up in this case. Even then, though the
disparity is wide enough that it fails the "Can I date that rule?":
Alas, "very young" doesn't necessarily imply lack of maturity. And it's silly to refer to a religion that is 1400 years old as immature.
And the "Can I date that" rule really is only meaningful within the limits of human lifespans. If humans lived 500 years, then that rule would suggest that a 100 year old adult shouldn't date a 200 year old adult, even though both were far past childhood, and even farther from death of old age.
It is unlikely that anyone was killing Protestants in the Middle Ages, as Protestantism (as opposed to Catholicism) did not exist until the Renaissance.
In addition, the wars of religion (Protestant vs. Catholic edition) weren't about the Catholics vs. the Protestants so much as they were normal wars between Princes with religion used as an excuse - when one of the two largest Catholic nations is supporting one of the major (NOT large, but significant) Protestant nations against the other Catholics, it's really hard to say that it's all about religion.
Note that there were heresies within the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages (and earlier) that might have, if left to grow in peace, become "Protestant". But not terribly likely. When the break finally came, it didn't require that Protestantism be "left to grow in peace" - by that time, the Catholic Church was seen as so corrupt that alternatives were welcomed.
Several times the point is indeed made that
Islam is very young compared to the other "major religions" and needs to grow beyond this and other
tendencies* to survive/thrive.
I'm assuming Christianity counts as a "major religion" here, but Islam is 1500 years old as compared to Christianity's 2000 years. Younger yes, "very young", no.
Of course Buddhism is 1000 years older then Islam. 1500 years against 2500 might be creeping toward "very young". But I don't think so. I don't think 50 year olds consider 30 year olds to be very young all that often.
Hinduism is about the only major religion that is much older than Buddhism, and is about the only one that makes Islam seem "very young" - 1500 years vs. 3500 years.
A theory which in fact they provide a debunking for.
They've debunked the last ice age??? And here I always thought that back 15000 yeara (an eyeblink, as it were) ago there were two mile thick ice sheets covering much of North America and Eurasia...
Both Japanese and American submersibles were better. For instance, German submersibles were strained to spend six weeks at sea without replenishment, unlike American or Japanese boats.
That's just a matter of requirements. Japan and Hawaii are a long way away from each other. With England right there, Germany could build smaller, cheaper submarines that were harder to see.
They weren't harder to see. They were just smaller and cheaper. One should note that if the Germans had seriously prepared for submarine warfare between the wars, they would have designed boats that could stay at sea longer - the USA wasn't the only place on the other side of an ocean that the Germans needed to be able to send subs. Designing subs for local waters when you need to be able to assert yourself anywhere from northern Norway to South Africa (at a minimum) isn't a sign of "better" in my book.
No, in fact, the magnetic fuse was NOT universally used in WW2, by any side. It was, in fact, a relatively late development. Most torpedoes went boom when they hit the side of a ship. Or not, in the case of the American torpedoes.
I've read many places that the American torpedoes at the beginning of the war had three problems: The magnetic fuses rarely worked. The contact fuses would be crushed without going off if they hit something head-on. They ran too deep.
Their magnetic fuses sucked little green horny toads. The contact fuses sucked, but not so badly. Their depth control sucked - it's not a matter of running too deep, but of running at the wrong depth - if you set them to run shallow, they porpoised, if you set them to run deep, they went so deep that they'd have missed a supertanker (if supertankers had been available to shoot), if you set the to run in the middle, they ran somewhere...just where depended on blind chance.
I know torpedoes explode under the ships now. Do they have magnetic fuses again, or do they just use the sonar to decide when to go off?
Depends on the torpedo. And it's classified, most places. Don't ask, and I won't lie. Sort of like nuclear weapons on submarines - "I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on board this missile submarine"....
This is a common misconception. In WW2, the convoy system was put in place immediately - the first transatlantic convoy sailed on the 16th of September, 1939, just two weeks after the war started.
Not according to my sources, although perhaps it's a difference in definitions of convoy.
HX-1 (Halifax-UK) sailed from Halifax 16 September 1939. HX convoys left Halifax every eight days throughout the war. Note that no ships were lost from an HX convoy until 1940, and that that first loss was a straggler. Note that many merchant marine captains refused to convoy until ships started being lost to u-boats.
In addition, the German U-Boat fleet was not developed especially in the inter-war years
This is certainly not true. Germany continued to develop 'illegal' U-boats, whereas the allies believed that U-boats could be ignored as international restrictions limited them. Why else were German U-boats so good at the start of the war?
