If the bullet has enough (a) is does not need any (b,) because nothing lasts very long against lots of (a) moving really fast. (I need me some (a.))
No matter how much (a) it has, if it is hard enough, it will strip the rifling grooves right out of the barrel, and won't hit worth crap. A bullet isn't supposed to be hard. Unless we're talking about the Penetrator of a Discarding Sabot round.
I mean, Columbus comes to America in 1492, and serious colonization takes much longer than that. Almost a hundred years goes by before even the start of real, multinational colonization of the New World...
"Multinational" is a nice buzzword to exclude a great deal of history.
The Spanish founded their fist city in the Americas in 1498. Havana was founded in 1515. The Spanish had colonized All non-Portuguese parts of South America by the mid 1500's. And the Portuguese had colonized Brazil by the early 1500's.
It was only the Anglos and French who were late getting to the New World by 100+ years. Which had more to do with them (the Anglos and French) being European backwaters at the time than anything else.
Talk to any Nam grunt who saw the elephant. They tended to grab a discarded AK and make use of it when possible.
For more insight into this:
during WW2 on the Russian Front, the Russian soldier would discard their own SMG's in favour of the Erma (aka Schmeiser) SMG used by the German soldiers whenever opportunity presented itself.
The German soldiers tended instead to ditch their Ermas in favour of the Russian SMG whenever opportunity presented itself.
Regardless of the technical definition of an assault weapon, the guns most often labeled as such were clearly designed for attacking groups of human targets. It isn't always cut and dry, since as you say the round makes a considerable difference in the performance of a weapons. That doesn't mean there is no distinction.
Umm, no. "Assault Rifle" and "Assault Weapon" are two entirely different things. "Assault Rifle" refers to those military weapons you've been discussing as if civilians had access to them. "Assault Weapon" refers to the semi-automatic versions of those same weapons that civilians can own.
Note exceptions for people with the appropriate license, of course. If you're willing to undergo the background checks, pay the fees, and allow your home to be inspected by BATF at irregular intervals, then you can own a real "Assault Rifle".
Whether or how to regulate weapons of all types is a much more complicated question, but to argue that there is no distinction between handguns, hunting rifles, and assault weapons is simply ignoring the truth.
There is amazingly little difference between "Assault Weapons" and hunting rifles, really. Two hands, pull the trigger and a bullet goes downrange fast. Generally, hunting rifles are more powerful, not because they need to be, but because we tend to hunt animals at greater ranges than we hunt humans, and we tend to want one-shot kills when hunting animals - a wound is generally good enough when hunting humans, since we don't really care if the meat gets spoiled by panic and fear.
By the by, an AK-47 round (7.62x39) is ballistically very similar to the.30-30, a very popular hunting round in some places. Also note that an M-16 is almost useless for serious hunting, since most States do not allow you to hunt deer (or other large animals) with a caliber that small. And if you're hunting small game, a.22LR is effective enough, and an order of magnitude cheaper.
I agree with the right to bear arms, what I don't agree with is the right to bear fully automatic weapons. I truly don't think this would have been possible with a asaiilant carrying only a shotgun or a hunting rifle.
Luckily for you that it's largely illegal to own a fully automatic weapon. Yah, there are exceptions (get the License, pay the fees, allow BATF to do random inspections of your home), but in general, fully automatic weapons are illegal.
That said, you're mistaken in believing that a man carrying only a shotgun couldn't have done this. Would have been easy with just a pump-action shotgun (which can be fired about as fast as a semi-automatic), since you don't often have to shoot someone twice with a 12 gauge to make him stop twitching. Unlike most semi-automatic weapons....
y question is, and I don't mean to troll, what happened? From my perspective, it seems that many people almost disdain the idea of progress in culture and arts now
Does "Tamerlane" mean anything to you? How about "Timur the Lame"?
Hint: He was the guy who ordered the destruction of the Persian Empire by the Mongols. From what I've read, it was a bit like Pol Pot, but more thorough - killed everyone but the peasants, and killed most of them. By the time the Mongols were through with the Islamic world, it was a gutted ruin, with the exception of Muslim Spain - Granada, Cordoba, and the like. Which were destroyed by the Castillian Kings, though not so thoroughly as the Mongols did it.
We could wait for prices to drop, but I think it's safe to say that it is within the responsibilities of our government to subsidize the cost and thus provide incentive for people to make the switch
Great idea! So, 50000000 million homes at $100000 per. The government can surely come up with the five TRILLION dollars to pay for all that, right?
The fact that something happens doesn't mean that its allowed
No arrests, no charges, no removal of embeds from other places. I'd say it was at least semi-officially approved. I remember screaming at the TV when I saw that - if I'd been in that armour unit at the time, I'd have shot the guy. By accident, of course.
I still don't trust the American media to behave any way other than irresponsibly in warfare....
