Decades ago the USA was one of the first nations to disconnect money from gold
Actually, the USA was one of the last to leave the gold standard. the UK left in 1931, the USA in 1971.
Yes, FDR made it illegal for Americans to own gold, but he did not remove the USA from the gold standard.
Note that the first country to abandon the Gold Standard was China, several thousand years ago. Of course, since then, they came back to it. and left it. and came back. and left....
A coalition government does not require the support of the largest party, nor does it require that the largest party leader be appointed PM/Chancellor.
Yes, it usually works out that way, but only because the largest party has the easiest time forming a coalition. The Nazi party only had about 1/3 the seats in the German Parliament. The next two parties (Social Democrats and Communists) combined to more seats than the Nazis held.
Effectively, the Nazis needed the support of at least two other Parties to get Hitler chosen Chancellor. Unfortunately, the Germans politicians were only too happy to work with Hitler rather than hold new elections....
Well, then things are going to happen sooner rather than later, as it was on the news today (well, at least here in Belgium) that 36 million americans live in a family where there is not enough food.
Did you ever look at the definition of "not enough food" in use in most of these "XXX gazillion people are starving!!!!" reports?
It is usually defined in such a way that *I* am "starving" (I skipped lunch yesterday because I was busy, but missing a meal means I am "starving" and have "not enough food").
Of course, I am trying to get my weight down, still. If I were to lose 20 pounds, I'd be in pretty decent shape (assuming I lost 20 pounds of fat, not 20 pounds of muscle).
Here's the cluestick - there aren't 36 million people in the USA who are "starving in the streets", as someone said. Nor are there 36 million who are even especially hungry, unless you count the people on the latest diet craze - there might be 36 million of them....
There is nothing that says congress can't pass unconstititional laws
Actually, their oath to "uphold and defend the Constitution" might be considered as forbidding them from passing of unconstitutional laws.
Of course, if that were true, we'd have to impeach (or, better yet, hang) almost every Congresscritter for the last 70 years, and a sizable part of the ones before that.
It's times like this I wish we were operating under the Republic of New Texas Constitution.
That said, it is likely that much, if not all, of this will be overturned if someone has the balls to get behind the eight-ball and take it to court. Which means, among other things, jailtime while the appeals run, since it requires breaking the law to give grounds for appeal, usually.
As far as detaining "terrorists" is concerned, the "alternative" you speak of is called "the Geneva convention".
Umm, no. If you'll check the signatories of the various parts of the Geneva Convention, you'll notice we never signed onto the parts that took care of "terrorists".
Probably because they were originally proposed in the Vietnam Era.
Something few Europeans seem aware of is that the "Geneva Convention" isn't a monolithic entity that one signs onto or not. We signed onto the pieces developed both before and immediately after WW2. We haven't signed onto any pieces since then (not sure why, really, though I expect that Vietnam distorted our PoV regarding unconventional warfare a bit).
The finest thing a Christian boy could become was a priest. Probably took some intelligence too. Except priests didn't marry (until reformation that is, so the protestants might be catching up on the jews, but they are like 1500 years behind, so it could take a while).
Umm, no. It wasn't until 1139 that Catholic priests couldn't marry. And there is much evidence that even after that, they continued to keep concubines and have children. Specifically, priests and their women and kids were one of the complaints of Martin Luther (and even later, a Pope appointed his brother to be a Cardinal, and two of that brothers children to be Cardinals, as I vaguely recall).
In fact, the whole celibate priest thing didn't really take off till the Counter-Reformation, less than 400 years ago.
a ballet with any other marks on it except an x (yes it has to be an X)is considered spoiled. it is idiot proof to vote, and intenions are very clear.
Yah, and in Florida in 2000, the punchcard ballots they used were idiot-proof and very clear (punch the chad out completely, punch only one). Yet, we had people complaining, and insisting that partially punched chads should count, and that cards with two chads should be counted (as long as one was for Gore, of course).
Make something idiot-proof, and the Universe will compensate with a better grade of idiot.
I bet that number doesn't include the other income tax - Social Security
Quite true. The IRS doesn't consider SS to be the same as "income tax".
It's more trouble than I want to go through to check the effects of SS on "income taxes" for all brackets. However, one can safely assume that in the top income bracket, SS taxes are effectively 0. And in the bottom bracket, assume they are 7.7% (the part of SS taxes you pay - a similar part is paid by your employer, and can arguably be considered part of your income).
Using that (admittedly imcomplete) basis, the top income earners paid ~25.9% of their income as income taxes, and the bottom income earners (less than $20k per year) paid ~10.5% of their income as income taxes (inclusive of the 7.7% SS taxes).
If you add in the employer contribution of 7.7%, and assume income increases by a like amount, then the bottom income earners paid ~16.9% of their income as income taxes - still considerably less than the top income earners paid.
This may be fair if only SS payouts were being funded by SS taxes, but there are surpluses and where is the surplus going? It's going to the general fund to help pay for the war/income tax cuts the benefit the wealthy more.
