You _are_ aware, are you not, that things like highways, fire brigades, the CDC or indeed a standing army are not covered by that constitution of yours?
Umm, no.
Standing Army would be covered under Section 8 (Powers of Congress) "To raise and support Armies...".
The CDC is arguable, but in the same section we have "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" which could cover the CDC. That said, when the CDC got into the Gon Control debate, they lost any respect I might have had for what they do.
Fire Brigades? Those are funded by municipalities and other local governments. They're not even State level, much less national.
Highways? "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;" from Section 8 seems to cover that nicely, without even invoking "general Welfare" or "common Defence" - remember that the Interstate Highway System was built to facilitate military movements.
In Sweden different parties have differently coloured papers.
In America, we don't vote for a Party, we vote for a candidate. And usually for more than one. Last federal election, I got to vote for President, Senator, Representative, Governor, Lt. Governor (our Lt. Governor isn't the running mate for the Governor), State Senator, State Representative, Council President, two At-Large Council members, one Council member for my district, two Judges, and four or five State Constitutional Amendments.
And there might have been a School Board member or two thrown in - I tend to ignore them since my kid doesn't use the Public School System, so I don't remember for sure....
Chernobal happened because of human error and government not spending enough on safety.
Umm, no. Well, maybe the human error part, but not the safety part.
Chernobyl happened because the Russian version of the NRC wanted to determine how much power could be extracted from a nuclear power plant while a meltdown was happening. This information was desired so that they could make better plans for dealing with a meltdown, by the way.
Soooo...they picked a power plant - Chernobyl. They disabled ALL safety features of the plant. They simulated a meltdown (read: they pushed it as far toward a meltdown as they thought was safe). Then they reacted to the simulated meltdown as they should, and measured carefully the amount of power they were still capable of extracting (that was the point of the test, remember?).
Alas, "as they thought was safe" wasn't actually the same as "safe". So their simulated meltdown became a real meltdown. And since they had disabled all the safety features (they had to, or they could not have "simulated" a meltdown - it wouldn't meltdown with the safety features in place), they got a catastrophe for their troubles.
It had nothing to do with lack of safety features. The plant had plenty of them, all deliberately disabled. The only real human error (besides not shooting the engineer who said "hey, we could test this by...") was misjudging how far into unsafe you could push the reactor without bad things happening - the crew of the reactor did an admirable job of dealing with an impossible situation, actually.
Do the maths: taking the earth as 6,000,000m across and an average density of 2t/m^3:
Better to take it as 13,000,000 meters across (12,756,274, more or less), and an average density of 5.5t/m^3. Then your results might come close to matching reality.
Seriously, I do not see a problem with doing research on fertilized eggs when there is 0% chance of them developing into people.
I don't see a problem with doing destructive research on 3 month old babies, either. They can't survive on their own (drop one in the woods sometime, come back in a week, and see if it's still alive), they're not intelligent (hell, they can't even talk, much less type), and they're just a parasite on their parents (ever checked the cost of raising a kid? outrageous that a man or woman should be required to bear such costs against their will).
The general thrust of the arguments are quite correct - it's a matter of drawing the line between a "person" and a non-person. Personally, I'm in favour of the "quickening" line (when they start moving in the womb - my daughter used to stop moving whenever I spoke - not sure if she was hiding from the booming voice or listening to it), which happens late in the second or early in the third trimester.
But one must remember that the progess of civilization has been the process of defining more and more non-people as "people" through history. This may be the first time in a long time we've decided to exclude something that used to be considered "people"....
I have already explained that I was only talking about the European theatre.
The first American attack on German-occupied Europe was by the Eighth Air Force, in July 1942. Which was a month before Staligrad started. Sorry to burst your bubble.
1. Lend-lease was only money. As far as I am concerned, dying is the ultimate sacrifice. Which would you rather lose, your life or a tiny fraction of your fortune? Twenty-two million Russians died in WW2; in Europe, U.S. casualties barely exceeded that of Latvia. The American sacrifice was not worthy of being called a major contribution.
2. Even at its height, Lend-Lease accounted for only a quarter of Britain's war fighting capability.
3. Lend-Lease was only a loan. Britain is still paying it off, 50 years later.
1) Umm, no. Lend-lease was tanks, planes, ships, trucks, food, fuel, etc. Wasn't money at all.