I am aware of the German offensives in 1918, but my understanding of them is that they used up the last and the best of the German military. They were spent, at that point, just at the point of the arrival of American troops. The Germans were in no position to seriously threaten America. Obviously, I wasn't there. However, to think that the Germans would have been able to solidify their holdings and eventually bridge their empire to America is rather ludicrous -- they would have a hard enough time keeping a hold on their territories.
The Germans didn't even WANT America. They didn't want France. Conquest wasn't actually the name of the game in WW1 - they were after political settlements. And they started that war because their warplans for fighting Russia required them to fight France (it's all in the train schedules. and the interlocking treaties). What they wanted was to knock the French out of the war, which was very possible in 1918. Their 1918 offensives failed badly, but did NOT leave the Germans down for the count. At the end of the German offensives, the German General Staff decided that the best resolution to the War was to become a democracy and ask for terms (they thought Wilson had more influence than the French were willing to give him), so they asked the Kaisar to step down, he did, they asked for an armistice.
At that point, the German Army was essentially intact, and still getting stronger with the continuing return of troops from the East.
I am aware of the United States' assistance to the Allied powers in WWI. I do not know how much that actually contributed to the stalement and eventual defeat of Germany. I do know that it made German attacks on our ships an inevitability.
WW2, I hope you mean?
Regarding the Philippines; why were we there in the first place? The Philippine islands are not part of the 50 United States, and our involvement there seems to be a textbook case of United States imperialism. We acquired the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War (no more justified than the current Iraq war), and subsequently fought the Philippine revolutionaries for 15 years.
And we had granted the Philippines independence in the '30s. Actually, we began the process of transitioning them to independence then, with a scheduled date for full independence in the mid-40s, as I recall.
The United States ended up using the Philippines to goad the Japanese into a fight. One of our actions was to bring long-range strategic bombers into the Philippines, from which the only target was Japan (and Japanese-held China). The Japanese couldn't afford not to invade the Philippines.
Umm, no. We had around 20 bombers in the Philippines, not one of which could reach Japan. Remember, it took the B-29 before we had a bomber that could pound Japan regularly, and those had to be based closer to Japan than the Philippines. The Japanese invaded the Philippines for the same reason they invaded the Dutch East Indies - because they were valuable pieces of real-estate. And note that even up to the end of 1941, it was not CERTAIN that the Japanese would invade the Philippines, since there was a rather large (though underequipped) Army there at the time, and while the Japanese Navy was impressive, their Army was nothing special, and tied up in China mostly.
Our capability to smash the Japanese was limited at the beginning of WWII. However, three things stand out concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor. The first is FDR's relieving of Admiral Richardson in February, 1941, over Richardson's refusal to keep the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. The second is the failure of Washington D.C. to communicate the Japanese declaration of war to Pearl Harbor. A third is FDR's "Vacant Seas" order that forbade Admiral Kimmel's reconnaisance of the Prokofiev Seamount, from which the Japanese attack was launched. Thus, I believe it to be a reasonable conclusion that we were purposefully drawn into a war without investigating possible alternati
For example, no country at war is going to allow people to publish information about troop deployments.
You may be too young to remember (or not), but during the Liberation of Kuwait, a Saudi tank battalion with an embedded journalist moved forward to the border during the first few hours of the ground war.
The embed went on CNN live to announce that "the battalion I'm embedded with has moved forward to the berm separating Saudi Arabia from Kuwait" and that "the Iraqis don't seem to be aware we've moved, since they're shelling our base camp a few miles behind us".
So, we can fairly accurately say that you are mistaken - ONE (at least) country is stupid enough to allow people to publish such information. And at least one network is dumb enough to not realize that broadcasting that information might be a bad thing.
Note that this worked both ways, of course - CNN also broadcast from Baghdad at that time (illegally and secretly, so the Iraqis wouldn't arrest/shoot them), which provided our guys with some useful intelligence (while showing that intelligence was in short supply at CNN).
No. Read some history. The Bill of Rights was proposed as part of the Constitution, and was rejected on the grounds that specifying Rights would lead some in Government to suppose that the ONLY Rights were those specified (odd, how that seems to have come to pass).
Pretty much the first act of the First Congress was to propose 12 Amendments to the Constitution - 10 were adopted immediately as the Bill of Rights, one was only approved in the last decade or so, and one was rejected by the States.
29 billion assuming nobody dies over that 1000 years...
Well, no, it doesn't. Population growth rates on Earth are greater than 2% per year. Some people die every year, some are born every year, but on balance, there are 2% more at the end of the year than at the beginning. Please note that I did NOT specify a Birth Rate of 1.5%, but a growth rate of 1.5%.