And your point is? Hate to say this, but the SS surplus has ALWAYS gone into the General Fund, whether the government was run by Democrats or Republicans. It has gone to the general fund whether taxes were cut on the rich, or raised on the rich.
Remember that Clinton's "surpluses" only existed because SS surpluses were tossed into the General Fund to make up the difference between his expenditures and revenues.
Also there is double taxation on the SS taxes
True enough. and double taxation on gasoline taxes, and alcohol taxes, and tobacco taxes.
There are a great many hidden taxes in the USA that you pay income tax on top of. Theoretically, you can deduct those from your income for tax purposes, but practically it is not possible (do you keep track of how much cigarette taxes you pay in a year? Or gasoline taxes?), so you're double-taxed.
Sorry, but there is nothing unique to SS about double taxation, neither is double taxation a new phenomenon nor an especially evil one.
No. The Me-323 was larger. It couldn't carry as much weight, but strength is different from size. "Weight" isn't size either. The Me-323 took up more space than a B-29, which is what "large" really means. It was taller, wider, thicker, and nearly as long. Just multiplying l*w*h we get 15400 m^3 versus 11610 m^3, and that's ignoring the thinner B-29 hull.
The size of the box it comes in is irrelevant to any measure of the capability of a bomber. Sorry, better luck next time.
"Best"? Try ONLY. It was the only jet fighter to be marginally successful, and the runners up were also German planes. The only Allied entry that might compare is the YP-80, but it was virtually too late to count as being part of the war- it certainly never saw combat.
Never heard of the Gloster Meteor, have you? British jet plane, in squadron service from late-44. In fact, the Meteor saw combat for the first time less than a month after the Me-262 did.
No, the Me-262 was superior primarily for it's JET ENGINES, which NONE of the opposing planes had.
Umm, no. Jet engines made for a potentially fast plane. Otherwise, early jets were most unsatisfactory - fuel usage was horrendous, which meant that jets had terribly short range. Short range was not a problem for defending the homeland from enemy bombers, but was nearly useless for projecting air power over the enemy homelands (which was why the USA didn't place great emphasis on jets - Hap Arnold started investing AAF research funds into jets quite early, but back-burnered it when it became obvious that the jets would never be able to reach Germany from England, or Japan at all.)
Bigger is not "more advanced", it just means you have more construction resources to build with (including luxuries like aerospace factories that get bombed fewer than twice per month). In terms of successful engineering innovation, the B-29 doesn't even begin to compare with the Mistel.
Really? Let's see. The B-29 bombed Japan for a year and change. It dropped the first atomic bomb. And the second. And continued in service through the Korean War as a bomber.
The Mistel...hmmm. It shot up a couple of bridges, and MAY have delayed the Soviets by as much as three days. Not a spectacular achievement, even for something that is nothing more than a humongous TOW missile.
The top speed of a Mistel was 686 km/h, while the B-29's max speed was 574 km/h. Of course, those are outbound speeds.
Umm, no. The FW-190 could manage 686 Km/hr. A Ju-88 (the core of the Mistel) could only manage 472 Km/hr. The combination probably couldn't go quite that fast, even ignoring range limits imposed by high speed.
Also, a Mistel could defeat a B-29 in air-to-air combat.
It's certainly possible that a FW-190 could beat a B-29. Of course, B-29's never travelled alone, much less over Germany, so we'll never know for sure.
Nope. They didn't build one because they didn't need one. In their military situation, it would've been a waste of resources.
If such planes had existed at the outset of the war, such as for the battle of Britain or the first year of the USSR incursion, then they would've been important. But by the time the USA had decent heavy bombers, it would've been meaningless for the Germans to build something similar. Air superiority had already turned too much against them.
Hmm, the Germans failed to knock Great Britain out of the war for lack a a fleet of heavy bombers and adequate excorts for same, which shows that they didn't need a heavy bomber??
I beg to differ.
Of course, the Germans didn't need a heavy bomber after we were pounding the crap out of them every day (and the Brits were doing the same every night). But when they needed one (before we started pounding the crap out of them), they didn't have one. Sorry, better luck next time.
There are many strategic reasons for this, mainly that Allied air superior
That 60% number sounds impressive, until you realize that something like 90% of the wealth in the us belongs that same 2%- proportionally they are being taxed less than the rest of us.
Umm, no. Wealth, of course, is problematic - we don't tax wealth, we tax income. And for income:
the top 2% make 10.7% of the "adjusted gross income", and pay 21% of the income tax. So they're taxed at about twice the average rate.
Since the other 89.3% of the income is paying 79% of the income taxes, they're paying about 2.2x the rate the rest of us are.
Note - figures from the IRS, as of 2001. Later figures are not yet available, and will no doubt be modified somewhat for later years - the last time the rich got a tax cut, they ended up paying a higher fraction of the income taxes.
No. Germany had the largest plane used in WWII [wikipedia.org]. They also had the most advanced bomber [making-history.ca] of the time. And of course, their mastery of jet engines [ozemail.com.au] was a decade ahead of the Allies.