2) Lend-lease wasn't just about Britain. Russia received tanks, planes, trucks, fuel, gold braid (yes, that was actually considered an important item to the Russians - they were trying to reconstitute an officer corps devastated by the purges in the 30's). Actually, pretty much every country in the war (except the lads on the other side) received enormous amounts of equipment from the USA.
3) Umm, no. Lend-lease was never about money, it was about equipment. The whole point of lend-lease is that it didn't require payment, just return of the equipment when you were done with it. Which was generally completed by 1947. Note that most lend-lease stuff was never returned, and we didn't really expect it to be returned - that was just a useful fiction to allow us to help the British/Russians/everyone else without getting Congress in a snit about giveaways.
If the U.S. generals wanted to invade Europe before 1944, they must have thought it was feasible. But for whatever reason, the U.S. held off, risking only its money in the European theatre, until most of the heaviest fighting and dying were over. The proof that the U.S. had it relatively easy after D-Day is the level of U.S. casualties in Europe compared to the other Allies. When the U.S. sacrificed only about as much in Europe as little Latvia did, it cannot fairly claim a major share of the credit for victory.
They thought so. They were wrong. The USA invaded France at about the earliest possible point in history. Note, by the way, that the British had no capability at all to invade France - those were American landing craft they came ashore in.
Of course, one could look at the small number of American casualties as proof of our superior skill inwarfare . Actually, it was mostly proof of our absolute air supremacy. Which allowed us to fight the Germans at an advantage whenever we fought them.
The U.S. stopped at Berlin because the Soviets were there first. Why do you think the Cold War began almost immediately after WW2? It was because two gigantic armies, that of the Western Allies and that of the Soviet Union, were nose to nose in Berlin in 1945.
Umm, no. Eisenhower announced that the USA/UK would not take Berlin at the end of March. The USSR didn't begin attacking Berlin until the 16th of April, and didn't actually enter the city for another five days.
Berlin was partitioned similarly to Germany as a whole, though that particular decision was not made until the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, two months after the end of the war in Europe. So the city didn't actually have two large armies facing each other - the American and British Armies were mostly in West Germany, with only token units in Berlin (and that only after July). The Cold War started because neither the UK nor the USA really trusted the USSR, and vice versa. And, interestingly, there is some evidence that the Cold War happened largely as a result of Stalin's desire to hide from the West just how badly the USSR was hurt in WW2 - they worked hard to convince us they were capable of overrunning Europe because they were afraid we'd overrun THEM if we knew how weak they really were.
"The New Horizons spacecraft will be the fastest ever launched, more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet.".
The same article said "According to The Physics Factbook, a bullet from a large-caliber rifle travels about 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) per second -- about 3,400 mph (5,400 kph)".
It is certainly possible that the Physics Factbook says this. Which just shows that the people who wrote it are idiots. Most rifle bullets don't manage 1000 meters per second. A very few manage 1200 meters per second (discarding sabot rounds, usually).
Of course, most modern tank guns can manage 1500 meters per second. But they're not rifled....
Note: the Physics Factbook is an "encyclopedia of scientific essays written by high school students". Hopefully the students know more about physics than they do about rifle bullets.
In fact, it has been argued that the U.S. stayed out of WW II until it became obvious, a year and a half after the destruction of much of the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Stalingrad, that the Soviet Union was about to win.
Really? So, we waited till a year and a half after the Battle of Stalingrad (Aug42-Feb43) to enter WW2? And here I thought we entered in December 1941! How silly of me!
Useful clue: Examine carefully the effects of Lend-Lease. Which was a clear violation of international neutrality laws, and which went into place in March 1941. Nine months before we officially entered the war.
Another useful clue: Examine the US Navy's role in convoy defense prior to December 1941. Also a clear violation in international neutrality laws.