If we assume a fairly normal kind of human span - say we round it up to 100 years to allow for better medical technology - then after 1,000 years your 10,000 hardy colonists becomes a bit under a tenth (2.2billion) of the linear 29 billion. Now that's a fairly rough and ready working based on killing off the population count at the turn of the previous century every hundred years. ie at year 100 we have 44,000 colonists but 10,000 of them (the original crew) die, leaving 34,000. At year 1,000 we have 2.9billion colonists but the 660million around at year 900 die off leaving 2.2billion.
If we assume that my Growth Rate were meant as a Birth Rate, you're quite correct. It wasn't so meant.
Note that Growth Rates are declining worldwide. Traditionally (which means, "when I was a lad", of course), they were well over 2.5% - thus the "Population Bomb" that was discussed so much back then. They've been declining for a long time now, and the latest projections show them declining into negative numbers within this century, and population beginning to decline worldwide - which'll have an unpredictable effect on the urge to colonize.
In any case, a 1.5% population growth rate isn't terribly unreasonable for a colony. Though it won't really be a "colony" by the time it has a population over one billion. Realistically, I expect that any colony world will settle at a stable, sustainable population in the low billions by the first millenium after landing, or shortly thereafter.
That said, even if it take 10,000 years for a colony to start expanding with its own colony ships, that doesn't especially increase the time required to colonize the galaxy - limiting factor will still be transport speed, so we'll (or our hypothetical alien overlords will) fill the galaxy at a speed slightly slower than our transports can cross it - one million years at 10% of c, which is an eyeblink in the lifetime of the universe....
WWI? Lies and bullshit. Hitler was stopped cold in a stalemate by the time we came in.
Well, actually Hitler was a corporal when we came in. Note also that Russia surrendered and that the Germans were moving the troops used in Russia west at that time. Note also the German Offensives of 1918, whicb broke the stalemate of the previous years quite nicely (unfortunately, it didn't break them in German favour).
WWII? Lies and bullshit. The Russians beat Hitler before we arrived, and if FDR hadn't personally allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, we would have smacked them down like a bug.
The Battle of Stalingrad, which is widely considered the turning point of WW2 on the Eastern Front, occurred one year after the USA entered the War formally. Note that the USA was supplying both the Soviets and the British for several years before that point, up to the point of providing convoy escorts to protect shipping from the Germans.
As to Japan - we wouldn't have "smacked them down like a bug" sans Pearl Harbour. Arguably, Pearl Harbour was the most idiotic operation of WW2, placing Japan in the completely untenable position (pissing us off enough to make pounding them into the ground something other than a sideshow wasn't smart, and destroying our battleline in the Pacific probably HELPED us more than hurt us) of having to fight the largest industrial base in the world essentially alone. Note that with or without Pearl Harbour, we would have lost the Philippines - we didn't have the transport required to resupply our Army in the Philippines, even if the Japanese has been gracious enough to allow our merchant hulls free passage through their lines, much less with the Japanese actually treating us like we were the enemy. At the beginning of 1942, remember, the US Navy was no larger than the Imperial Japanese Navy, and was spread over two-plus oceans, rather than concentrated in one like the IJN was.
The vast military-industrial machine that beat the Japanese and the Germans was in its infancy in 1942 - our ability to "smack down" anyone was quite limited then - only reason we survived that War was that we were too far from the fighting to be pounded by the other lads....
Korean war? Oh man we fought communism so well, too bad we're a socialist country now, wups.
Well, no. That's not why we fought it. Read more about Harry Truman sometime. We fought in Korea because the League of Nations didn't stop the Italians and Japanese in the '30s. And Truman figured (in hindsight, probably incorrectly, but we didn't know just how badly the Soviets had been hurt in WW2 until the end of the USSR) that if the UN let the North Koreans get away with invading South Korea that the USA and USSR would be fighting a nuclear war within a few years. He didn't want that, so he slapped the North Koreans hard to make it clear that the UN had some teeth.
After all, if you're sending out colony ships a thousand years after a planet is newly colonised then you're assuming a certain population growth sufficient that :
(a) there's enough of a population to remain effective and sustainable after the colony ship (containing what would necessarily be a reasonable chunk of that population) leaves; and
(b) there's enough of a population - or other demand - to create the impetus to send out a colony ship.
Fecundity. Let's assume a colony ship with 10000 people on it. Let's assume a population growth rate of 1.5% per year (lower than Earth has today, by the way). In 1000 years, the "colony" has a population of 29 Billion (with a B) people. Finding 10000 of that 29000000000 who want to make the jump to the next place should be trivial.
So, no, it wouldn't take a reasonable chunk of that population (well, *I* don't consider 1/3000000th of the population a big deal, perhaps others might disagree).
Note that with a population growth rate similar to Earth's today (2%+), you would get from 10000 to 10 billion in only 700 years.