The U-Boat Fleet, I said. Not the U-boats themselves. That said, the German U-Boats were not especially good, either at the start of the war or later. Both Japanese and American submersibles were better. For instance, German submersibles were strained to spend six weeks at sea without replenishment, unlike American or Japanese boats.
Tirpitz/Bismark: which were largely useless, and a colossal waste of money
Possibly true, though both ships tied up lots of allied warships with their mere presence, ships that could have been better used elsewhere.
Not really. Most of the ships keeping an eye on the Bismark and Tirpitz weren't any use anywhere else. After Taranto and Pearl Harbor (and the loss of the Prince of Wales in the Pacific), it was pretty clear that battleships had limited utility at best in the war.
The Wolf-pack wasn't developed until after the war began
Again, untrue. The Wolf-pack was tried in WW1, except it didn't work (simply lack of practice/technology).
I bow to your greater knowledge. A technique that doesn't work isn't a technique, in my book, but I won't argue. The use of the wolf-pack in WW2 was developed by the Germans during WW2, in response to increased losses and inability to effectively attack convoys with one boat.
I hadn't heard that the Germans had a torpedo problem, though
German fuses had not been very well developed, and would often fail. Contrary to your belief, Torpedoes do not actually hit ships, but rather are designed to travel under them and explode, whereupon they will break a ship's back. This means that they need magnetically-triggered fuses. German engineering, for once, didn't do such a good job.
He says to the ex-submariner. No, in fact, the magnetic fuse was NOT universally used in WW2, by any side. It was, in fact, a relatively late development. Most torpedoes went boom when they hit the side of a ship. Or not, in the case of the American torpedoes.
The Allies probably had similar problems, but they were less dependent on torpedo fuses.
Whatever gave you the idea that the allies were less dependent on torpedo fuses? We fired them from submarines, from destroyers, and dropped them from airplanes. We sank the Japanese merchant marine largely with our torpedoes, and sent more than a few Japanese warships down the same way.
In any case, I had never read before that the Germans had fusing problems with their torpedoes. Thank you for the information, which I'll use to do some research to add to my store of historical trivia.
if we'd invaded China, you know, they could well have invaded us in response.
No, they could not. At that time, the USA pretty much had control of every ocean in the world. NOONE could have invaded us then. Well, maybe Canada, but noone would have noticed if they had....
One area where the Brits and Americans had to relearn the lessons of World War I was anti-submarine warfare. Only after many ships were sunk, and lives lost, did they reinstitute the convoy system that had proved so successful in the previous war. It was if the allied navies had suffered a collective attack of memory loss and were determined to repeat all of their previous mistakes. In contrast, the Germans had developed and practiced new tactics to make more effective use of their modernized submarine fleet. The damage to the allies was only limited by the relatively small size of the German submarine fleet and design deficiencies in their torpedoes.
This is a common misconception. In WW2, the convoy system was put in place immediately - the first transatlantic convoy sailed on the 16th of September, 1939, just two weeks after the war started.
The problem was not the lack of the convoy system, but the lack of suitable escorts. Due to the various peacetime limitations on the Navies involved (budgets were small, Treaties had to be abided by, that sort of thing), the various Navies (British, USA, primarily) decided that building escorts was not necessary until they were needed. The emphasis was put on building long-lead-time ships (battleships, aircraft carriers (anyone know how many battleships were laid down after the beginning of WW2 and completed in time to see action during the war? Eight, if you're generous, and include USS Alaska and USS Guam, both battlecruisers). Escorts, which could be built relatively easily and quickly in a great many yards were designed, then not built until after the war began. Which was why the USA and the UK could trade 50 old destroyers for some bases early in the war - the British needed escorts more than they needed bases right then.
In addition, the German U-Boat fleet was not developed especially in the inter-war years. Hitler did not see the U-Boat as the decisive weapon, and so largely ignored them in favour of long-lead-time ships like the Bismark and Tirpitz (which were largely useless, and a colossal waste of money). The Wolf-pack wasn't developed until after the war began, and other than that, German submersible tactics were pretty much the same as everyone else's.