And one last useful clue: We originally planned to invade continental Europe in 1942, but the British (rather sensibly) talked us out of it. We hadn't the landing craft, the aircraft, or the naval presence to actually do it then. We then planned to do so in 1943. The British talked us out of it again. Basically the same reasons applied, plus the British wanted to invade Italy. We finally amassed enough landing craft (did you know that landing craft were the limiting factor in every major allied amphibious operation? we had to schedule the silly things a year in advance, since we didn't have enough at any point in the War to perform two amphibious operations simultaneously) in 1944, and we had a go at invading France. Things worked fine. Almost. We actually couldn't properly supply the army we put into France in 1944. Most of the allied (read British, American, French) activities in Europe after D-Day were limited due to our inability to ship enough fuel/ammo to the lads at the front. Frankly, we should have waited another year.
Note, by the way, that if the Russian's "winning" WW2 were the impetus for us to get serious about the war, we wouldn't have stopped short of Berlin. Which, if you'll remember, we did.
Canada, Mexico and the US average 170kg of copper use per person, and the most generous estimates suggest that only 1.6 billion unused metric tons exist. More reclamation and use of fiber, wireless, and PVC helps - but won't be enough to cover the billions of people who don't yet live in highly wired/mechanized societies."
Seems to me that at 170Kg a head, 1.6 billion tons is enough to support 9.6 billion people. At the standards to which we in North America have become accustomed. So, where exactly is the shortage?
Well look at it this way. We have all that technology now, and yet a quarter of the world is still starving.
Well, no. Even the most generous estimates for "hunger" I have seen put the number of "hungry" people at no more than 1/7th the world's population.
Note also that the definition of "hunger" used in those estimates is that those people missed a meal at least once. Which, amazingly, puts me in that category.
Despite the fact that my doctor wants me to lose weight, I am officially among the "hungry" of the world.
It seems the time-shifting argument has been abused to mean "If it was on TV it's mine forever"... but technically we have no such right do we?
No, no, no!
We have only Rights to keep copies made for time-shifting for limited periods. Certainly no forever. Say, forever less one day? Or perhaps we should be generous to the poor Copyright holders, and limit our time-shifting to the life of the media less one day?
A quick calculation of the amount of material needed. Lets assume it's lightweight and superstrong in addition to being very efficient. Lets go with 2,700 kg/m^3, 1cm thick, and 40% overall system efficiency (including power beaming). For safety, it would have to be, say, at least 0.1 AU from the sun. That's 1.5e10 meters radius, so given the surface area of a sphere as 4*pi*r^2, that's 2.8e21 square meters. With 1 cm thickness, we're talking about 2.8e19 cubic meters, and thus 7.6e22 kilograms (760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg).
One of the slowest advancing techs is rocketry (sadly). Current launch prices range from 7-15k$/kg just to get things to *LEO*.
All these calculations, and it never occurred to you that 7.6e22 Kg is about 1% of the mass of the entire planet?? Getting the stuff to LEO isn't even in the same league as the problem of stripmining the top 20Km of the entire planet's surface to come up with that amount of material....
Yes, but there's a big difference between escape velocity which is radial, and orbital speed which is tangential.
Umm, no. Escape Velocity is misnamed, really. Properly, it's Escape Speed. Any velocity vector whose magnitude is equal to Escape Speed at a given point in space will escape, as long as the direction of the vector doesn't hit anything (like the object you're escaping, for instance).
For that matter, orbital velocity is similarly misnamed. Any velocity vector whose magnitude is less than Escape Speed will "orbit", given the limits that it doesn't hit anything (like the object you're orbitting). Even then, it orbits until the impact.
above the critical limit for being able to orbit is outside the event horizon (actually its at 3MG/c^2 expressed in metres from the singularity, whereas the Event Horizon for a non-spinning black hole is at 2MG/c^2)
Let's see, Orbital Speed is sqrt(Rg), where R is distance from the point you're orbitting, and g is the local acceleration due to gravity. g = Gm/(R^2), so orbital velocity is sqrt(Gm/R). If orbital velocity is c, then R = Gm/c^2.
Escape Speed is sqrt(2Rg). Which reduces down to R = 2Gm/c^2, for the Event Horizon of a black hole.
Looks to me like the radius of orbit of an object moving at c is inside the Event Horizon.
Note, of course, that I am using strictly Newtonian orbital mechanics here. The region near an Event Horizon is nowhere near flat enough for Newtonian physics to apply all that well.