Note that a continued population growth may not be inevitable with an increasing technology. Note that finding 10000 people willing to go to the back end of beyond may be difficult if technology is sufficiently advanced (they might be too comfortable at home to want to pick up and go).
Note that if you can find 10000 people willing to make the jump every century, you'll put out 10 colonies every millenium, and each colony will begin doing so after a millenium. Under those conditions, we'd expand across the galaxy at barely under the speed of our transports, colonizing all the way (we'd put out a colony transport aimed at each star in the galaxy in under 10000 years, and the rest would just be waiting for reports back....
Funny thing, that. In the 2006 elections not a single Republican congressman won against a Democrat.
Funny thing - we still have 202 republican congresscritters. Are you suggesting that all of them were running unopposed by democrats? If so, perhaps you should review the facts of the matter.
Clinton shut down the government TWICE to make the republican congress come back with smaller budgets than they were trying to pass.
Umm, no. Clinton shut the government down TWICE to make the republican congress come back with BIGGER budgets. Or don't you remember the "the evil republicans are gutting the school lunch program!!!" (note: they weren't, they were increasing it both on a total basis and on a per-student basis - both relative to inflation - they were merely not growing it as fast as it had been crown earlier)?
Later on, of course, Clinton and the Republicans were capable of compromise, and we got a short-lived (almost) surplus.
Aren't heterosexual marriage documents still handed out by churches?
No. Churches do NOT issue marriage licenses (at least in the USA). The presiding pastor (or whatever any particular brand of religion calls the guy that does the ceremony) signs the marriage license, I believe. But it's issued by the State, not the church.
I remember a highschool experience. A teacher had a record, put it on the table. "Ok, see the hole in the middle? That's the sun. Track 1 is approximately where the earth is located. The outer edge might be pluto's orbit. Heliopause? That's probably in the teacher's parking lot. Ok, so the next closest galaxy is Alpha Centauri, so that is approximately...well, Hamilton." (We were in Toronto, Hamilton is 100km+ away).
Hmm, your teacher scalig is a bit off, eh? Hole in record is about 1/4". If that represents the diameter of the sun (about 1.4 Gm), then the Earth's orbit is about 27 inches away from the hole in the middle. Pluto's orbit is about 80 feet away.
Alpha Centauri (which is certainly the nearest star, but isn't a galaxy at all, much less the nearest one) is about 120 miles away, so nearly twice as far as Hamilton.
No comment about the Heliopause, since I don't know how far out your teachers' parking lot is. But it isn't so far beyond Pluto as is implied by this example. Maybe three times as far out as Pluto.
Perhaps there is other intelligent life out there. Let's say that our radio signals take a long time to get to whomever is listening...perhaps decades (probably longer). Then whomever out there, after researching our radio signals, decides to attempt sending a response...which in turn takes decades to get back to us. It's entirely possible we get a response to radio signals sent 50 years ago....well, 50 years from now.
Problem is, about 25 years from now, they're going to send another response...."Never mind, we really don't want to get to know you. You're all a bunch of freaks!", but we won't get that until 2075 and by that time we'll be sending battle cruisers....and it all won't matter.:D
While I can't argue with your sentiments, I feel a burning need to point out that your first paragraph put the hypothetical aliens on a world 50 lightyears away, and your second put them 25 lightyears away.
Heck, it took me 3 minutes just to write the US example and I had to use wikipedia and calculator as a help to do that. What was that guy thinking when he invented that weird system?!
Leaving aside that it wasn't invented by one guy, or even at one time...he was probably thinking that we didn't measure the distance from London to York in feet, nor the length of one's house in miles, nor did we care just how many 9/16" bolts we had to lay side by side to measure out a mile (112640, for those who might care).
Nor, for that matter, do we often find much need to know the weight of the Queen Elizabeth in pounds, nor that of Queen Elizabeth in tonnes (note the "the" - it makes a difference). And we neither knew nor cared about the difference between weight and mass.
The original Imperial measures were such a hodge-podge because a different measure was used for different things, and we seldom needed to convert from the one to another.
Now, however, things have changed. Well, not so much as might be suspected - most of us still don't have to know or care about the distinction between mass and weight.
Metric makes all sorts of conversions trivial, but few people want to make those conversions - 1 Mm == 1000000 m = 1000000000 mm is all well and good, but why would it ever matter?
Imperial still has (relatively) difficult conversions, but we have Google if we want to bother with the conversions, making them trivial.
The only real issue is when two different people use a bare number to describe something - "How far to London, mate?", "eh, two hundred, maybe two-fifty", and one is thinking in Km and the other in miles. Or when one software module is written in feet, the other in meters.
Neither of these actually happens often enough to matter for 99.99% of us, though, so why get excited about it? Especially when the Metric types don't even use the concept properly - distance to Sol? 149.6 Gigameters, NOT 149,600,000 Kilometers....