I hadn't heard that the Germans had a torpedo problem, though. There was a notorious (and frequently fatal) American torpedo problem that surfaced after we entered the war. The detonators didn't work worth a flip, and it was difficult for the submariners to prove that the torpedoes were actually defective - it looks like an excuse for missing your target when you claim "yeah, we did really well - hit dozens of ships, but the damn torpedoes wouldn't go off". The problem wasn't resolved until a demonstration was made in a friendly harbor - torpedoes were fired at a vertical steel plate, and observed to hit it and bounce away....
I think the crime you are looking for is "barratry". Normally, that is defined as bringing repeated groundless legal actions for harassment purposes. I suspect that threatening lawsuits would count as well, but IANAL either.
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Which means exactly zero when it comes to election reform.
I am aware that getting SOMETHING done is often seen as necessary. However, I have a prejudice in favour of getting something done RIGHT. If more of our lawmakers worked on the assumption that a bad bill is worse than no bill, we'd all be better off.
The Dems don't expect this bill to be effective till there is a Democrat President in the White House. That way the Dems can ensure that there will never be another Republican President.
Of course, the Republicans would like the bill to be law with a Republican President, so they can ensure there will never be another Democrat President.
Michael Crichton IS/WAS a real doctor. Before he started writing thrillers, he earned an MD at Harvard Medical School.
This is certainly possible. However, when you reach for a 3/4" socket, do you also reach for a ruler at the same time to verify that the socket was the correct size? If not, then you trust that the socket is the correct size. Your trust may be misplaced, but nonetheless you have trusted.
No, she wasn't. She was part Maori. Her Uncle Tom looked like a Maori (black), but she did not. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a deep tan (typical of Marsmen in that reality).
Remember, there were people on the ship to Venus who thought that she could not possibly be his niece, since he was black, and she wasn't.
Which wasn't really about sex, but about time travel paradoxes. An extreme variant of "By His Bootstraps", where the main character's trip into the far future and subsequent takeover of the local region occurs because his future self accidently pulled him forward to the far future after taking over the local region....
In "All You Zombies", the main character becomes his own mother and father in the process of recruiting himself into the time patrol, or whatever they called it (Time Patrol was Poul Anderson, as I recall).
Probably downloaded the language update from Starscream when he went active. I'm assuming he can manage a reasonable bandwidth for communications. If not, he's a pretty crappy super-tech AI computer....
My daughter went to the most recent BotCon. She learned there that the subtitle was just a mistake that noone noticed until it was too late. The script said Brawl, someone turned that into Devastator when adding subtitles...get over it.
That is the question, of course. If he were in the market for a new car, and decided to buy a fuel efficient one, then there's nothing wrong with the decision. If, on the other hand, he decided to buy a new car just because gas prices were high, then his decision might very well qualify as idiotic.
Or, just possibly, they installed the sensors in Canada because Canadian law requires it, and didn't install them here because US State/Federal law doesn't require it.
Seems to me that if you paid $15000 for the diesel car, and if you were getting the 16mpg in whatever you were driving before, that you'll have to drive better than 113000 miles before you pay off the cost of the new car. Of course, the diesel car may have had a net cost of less than $15000, so you'd have to scale that 113000 miles proportionally. And it may have had a net cost of rather more than $15000, too....
While I might let gas prices affect m new car buying decisions, letting them decide WHEN to buy a new car (switching cars when the gas prices go up), would be an insane waste of money, not a savings.
Powered flight is 104 years old. The notion of crossing oceans by air was inconceivable four years after Kittyhawk.
It took around 30 years before there were any trans-Pacific flights, as you say.
And the jet engine didn't mean what you think it did in WW2 - jets were VERY short range compared to prop-jobs at that time. Mostly because they drank fuel like it was going out of style. Which is why the Germans and British had more interest in it than the USA did - they had opponents near enough for jets to make the flights, whereas we were a bit farther away.
By the '50s, there were aircraft capable of flying non-stop from Australia to LA (the B-36, if nothing else), but that's a lot closer to 50 years ago than to 100 years ago.
Seriously, do you really believe that anyone in 1907 was thinking in terms of one-day flights of that distance? If you do, just change "100" to "200"....
point is that the changes being described were MUCH quicker than a 10000 year span. Which just suggests that the next 10000 years will likely usher in even more dramatic changes in the limits of "the possible"....
Going from Australia to LA in less than a day was laughable 100 years ago, much less 10000 years ago
Three to four? I wish it was so few. Last time, we had nine, I think. And I've had to vote on twice that many items in some elections.