Nonetheless, the assumption that you made reduces down to orbital speed > escape speed, which is absurd on the face of it.
Because there's a critical distance away from the black hole below which matter cannot orbit because the orbital speed would be greater than the speed of light. So anything orbiting that reaches the critical orbital radius (which depends on the black hole's mass) will be sucked in.
True, so far as it goes.
But...
The Event Horizon marks the surface where Escape Velocity is lightspeed. Circular Orbital Velocity is only sqrt(0.5) times Escape Velocity, so orbital velocity at the Event Horizon is less than lightspeed.
In other words, that "critical orbital radius" you mentioned in beyond the Event Horizon, thus anything there has already been sucked in....
Not exactly. Your cell phone calls are broadcast on public airwaves, remember? You have no reasonable Right to privacy for anything that you essentially shout from the rooftops.
Note that this does not in any way imply approval for the behaviour of whomever is selling such information. But Right to Privacy isn't covered here. Actually, even the content of a cell phone conversation (remember, broadcast on public aairwaves) isn't reasonably "private", unless encrypted. And compressed != encrypted.
Free speech is a human right. (It is stated in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and although it isn't a legally binding document, this right is reformulated in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (by coincidence also article 19) which is a legally binding document).
China signed this a few months ago (oct 2005) - they haven't ratified it. Or even had time to implement it, assuming they wanted to. Which is unlikely.
Britain won't generally allow a person to be held without specific charge for more than 24 hours, yet Kevin Mitnick was not brought to trial for many years
This is slightly misleading. Mitnick was CHARGED within the legal limits (72 hours?), but his trial did not occur for years. Being charged is not the same as going to trial.
Note also that "four" could be considered "many", but I've always found "four" to be considered "few", as in "...was not brought to trial for a few years".
I see nothing wrong with making it illegal to mention the candidate by name. It's harder to sling mud (for example) and affects everyone equally. How could that be bad?
Well, you see, we have this little thing called the First Amendment. If I'm not mistaken, it pretty much guarantees free speech. Free speech should allow me to mention a candidate's name if I want to.
And you blame this on CFR? CFR had no effect on this fact one way or another.
Quite so. Of course, since CFR made it harder to get the challenger's name mentioned, without making it harder to get the incumbent's name mentioned, one might surmise that the net effect was to shift teh balance of publicity in favour of the incumbent.
I agree that it was not a perfect law--Hardly any law is. But if you are against the very idea of the law, which is stopping the rich and corporately-sponsored from being the only ones that can compete, then by default you are FOR the Golden Rule.
The very idea of the law is to limit political speech. Which is the very thing the First Amendment was meant to protect most.
If you can come up with a law that will have the effect of "stopping the rich and corporately-sponsored from being the only ones that can compete", without trampliinng on ANYONE's civil rights (yes, even politicians and politician wannabees have civil rights), then go to town! I'd not mind seeing such a law. This law, however, didn't do any of the things you think it did, and DID trample on some civil rights. No plus, a big minus, makes for a bad law, not an inadequate law.
In this case it seems that you are saying he didn't succeed well enough, so therefore it's better to not have tried at all. That seems absurd to me and is hardly a solid reason to dislike a candidate altogether.
I am saying that his effect was to help the incumbents, not to remove money from politics. Everyone knows laws have unintended consequences. If he doesn't know that, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President. If he DOES know that, and couldn't foresee the abuses his CFRA would allow, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President. If he knows that, and DID foresee the abuses possible in the CFRA, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President.
Sorry, demonstrating his incompetence by passing a law with so many potential abuses (note that both the NRA and ACLU dislike this law - an odd conjunction of interests indeed) is not something that makes me think the man is ready to be President.
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A horse and a donkey can produce a mule, which is infertile.
Not always. Occasionally, a female mule is fertile. Which just goes to show that things are even woolier than one might expect.
So far, I've not heard of a definition of species that is inclusive of everything we like to think of as different species, while exclusive of everything we'd like to think of as the same species.
Which just means we need to work on definitions a bit more. Every time a Creationist points out an exception, he's pointing out a place where we need to tweak the definition until it actually means what we want it to mean (as opposed to letting him tweak it till it means what HE wants it to mean).