If you really want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is not measured but rather defined to be 299,792,458 m/s.
Of course, if you REALLY want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is measured, and the meter is defined as being the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second.
t'd odd then how a minimum wage doesn't ever seem to lead to unemployment problems. This supposed demon of 'eliminating jobs for the poor' is a complete red herring. There's no evidence for it at all.
Then why not solve our poverty problems by setting minimum wage to $100 per hour? It won't cause unemployment, you say, so there should be absolutely no downside to doing so.
That said, there is a clear link between unemployment and minimum wage. It's a small link, but it's there - something around 2% change in unemployment per 10% change in minimum wage (increase minimum wage from $5 to $5.5 (10% increase), see unemployment change from 5% to 5.1% (2% of 5% is 0.1%)).
Note that the effect applies to a sudden change - increase minimum wage by 3% per year, and the effect would be absorbed from year to year with only short-lived blips in employment rate. Raise minimum wage by 100% in a year, and see a big jump in unemployment, taking rather longer to recover.
Note further that US unemployment numbers really do indicate a shortage of workers. So increasing minimum wage will have negligible impact on employment.
And, finally, note that the US tends to adjust its minimum wage during periods like this - more jobs than workers to fill them. We don't tweak the minimum wage when the economy is weak, so it's harder to see the relation between minimum wage and unemployment.
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No matter how much (a) it has, if it is hard enough, it will strip the rifling grooves right out of the barrel, and won't hit worth crap. A bullet isn't supposed to be hard. Unless we're talking about the Penetrator of a Discarding Sabot round.
"Multinational" is a nice buzzword to exclude a great deal of history.
The Spanish founded their fist city in the Americas in 1498. Havana was founded in 1515. The Spanish had colonized All non-Portuguese parts of South America by the mid 1500's. And the Portuguese had colonized Brazil by the early 1500's.
It was only the Anglos and French who were late getting to the New World by 100+ years. Which had more to do with them (the Anglos and French) being European backwaters at the time than anything else.
For more insight into this:
during WW2 on the Russian Front, the Russian soldier would discard their own SMG's in favour of the Erma (aka Schmeiser) SMG used by the German soldiers whenever opportunity presented itself.
The German soldiers tended instead to ditch their Ermas in favour of the Russian SMG whenever opportunity presented itself.
In other words, the Grass is Always Greener....
Umm, no. "Assault Rifle" and "Assault Weapon" are two entirely different things. "Assault Rifle" refers to those military weapons you've been discussing as if civilians had access to them. "Assault Weapon" refers to the semi-automatic versions of those same weapons that civilians can own.
Note exceptions for people with the appropriate license, of course. If you're willing to undergo the background checks, pay the fees, and allow your home to be inspected by BATF at irregular intervals, then you can own a real "Assault Rifle".
Whether or how to regulate weapons of all types is a much more complicated question, but to argue that there is no distinction between handguns, hunting rifles, and assault weapons is simply ignoring the truth.
There is amazingly little difference between "Assault Weapons" and hunting rifles, really. Two hands, pull the trigger and a bullet goes downrange fast. Generally, hunting rifles are more powerful, not because they need to be, but because we tend to hunt animals at greater ranges than we hunt humans, and we tend to want one-shot kills when hunting animals - a wound is generally good enough when hunting humans, since we don't really care if the meat gets spoiled by panic and fear.
By the by, an AK-47 round (7.62x39) is ballistically very similar to the .30-30, a very popular hunting round in some places. Also note that an M-16 is almost useless for serious hunting, since most States do not allow you to hunt deer (or other large animals) with a caliber that small. And if you're hunting small game, a .22LR is effective enough, and an order of magnitude cheaper.
Luckily for you that it's largely illegal to own a fully automatic weapon. Yah, there are exceptions (get the License, pay the fees, allow BATF to do random inspections of your home), but in general, fully automatic weapons are illegal.
That said, you're mistaken in believing that a man carrying only a shotgun couldn't have done this. Would have been easy with just a pump-action shotgun (which can be fired about as fast as a semi-automatic), since you don't often have to shoot someone twice with a 12 gauge to make him stop twitching. Unlike most semi-automatic weapons....
Does "Tamerlane" mean anything to you? How about "Timur the Lame"?
Hint: He was the guy who ordered the destruction of the Persian Empire by the Mongols. From what I've read, it was a bit like Pol Pot, but more thorough - killed everyone but the peasants, and killed most of them. By the time the Mongols were through with the Islamic world, it was a gutted ruin, with the exception of Muslim Spain - Granada, Cordoba, and the like. Which were destroyed by the Castillian Kings, though not so thoroughly as the Mongols did it.
Great idea! So, 50000000 million homes at $100000 per. The government can surely come up with the five TRILLION dollars to pay for all that, right?