Of course, you can glide for 90 minutes using no fuel whatsoever. Once you spend a relatively small amount of deltaV to put yourself into a ballistic trajectory that takes you up 100 Km. 2 Km/s or so should be in the timezone of enough. Then glide for the best part of 90 minutes at mach 2+....
It's not like hovering gives you zero-G or anything - if you were to hover for 90 minutes, you'd experience zero seconds of zero-G
The Vietnam War can be considered a success if one understands its purpose - it was a "training war". We got a lot of officers and NCO's with combat experience out of it. Which are always useful, for training the next generation of soldiers.
By pretty much any other measure, it was a failure. Though not a military failure - it was a political/PR failure.
Alas, "very young" doesn't necessarily imply lack of maturity. And it's silly to refer to a religion that is 1400 years old as immature.
And the "Can I date that" rule really is only meaningful within the limits of human lifespans. If humans lived 500 years, then that rule would suggest that a 100 year old adult shouldn't date a 200 year old adult, even though both were far past childhood, and even farther from death of old age.
It is unlikely that anyone was killing Protestants in the Middle Ages, as Protestantism (as opposed to Catholicism) did not exist until the Renaissance.
In addition, the wars of religion (Protestant vs. Catholic edition) weren't about the Catholics vs. the Protestants so much as they were normal wars between Princes with religion used as an excuse - when one of the two largest Catholic nations is supporting one of the major (NOT large, but significant) Protestant nations against the other Catholics, it's really hard to say that it's all about religion.
Note that there were heresies within the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages (and earlier) that might have, if left to grow in peace, become "Protestant". But not terribly likely. When the break finally came, it didn't require that Protestantism be "left to grow in peace" - by that time, the Catholic Church was seen as so corrupt that alternatives were welcomed.
I'm assuming Christianity counts as a "major religion" here, but Islam is 1500 years old as compared to Christianity's 2000 years. Younger yes, "very young", no.
Of course Buddhism is 1000 years older then Islam. 1500 years against 2500 might be creeping toward "very young". But I don't think so. I don't think 50 year olds consider 30 year olds to be very young all that often.
Hinduism is about the only major religion that is much older than Buddhism, and is about the only one that makes Islam seem "very young" - 1500 years vs. 3500 years.
They've debunked the last ice age??? And here I always thought that back 15000 yeara (an eyeblink, as it were) ago there were two mile thick ice sheets covering much of North America and Eurasia...
Well, you learn something new every day, eh?
That's just a matter of requirements. Japan and Hawaii are a long way away from each other. With England right there, Germany could build smaller, cheaper submarines that were harder to see.
They weren't harder to see. They were just smaller and cheaper. One should note that if the Germans had seriously prepared for submarine warfare between the wars, they would have designed boats that could stay at sea longer - the USA wasn't the only place on the other side of an ocean that the Germans needed to be able to send subs. Designing subs for local waters when you need to be able to assert yourself anywhere from northern Norway to South Africa (at a minimum) isn't a sign of "better" in my book.
No, in fact, the magnetic fuse was NOT universally used in WW2, by any side. It was, in fact, a relatively late development. Most torpedoes went boom when they hit the side of a ship. Or not, in the case of the American torpedoes.
I've read many places that the American torpedoes at the beginning of the war had three problems: The magnetic fuses rarely worked. The contact fuses would be crushed without going off if they hit something head-on. They ran too deep.
Their magnetic fuses sucked little green horny toads. The contact fuses sucked, but not so badly. Their depth control sucked - it's not a matter of running too deep, but of running at the wrong depth - if you set them to run shallow, they porpoised, if you set them to run deep, they went so deep that they'd have missed a supertanker (if supertankers had been available to shoot), if you set the to run in the middle, they ran somewhere...just where depended on blind chance.
I know torpedoes explode under the ships now. Do they have magnetic fuses again, or do they just use the sonar to decide when to go off?
Depends on the torpedo. And it's classified, most places. Don't ask, and I won't lie. Sort of like nuclear weapons on submarines - "I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on board this missile submarine"....
Not according to my sources, although perhaps it's a difference in definitions of convoy.
HX-1 (Halifax-UK) sailed from Halifax 16 September 1939. HX convoys left Halifax every eight days throughout the war. Note that no ships were lost from an HX convoy until 1940, and that that first loss was a straggler. Note that many merchant marine captains refused to convoy until ships started being lost to u-boats.