They're in business to tickle the fickle prejudices of 14-year-olds. 'Twas ever thus.
Well, no. The music business (and every other business in the USA) became interested in the "fickle prejudices of 14-year-olds" sometime in the late 50's-early 60's. That was when it became apparent that unlike earlier times, 14-year-olds (I use the euphemism to represent all "kids" from 5-early adulthood) had MONEY TO SPEND! Quite a lot of it, in fact. Enough to get the executives salivating at the thought of a mass of money in the hands of people who didn't have ANY of their money earmarked to things like paying the bills....
A law making it illegal to mention a candidate by name under certain conditions.
Which doesn't apply to the incumbent, because he can always get into the news by proposing some legislation.
Sounds like Incumbent Protection more than Campaign Finance Reform.
And, of course, we can look at the actual results. Oh, look! It did NOT reduce the spending by third parties in campaigns. Nor did it reduce the requirement that candidates whore themselves out for the money required to be elected.
It DID change the specific means of getting money to the candidate, so I guess that's some sort of "reform". It also raised the limits on individual contributions....
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, no.
Standing Army would be covered under Section 8 (Powers of Congress) "To raise and support Armies...".
The CDC is arguable, but in the same section we have "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" which could cover the CDC. That said, when the CDC got into the Gon Control debate, they lost any respect I might have had for what they do.
Fire Brigades? Those are funded by municipalities and other local governments. They're not even State level, much less national.
Highways? "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;" from Section 8 seems to cover that nicely, without even invoking "general Welfare" or "common Defence" - remember that the Interstate Highway System was built to facilitate military movements.
In America, we don't vote for a Party, we vote for a candidate. And usually for more than one. Last federal election, I got to vote for President, Senator, Representative, Governor, Lt. Governor (our Lt. Governor isn't the running mate for the Governor), State Senator, State Representative, Council President, two At-Large Council members, one Council member for my district, two Judges, and four or five State Constitutional Amendments.
And there might have been a School Board member or two thrown in - I tend to ignore them since my kid doesn't use the Public School System, so I don't remember for sure....
He used to be a prosecutor, and apparently has long wanted the money-laundering laws to be broadened in scope, to make it easier for prosecutors....
Umm, no. Well, maybe the human error part, but not the safety part.
Chernobyl happened because the Russian version of the NRC wanted to determine how much power could be extracted from a nuclear power plant while a meltdown was happening. This information was desired so that they could make better plans for dealing with a meltdown, by the way.
Soooo...they picked a power plant - Chernobyl. They disabled ALL safety features of the plant. They simulated a meltdown (read: they pushed it as far toward a meltdown as they thought was safe). Then they reacted to the simulated meltdown as they should, and measured carefully the amount of power they were still capable of extracting (that was the point of the test, remember?).
Alas, "as they thought was safe" wasn't actually the same as "safe". So their simulated meltdown became a real meltdown. And since they had disabled all the safety features (they had to, or they could not have "simulated" a meltdown - it wouldn't meltdown with the safety features in place), they got a catastrophe for their troubles.
It had nothing to do with lack of safety features. The plant had plenty of them, all deliberately disabled. The only real human error (besides not shooting the engineer who said "hey, we could test this by...") was misjudging how far into unsafe you could push the reactor without bad things happening - the crew of the reactor did an admirable job of dealing with an impossible situation, actually.
Better to take it as 13,000,000 meters across (12,756,274, more or less), and an average density of 5.5t/m^3. Then your results might come close to matching reality.
I don't see a problem with doing destructive research on 3 month old babies, either. They can't survive on their own (drop one in the woods sometime, come back in a week, and see if it's still alive), they're not intelligent (hell, they can't even talk, much less type), and they're just a parasite on their parents (ever checked the cost of raising a kid? outrageous that a man or woman should be required to bear such costs against their will).
The general thrust of the arguments are quite correct - it's a matter of drawing the line between a "person" and a non-person. Personally, I'm in favour of the "quickening" line (when they start moving in the womb - my daughter used to stop moving whenever I spoke - not sure if she was hiding from the booming voice or listening to it), which happens late in the second or early in the third trimester.