No arrests, no charges, no removal of embeds from other places. I'd say it was at least semi-officially approved. I remember screaming at the TV when I saw that - if I'd been in that armour unit at the time, I'd have shot the guy. By accident, of course.
I still don't trust the American media to behave any way other than irresponsibly in warfare....
The Germans didn't even WANT America. They didn't want France. Conquest wasn't actually the name of the game in WW1 - they were after political settlements. And they started that war because their warplans for fighting Russia required them to fight France (it's all in the train schedules. and the interlocking treaties). What they wanted was to knock the French out of the war, which was very possible in 1918. Their 1918 offensives failed badly, but did NOT leave the Germans down for the count. At the end of the German offensives, the German General Staff decided that the best resolution to the War was to become a democracy and ask for terms (they thought Wilson had more influence than the French were willing to give him), so they asked the Kaisar to step down, he did, they asked for an armistice.
At that point, the German Army was essentially intact, and still getting stronger with the continuing return of troops from the East.
I am aware of the United States' assistance to the Allied powers in WWI. I do not know how much that actually contributed to the stalement and eventual defeat of Germany. I do know that it made German attacks on our ships an inevitability.
WW2, I hope you mean?
Regarding the Philippines; why were we there in the first place? The Philippine islands are not part of the 50 United States, and our involvement there seems to be a textbook case of United States imperialism. We acquired the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War (no more justified than the current Iraq war), and subsequently fought the Philippine revolutionaries for 15 years.
And we had granted the Philippines independence in the '30s. Actually, we began the process of transitioning them to independence then, with a scheduled date for full independence in the mid-40s, as I recall.
The United States ended up using the Philippines to goad the Japanese into a fight. One of our actions was to bring long-range strategic bombers into the Philippines, from which the only target was Japan (and Japanese-held China). The Japanese couldn't afford not to invade the Philippines.
Umm, no. We had around 20 bombers in the Philippines, not one of which could reach Japan. Remember, it took the B-29 before we had a bomber that could pound Japan regularly, and those had to be based closer to Japan than the Philippines. The Japanese invaded the Philippines for the same reason they invaded the Dutch East Indies - because they were valuable pieces of real-estate. And note that even up to the end of 1941, it was not CERTAIN that the Japanese would invade the Philippines, since there was a rather large (though underequipped) Army there at the time, and while the Japanese Navy was impressive, their Army was nothing special, and tied up in China mostly.
Our capability to smash the Japanese was limited at the beginning of WWII. However, three things stand out concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor. The first is FDR's relieving of Admiral Richardson in February, 1941, over Richardson's refusal to keep the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. The second is the failure of Washington D.C. to communicate the Japanese declaration of war to Pearl Harbor. A third is FDR's "Vacant Seas" order that forbade Admiral Kimmel's reconnaisance of the Prokofiev Seamount, from which the Japanese attack was launched. Thus, I believe it to be a reasonable conclusion that we were purposefully drawn into a war without investigating possible alternati
You may be too young to remember (or not), but during the Liberation of Kuwait, a Saudi tank battalion with an embedded journalist moved forward to the border during the first few hours of the ground war.
The embed went on CNN live to announce that "the battalion I'm embedded with has moved forward to the berm separating Saudi Arabia from Kuwait" and that "the Iraqis don't seem to be aware we've moved, since they're shelling our base camp a few miles behind us".
So, we can fairly accurately say that you are mistaken - ONE (at least) country is stupid enough to allow people to publish such information. And at least one network is dumb enough to not realize that broadcasting that information might be a bad thing.
Note that this worked both ways, of course - CNN also broadcast from Baghdad at that time (illegally and secretly, so the Iraqis wouldn't arrest/shoot them), which provided our guys with some useful intelligence (while showing that intelligence was in short supply at CNN).
Because it was an anagram of "One"?
No. Read some history. The Bill of Rights was proposed as part of the Constitution, and was rejected on the grounds that specifying Rights would lead some in Government to suppose that the ONLY Rights were those specified (odd, how that seems to have come to pass).
Pretty much the first act of the First Congress was to propose 12 Amendments to the Constitution - 10 were adopted immediately as the Bill of Rights, one was only approved in the last decade or so, and one was rejected by the States.
Well, no, it doesn't. Population growth rates on Earth are greater than 2% per year. Some people die every year, some are born every year, but on balance, there are 2% more at the end of the year than at the beginning. Please note that I did NOT specify a Birth Rate of 1.5%, but a growth rate of 1.5%.
If we assume a fairly normal kind of human span - say we round it up to 100 years to allow for better medical technology - then after 1,000 years your 10,000 hardy colonists becomes a bit under a tenth (2.2billion) of the linear 29 billion. Now that's a fairly rough and ready working based on killing off the population count at the turn of the previous century every hundred years. ie at year 100 we have 44,000 colonists but 10,000 of them (the original crew) die, leaving 34,000. At year 1,000 we have 2.9billion colonists but the 660million around at year 900 die off leaving 2.2billion.