In addition, the German U-Boat fleet was not developed especially in the inter-war years
This is certainly not true. Germany continued to develop 'illegal' U-boats, whereas the allies believed that U-boats could be ignored as international restrictions limited them. Why else were German U-boats so good at the start of the war?
The U-Boat Fleet, I said. Not the U-boats themselves. That said, the German U-Boats were not especially good, either at the start of the war or later. Both Japanese and American submersibles were better. For instance, German submersibles were strained to spend six weeks at sea without replenishment, unlike American or Japanese boats.
Tirpitz/Bismark: which were largely useless, and a colossal waste of money
Possibly true, though both ships tied up lots of allied warships with their mere presence, ships that could have been better used elsewhere.
Not really. Most of the ships keeping an eye on the Bismark and Tirpitz weren't any use anywhere else. After Taranto and Pearl Harbor (and the loss of the Prince of Wales in the Pacific), it was pretty clear that battleships had limited utility at best in the war.
The Wolf-pack wasn't developed until after the war began
Again, untrue. The Wolf-pack was tried in WW1, except it didn't work (simply lack of practice/technology).
I bow to your greater knowledge. A technique that doesn't work isn't a technique, in my book, but I won't argue. The use of the wolf-pack in WW2 was developed by the Germans during WW2, in response to increased losses and inability to effectively attack convoys with one boat.
I hadn't heard that the Germans had a torpedo problem, though
German fuses had not been very well developed, and would often fail. Contrary to your belief, Torpedoes do not actually hit ships, but rather are designed to travel under them and explode, whereupon they will break a ship's back. This means that they need magnetically-triggered fuses. German engineering, for once, didn't do such a good job.
He says to the ex-submariner. No, in fact, the magnetic fuse was NOT universally used in WW2, by any side. It was, in fact, a relatively late development. Most torpedoes went boom when they hit the side of a ship. Or not, in the case of the American torpedoes.
The Allies probably had similar problems, but they were less dependent on torpedo fuses.
Whatever gave you the idea that the allies were less dependent on torpedo fuses? We fired them from submarines, from destroyers, and dropped them from airplanes. We sank the Japanese merchant marine largely with our torpedoes, and sent more than a few Japanese warships down the same way.
In any case, I had never read before that the Germans had fusing problems with their torpedoes. Thank you for the information, which I'll use to do some research to add to my store of historical trivia.
No, they could not. At that time, the USA pretty much had control of every ocean in the world. NOONE could have invaded us then. Well, maybe Canada, but noone would have noticed if they had....
This is a common misconception. In WW2, the convoy system was put in place immediately - the first transatlantic convoy sailed on the 16th of September, 1939, just two weeks after the war started.
The problem was not the lack of the convoy system, but the lack of suitable escorts. Due to the various peacetime limitations on the Navies involved (budgets were small, Treaties had to be abided by, that sort of thing), the various Navies (British, USA, primarily) decided that building escorts was not necessary until they were needed. The emphasis was put on building long-lead-time ships (battleships, aircraft carriers (anyone know how many battleships were laid down after the beginning of WW2 and completed in time to see action during the war? Eight, if you're generous, and include USS Alaska and USS Guam, both battlecruisers). Escorts, which could be built relatively easily and quickly in a great many yards were designed, then not built until after the war began. Which was why the USA and the UK could trade 50 old destroyers for some bases early in the war - the British needed escorts more than they needed bases right then.
In addition, the German U-Boat fleet was not developed especially in the inter-war years. Hitler did not see the U-Boat as the decisive weapon, and so largely ignored them in favour of long-lead-time ships like the Bismark and Tirpitz (which were largely useless, and a colossal waste of money). The Wolf-pack wasn't developed until after the war began, and other than that, German submersible tactics were pretty much the same as everyone else's.
I hadn't heard that the Germans had a torpedo problem, though. There was a notorious (and frequently fatal) American torpedo problem that surfaced after we entered the war. The detonators didn't work worth a flip, and it was difficult for the submariners to prove that the torpedoes were actually defective - it looks like an excuse for missing your target when you claim "yeah, we did really well - hit dozens of ships, but the damn torpedoes wouldn't go off". The problem wasn't resolved until a demonstration was made in a friendly harbor - torpedoes were fired at a vertical steel plate, and observed to hit it and bounce away....
I think the crime you are looking for is "barratry". Normally, that is defined as bringing repeated groundless legal actions for harassment purposes. I suspect that threatening lawsuits would count as well, but IANAL either.