But one must remember that the progess of civilization has been the process of defining more and more non-people as "people" through history. This may be the first time in a long time we've decided to exclude something that used to be considered "people"....
The first American attack on German-occupied Europe was by the Eighth Air Force, in July 1942. Which was a month before Staligrad started. Sorry to burst your bubble.
1. Lend-lease was only money. As far as I am concerned, dying is the ultimate sacrifice. Which would you rather lose, your life or a tiny fraction of your fortune? Twenty-two million Russians died in WW2; in Europe, U.S. casualties barely exceeded that of Latvia. The American sacrifice was not worthy of being called a major contribution.
2. Even at its height, Lend-Lease accounted for only a quarter of Britain's war fighting capability.
3. Lend-Lease was only a loan. Britain is still paying it off, 50 years later.
1) Umm, no. Lend-lease was tanks, planes, ships, trucks, food, fuel, etc. Wasn't money at all.
2) Lend-lease wasn't just about Britain. Russia received tanks, planes, trucks, fuel, gold braid (yes, that was actually considered an important item to the Russians - they were trying to reconstitute an officer corps devastated by the purges in the 30's). Actually, pretty much every country in the war (except the lads on the other side) received enormous amounts of equipment from the USA.
3) Umm, no. Lend-lease was never about money, it was about equipment. The whole point of lend-lease is that it didn't require payment, just return of the equipment when you were done with it. Which was generally completed by 1947. Note that most lend-lease stuff was never returned, and we didn't really expect it to be returned - that was just a useful fiction to allow us to help the British/Russians/everyone else without getting Congress in a snit about giveaways.
If the U.S. generals wanted to invade Europe before 1944, they must have thought it was feasible. But for whatever reason, the U.S. held off, risking only its money in the European theatre, until most of the heaviest fighting and dying were over. The proof that the U.S. had it relatively easy after D-Day is the level of U.S. casualties in Europe compared to the other Allies. When the U.S. sacrificed only about as much in Europe as little Latvia did, it cannot fairly claim a major share of the credit for victory.
They thought so. They were wrong. The USA invaded France at about the earliest possible point in history. Note, by the way, that the British had no capability at all to invade France - those were American landing craft they came ashore in.
Of course, one could look at the small number of American casualties as proof of our superior skill inwarfare . Actually, it was mostly proof of our absolute air supremacy. Which allowed us to fight the Germans at an advantage whenever we fought them.
The U.S. stopped at Berlin because the Soviets were there first. Why do you think the Cold War began almost immediately after WW2? It was because two gigantic armies, that of the Western Allies and that of the Soviet Union, were nose to nose in Berlin in 1945.
Umm, no. Eisenhower announced that the USA/UK would not take Berlin at the end of March. The USSR didn't begin attacking Berlin until the 16th of April, and didn't actually enter the city for another five days.
Berlin was partitioned similarly to Germany as a whole, though that particular decision was not made until the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, two months after the end of the war in Europe. So the city didn't actually have two large armies facing each other - the American and British Armies were mostly in West Germany, with only token units in Berlin (and that only after July). The Cold War started because neither the UK nor the USA really trusted the USSR, and vice versa. And, interestingly, there is some evidence that the Cold War happened largely as a result of Stalin's desire to hide from the West just how badly the USSR was hurt in WW2 - they worked hard to convince us they were capable of overrunning Europe because they were afraid we'd overrun THEM if we knew how weak they really were.
The same article said "According to The Physics Factbook, a bullet from a large-caliber rifle travels about 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) per second -- about 3,400 mph (5,400 kph)".
It is certainly possible that the Physics Factbook says this. Which just shows that the people who wrote it are idiots. Most rifle bullets don't manage 1000 meters per second. A very few manage 1200 meters per second (discarding sabot rounds, usually).
Of course, most modern tank guns can manage 1500 meters per second. But they're not rifled....
Note: the Physics Factbook is an "encyclopedia of scientific essays written by high school students". Hopefully the students know more about physics than they do about rifle bullets.
Really? So, we waited till a year and a half after the Battle of Stalingrad (Aug42-Feb43) to enter WW2? And here I thought we entered in December 1941! How silly of me!
Useful clue: Examine carefully the effects of Lend-Lease. Which was a clear violation of international neutrality laws, and which went into place in March 1941. Nine months before we officially entered the war.