If we assume that my Growth Rate were meant as a Birth Rate, you're quite correct. It wasn't so meant.
Note that Growth Rates are declining worldwide. Traditionally (which means, "when I was a lad", of course), they were well over 2.5% - thus the "Population Bomb" that was discussed so much back then. They've been declining for a long time now, and the latest projections show them declining into negative numbers within this century, and population beginning to decline worldwide - which'll have an unpredictable effect on the urge to colonize.
In any case, a 1.5% population growth rate isn't terribly unreasonable for a colony. Though it won't really be a "colony" by the time it has a population over one billion. Realistically, I expect that any colony world will settle at a stable, sustainable population in the low billions by the first millenium after landing, or shortly thereafter.
That said, even if it take 10,000 years for a colony to start expanding with its own colony ships, that doesn't especially increase the time required to colonize the galaxy - limiting factor will still be transport speed, so we'll (or our hypothetical alien overlords will) fill the galaxy at a speed slightly slower than our transports can cross it - one million years at 10% of c, which is an eyeblink in the lifetime of the universe....
Well, actually Hitler was a corporal when we came in. Note also that Russia surrendered and that the Germans were moving the troops used in Russia west at that time. Note also the German Offensives of 1918, whicb broke the stalemate of the previous years quite nicely (unfortunately, it didn't break them in German favour).
WWII? Lies and bullshit. The Russians beat Hitler before we arrived, and if FDR hadn't personally allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, we would have smacked them down like a bug.
The Battle of Stalingrad, which is widely considered the turning point of WW2 on the Eastern Front, occurred one year after the USA entered the War formally. Note that the USA was supplying both the Soviets and the British for several years before that point, up to the point of providing convoy escorts to protect shipping from the Germans.
As to Japan - we wouldn't have "smacked them down like a bug" sans Pearl Harbour. Arguably, Pearl Harbour was the most idiotic operation of WW2, placing Japan in the completely untenable position (pissing us off enough to make pounding them into the ground something other than a sideshow wasn't smart, and destroying our battleline in the Pacific probably HELPED us more than hurt us) of having to fight the largest industrial base in the world essentially alone. Note that with or without Pearl Harbour, we would have lost the Philippines - we didn't have the transport required to resupply our Army in the Philippines, even if the Japanese has been gracious enough to allow our merchant hulls free passage through their lines, much less with the Japanese actually treating us like we were the enemy. At the beginning of 1942, remember, the US Navy was no larger than the Imperial Japanese Navy, and was spread over two-plus oceans, rather than concentrated in one like the IJN was.
The vast military-industrial machine that beat the Japanese and the Germans was in its infancy in 1942 - our ability to "smack down" anyone was quite limited then - only reason we survived that War was that we were too far from the fighting to be pounded by the other lads....
Korean war? Oh man we fought communism so well, too bad we're a socialist country now, wups.
Well, no. That's not why we fought it. Read more about Harry Truman sometime. We fought in Korea because the League of Nations didn't stop the Italians and Japanese in the '30s. And Truman figured (in hindsight, probably incorrectly, but we didn't know just how badly the Soviets had been hurt in WW2 until the end of the USSR) that if the UN let the North Koreans get away with invading South Korea that the USA and USSR would be fighting a nuclear war within a few years. He didn't want that, so he slapped the North Koreans hard to make it clear that the UN had some teeth.
(a) there's enough of a population to remain effective and sustainable after the colony ship (containing what would necessarily be a reasonable chunk of that population) leaves; and
(b) there's enough of a population - or other demand - to create the impetus to send out a colony ship.
Fecundity. Let's assume a colony ship with 10000 people on it. Let's assume a population growth rate of 1.5% per year (lower than Earth has today, by the way). In 1000 years, the "colony" has a population of 29 Billion (with a B) people. Finding 10000 of that 29000000000 who want to make the jump to the next place should be trivial.
So, no, it wouldn't take a reasonable chunk of that population (well, *I* don't consider 1/3000000th of the population a big deal, perhaps others might disagree).
Note that with a population growth rate similar to Earth's today (2%+), you would get from 10000 to 10 billion in only 700 years.
Note that a continued population growth may not be inevitable with an increasing technology. Note that finding 10000 people willing to go to the back end of beyond may be difficult if technology is sufficiently advanced (they might be too comfortable at home to want to pick up and go).
Note that if you can find 10000 people willing to make the jump every century, you'll put out 10 colonies every millenium, and each colony will begin doing so after a millenium. Under those conditions, we'd expand across the galaxy at barely under the speed of our transports, colonizing all the way (we'd put out a colony transport aimed at each star in the galaxy in under 10000 years, and the rest would just be waiting for reports back....