Another useful clue: Examine the US Navy's role in convoy defense prior to December 1941. Also a clear violation in international neutrality laws.
And one last useful clue: We originally planned to invade continental Europe in 1942, but the British (rather sensibly) talked us out of it. We hadn't the landing craft, the aircraft, or the naval presence to actually do it then. We then planned to do so in 1943. The British talked us out of it again. Basically the same reasons applied, plus the British wanted to invade Italy. We finally amassed enough landing craft (did you know that landing craft were the limiting factor in every major allied amphibious operation? we had to schedule the silly things a year in advance, since we didn't have enough at any point in the War to perform two amphibious operations simultaneously) in 1944, and we had a go at invading France. Things worked fine. Almost. We actually couldn't properly supply the army we put into France in 1944. Most of the allied (read British, American, French) activities in Europe after D-Day were limited due to our inability to ship enough fuel/ammo to the lads at the front. Frankly, we should have waited another year.
Note, by the way, that if the Russian's "winning" WW2 were the impetus for us to get serious about the war, we wouldn't have stopped short of Berlin. Which, if you'll remember, we did.
Seems to me that at 170Kg a head, 1.6 billion tons is enough to support 9.6 billion people. At the standards to which we in North America have become accustomed. So, where exactly is the shortage?
Well, no. Even the most generous estimates for "hunger" I have seen put the number of "hungry" people at no more than 1/7th the world's population.
Note also that the definition of "hunger" used in those estimates is that those people missed a meal at least once. Which, amazingly, puts me in that category.
Despite the fact that my doctor wants me to lose weight, I am officially among the "hungry" of the world.
No, no, no!
We have only Rights to keep copies made for time-shifting for limited periods. Certainly no forever. Say, forever less one day? Or perhaps we should be generous to the poor Copyright holders, and limit our time-shifting to the life of the media less one day?
One of the slowest advancing techs is rocketry (sadly). Current launch prices range from 7-15k$/kg just to get things to *LEO*.
All these calculations, and it never occurred to you that 7.6e22 Kg is about 1% of the mass of the entire planet?? Getting the stuff to LEO isn't even in the same league as the problem of stripmining the top 20Km of the entire planet's surface to come up with that amount of material....
Umm, no. Escape Velocity is misnamed, really. Properly, it's Escape Speed. Any velocity vector whose magnitude is equal to Escape Speed at a given point in space will escape, as long as the direction of the vector doesn't hit anything (like the object you're escaping, for instance).
For that matter, orbital velocity is similarly misnamed. Any velocity vector whose magnitude is less than Escape Speed will "orbit", given the limits that it doesn't hit anything (like the object you're orbitting). Even then, it orbits until the impact.
above the critical limit for being able to orbit is outside the event horizon (actually its at 3MG/c^2 expressed in metres from the singularity, whereas the Event Horizon for a non-spinning black hole is at 2MG/c^2)
Let's see, Orbital Speed is sqrt(Rg), where R is distance from the point you're orbitting, and g is the local acceleration due to gravity. g = Gm/(R^2), so orbital velocity is sqrt(Gm/R). If orbital velocity is c, then R = Gm/c^2.
Escape Speed is sqrt(2Rg). Which reduces down to R = 2Gm/c^2, for the Event Horizon of a black hole.
Looks to me like the radius of orbit of an object moving at c is inside the Event Horizon.
Note, of course, that I am using strictly Newtonian orbital mechanics here. The region near an Event Horizon is nowhere near flat enough for Newtonian physics to apply all that well.
Nonetheless, the assumption that you made reduces down to orbital speed > escape speed, which is absurd on the face of it.
Orbital Velocity is HIGHER then Escape Velocity??
I think you need to re-evalute here.
True, so far as it goes.
But...
The Event Horizon marks the surface where Escape Velocity is lightspeed. Circular Orbital Velocity is only sqrt(0.5) times Escape Velocity, so orbital velocity at the Event Horizon is less than lightspeed.
In other words, that "critical orbital radius" you mentioned in beyond the Event Horizon, thus anything there has already been sucked in....
Umm, there is no Federal Handgun Registration. Never has been.