Funny thing - we still have 202 republican congresscritters. Are you suggesting that all of them were running unopposed by democrats? If so, perhaps you should review the facts of the matter.
Umm, no. Clinton shut the government down TWICE to make the republican congress come back with BIGGER budgets. Or don't you remember the "the evil republicans are gutting the school lunch program!!!" (note: they weren't, they were increasing it both on a total basis and on a per-student basis - both relative to inflation - they were merely not growing it as fast as it had been crown earlier)?
Later on, of course, Clinton and the Republicans were capable of compromise, and we got a short-lived (almost) surplus.
No. Churches do NOT issue marriage licenses (at least in the USA). The presiding pastor (or whatever any particular brand of religion calls the guy that does the ceremony) signs the marriage license, I believe. But it's issued by the State, not the church.
I had no idea soccer fields were so large. American Rules Football only uses a 100 yard field.
Hmm, your teacher scalig is a bit off, eh? Hole in record is about 1/4". If that represents the diameter of the sun (about 1.4 Gm), then the Earth's orbit is about 27 inches away from the hole in the middle. Pluto's orbit is about 80 feet away. Alpha Centauri (which is certainly the nearest star, but isn't a galaxy at all, much less the nearest one) is about 120 miles away, so nearly twice as far as Hamilton.
No comment about the Heliopause, since I don't know how far out your teachers' parking lot is. But it isn't so far beyond Pluto as is implied by this example. Maybe three times as far out as Pluto.
Problem is, about 25 years from now, they're going to send another response...."Never mind, we really don't want to get to know you. You're all a bunch of freaks!", but we won't get that until 2075 and by that time we'll be sending battle cruisers....and it all won't matter. :D
While I can't argue with your sentiments, I feel a burning need to point out that your first paragraph put the hypothetical aliens on a world 50 lightyears away, and your second put them 25 lightyears away.
- Metric: 1 km = 1000 m = 1000000 mm
- US system: 1 ml = 1760 yd = 5280 ft = 63360 in
Heck, it took me 3 minutes just to write the US example and I had to use wikipedia and calculator as a help to do that. What was that guy thinking when he invented that weird system?!
Leaving aside that it wasn't invented by one guy, or even at one time...he was probably thinking that we didn't measure the distance from London to York in feet, nor the length of one's house in miles, nor did we care just how many 9/16" bolts we had to lay side by side to measure out a mile (112640, for those who might care).
Nor, for that matter, do we often find much need to know the weight of the Queen Elizabeth in pounds, nor that of Queen Elizabeth in tonnes (note the "the" - it makes a difference). And we neither knew nor cared about the difference between weight and mass.
The original Imperial measures were such a hodge-podge because a different measure was used for different things, and we seldom needed to convert from the one to another.
Now, however, things have changed. Well, not so much as might be suspected - most of us still don't have to know or care about the distinction between mass and weight.
Metric makes all sorts of conversions trivial, but few people want to make those conversions - 1 Mm == 1000000 m = 1000000000 mm is all well and good, but why would it ever matter?
Imperial still has (relatively) difficult conversions, but we have Google if we want to bother with the conversions, making them trivial.
The only real issue is when two different people use a bare number to describe something - "How far to London, mate?", "eh, two hundred, maybe two-fifty", and one is thinking in Km and the other in miles. Or when one software module is written in feet, the other in meters.
Neither of these actually happens often enough to matter for 99.99% of us, though, so why get excited about it? Especially when the Metric types don't even use the concept properly - distance to Sol? 149.6 Gigameters, NOT 149,600,000 Kilometers....
Of course, if you REALLY want to be pedantic, the speed of light in a vacuum is measured, and the meter is defined as being the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second.
Then why not solve our poverty problems by setting minimum wage to $100 per hour? It won't cause unemployment, you say, so there should be absolutely no downside to doing so.
That said, there is a clear link between unemployment and minimum wage. It's a small link, but it's there - something around 2% change in unemployment per 10% change in minimum wage (increase minimum wage from $5 to $5.5 (10% increase), see unemployment change from 5% to 5.1% (2% of 5% is 0.1%)).
Note that the effect applies to a sudden change - increase minimum wage by 3% per year, and the effect would be absorbed from year to year with only short-lived blips in employment rate. Raise minimum wage by 100% in a year, and see a big jump in unemployment, taking rather longer to recover.
Note further that US unemployment numbers really do indicate a shortage of workers. So increasing minimum wage will have negligible impact on employment.
And, finally, note that the US tends to adjust its minimum wage during periods like this - more jobs than workers to fill them. We don't tweak the minimum wage when the economy is weak, so it's harder to see the relation between minimum wage and unemployment.
Umm, no. Legal limits on abortion in the USA are pretty much set at "before labor commences".