Not exactly. Your cell phone calls are broadcast on public airwaves, remember? You have no reasonable Right to privacy for anything that you essentially shout from the rooftops.
Note that this does not in any way imply approval for the behaviour of whomever is selling such information. But Right to Privacy isn't covered here. Actually, even the content of a cell phone conversation (remember, broadcast on public aairwaves) isn't reasonably "private", unless encrypted. And compressed != encrypted.
China signed this a few months ago (oct 2005) - they haven't ratified it. Or even had time to implement it, assuming they wanted to. Which is unlikely.
This is slightly misleading. Mitnick was CHARGED within the legal limits (72 hours?), but his trial did not occur for years. Being charged is not the same as going to trial.
Note also that "four" could be considered "many", but I've always found "four" to be considered "few", as in "...was not brought to trial for a few years".
True. Of course, we will all die WITH a Patent System too. Or does anyone here really expect to not die?
Well, you see, we have this little thing called the First Amendment. If I'm not mistaken, it pretty much guarantees free speech. Free speech should allow me to mention a candidate's name if I want to.
And you blame this on CFR? CFR had no effect on this fact one way or another.
Quite so. Of course, since CFR made it harder to get the challenger's name mentioned, without making it harder to get the incumbent's name mentioned, one might surmise that the net effect was to shift teh balance of publicity in favour of the incumbent.
I agree that it was not a perfect law--Hardly any law is. But if you are against the very idea of the law, which is stopping the rich and corporately-sponsored from being the only ones that can compete, then by default you are FOR the Golden Rule.
The very idea of the law is to limit political speech. Which is the very thing the First Amendment was meant to protect most.
If you can come up with a law that will have the effect of "stopping the rich and corporately-sponsored from being the only ones that can compete", without trampliinng on ANYONE's civil rights (yes, even politicians and politician wannabees have civil rights), then go to town! I'd not mind seeing such a law. This law, however, didn't do any of the things you think it did, and DID trample on some civil rights. No plus, a big minus, makes for a bad law, not an inadequate law.
In this case it seems that you are saying he didn't succeed well enough, so therefore it's better to not have tried at all. That seems absurd to me and is hardly a solid reason to dislike a candidate altogether.
I am saying that his effect was to help the incumbents, not to remove money from politics. Everyone knows laws have unintended consequences. If he doesn't know that, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President. If he DOES know that, and couldn't foresee the abuses his CFRA would allow, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President. If he knows that, and DID foresee the abuses possible in the CFRA, then he shouldn't be a Senator, much less President.
Sorry, demonstrating his incompetence by passing a law with so many potential abuses (note that both the NRA and ACLU dislike this law - an odd conjunction of interests indeed) is not something that makes me think the man is ready to be President. [ Reply to This ]
Not always. Occasionally, a female mule is fertile. Which just goes to show that things are even woolier than one might expect.
So far, I've not heard of a definition of species that is inclusive of everything we like to think of as different species, while exclusive of everything we'd like to think of as the same species.
Which just means we need to work on definitions a bit more. Every time a Creationist points out an exception, he's pointing out a place where we need to tweak the definition until it actually means what we want it to mean (as opposed to letting him tweak it till it means what HE wants it to mean).
Well, no. The music business (and every other business in the USA) became interested in the "fickle prejudices of 14-year-olds" sometime in the late 50's-early 60's. That was when it became apparent that unlike earlier times, 14-year-olds (I use the euphemism to represent all "kids" from 5-early adulthood) had MONEY TO SPEND! Quite a lot of it, in fact. Enough to get the executives salivating at the thought of a mass of money in the hands of people who didn't have ANY of their money earmarked to things like paying the bills....
A law making it illegal to mention a candidate by name under certain conditions.
Which doesn't apply to the incumbent, because he can always get into the news by proposing some legislation.
Sounds like Incumbent Protection more than Campaign Finance Reform.
And, of course, we can look at the actual results. Oh, look! It did NOT reduce the spending by third parties in campaigns. Nor did it reduce the requirement that candidates whore themselves out for the money required to be elected.
It DID change the specific means of getting money to the candidate, so I guess that's some sort of "reform". It also raised the limits on individual contributions....