Umm, no. The B-29 Superfortress was over twice as large as he Me-323. The Me-323 was the largest land-based cargo transport, but that isn't saying much.
Nor was the Mistel the most advanced bomber. Though it might have qualified as the most advanced cruise-missile. Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster, longer-ranged, had a heavier bomb load, and been more accurate as a bombing platform.
It is certainly true that the Me-262 was the best jet fighter of WW2. However, its engines were nothing to write home about. The British built better, and the Americans (who copied British designs, mostly) did as well. The -262 was a superior performer primarily for its swept wings - much like the Corsair's inverted gullwing, they were aerodynamically superior by accident.
Combining those excellent starting points into an effective long-range heavy bomber would take far less time than designing and manufacturing the hypothetical bomb itself.
And yet, the Germans did not ever manage to build even a halfway decent long-range heavy bomber. Obviously not so trivial a problem as all that.
First, if you look at the diagram [bbc.co.uk], you'll see that it plainly shows a plutonium core. Problem, Nazi Germany did not have an operational nuclear reactor. Thus they had no ability to create kilograms of plutonium. This makes the diagram a pipe-dream at best.
Second, if you look at the diagram you'll see that it is initiated a gun-type trigger, something that is impossible for Pu. This makes the diagram look like the work of someone that doesn't know what they are doing. Maybe this was deliberate (though rather obvious) misinformation by a scientist who didn't want Hitler to get the bomb.
Not so obvious. The Plutonium gun-type bomb was being worked on in the USA up till the middle of 1944. Research along that line finally stopped when they had enough Pu on hand to find out that the Pu produced in the reactors had too much Pu-240 to make a gun feasible.
It is entirely possible that such a weapon could have been envisioned by the Germans, since it was a fairly obvious design, whose flaws wouldn't have been seen until you actually produced significant amounts of Pu (which they never quite managed to do).
Note that this is not meant to imply that I think the drawing is not a hoax. I do not have enough information to say one way or another.
Now if you want to ask for permission to copy part of the code, and accidentally ask the FSF instead of the real copyright holder, a genuine problem could ensue: If the FSF would blindly say: "Sure, go ahead, you can use any code we have the copyright on in your commercial closed-source product".
Umm, no. If the FSF said "Sure, go ahead, you can use any code we have the copyright on in your commercial closed-source product", it would be well within their rights. It does not, however, excuse you if the code you want to use is not in the set "we have the copyright".
It might get you off the hook for wilful infringement, but won't prevent the Copyright owner from suing you successfully to make you stop violating his Copyright (the triple damages go away, but nothing else).
Actually, the authors own the copyright to their individual contributions, e.g. Rik van Riel has copyright to the code for the kswapd_ctl changes.
Simply being the last to contribute to something doesn't mean that you gain the copyright over the rest of the code.
That's certainly one interpretation. However, if the work is defined as a "joint work", then all contributors share copyright equally.
Probably the biggest weakness (and it's not very big) of the whole issue is whether a given file is a "joint work" or a "derivative work" under Copyright law.
Note, however, that in neither case does the first Copyright holder lose his own Copyright - the interpretation (joint/derivative) just affects the rights of subsequent Copyright holders (do they own Copyright to just their own piece, or do they own a share of the Copyright to the whole work?)
"Agreed. I have a bleeding heart like the next guy, but the tenets of evolution confirm that the fittest survive."
The tenets of evolution assure no such thing
Actually, they do. Darwin, remember? "Survival of the fittest" was his catchphrase.
However, what he carefully ignored was that it was a meaningless statement, really. The "fittest" survive. How do we determine what is the "fittest"? If it survives, it's the "fittest". So, what survives, survives.
Yah, we all knew that one without Darwin coming along and telling us. Realistically, "survival of the fittest" is only useful for ex post facto analysis of life - this moth is here, now, so it must have some subtle advantage over the moths that used to be here (like, it's dark colored, and the older moths were light colored)....
I do not understand, for example, why anyone would consider another trip the moon or one to Mars an enterprise for profit
the Moon: Solar Power Satellites can be built far more easily using Lunar raw materials than by boosting the tens of thousands of tons each into orbit from Earth. Yah, big infrastructure is required, but it's still way cheaper than doing it all from Canaveral (or anywhere else down here).
How much money can be made from Solar Power Satellites? Not sure, but assume $0.05/KWh (close enough to what I pay now), and 5GW per SPS gives you about $2 billion per year per satellite. And no greenhouse gases, so the global warming guys should be happy.
Mars. Hmm, that's a toughie. But, as was said once upon a time (about the Moon) "There's a WHOLE NEW WORLD out there - if we can't find a way to make a buck on that, maybe we should go back to selling both sides of the same hill in Arkansas" (mangled, no doubt, but original was in "The Man Who Sold the Moon", by RAH).
Seriously, if nothing else a Mars base can sell carbon and iron to the guys living on the Moon - cheaper to ship it from Mars than from Earth.
Big picture: one small asteroid (say, 1Km^3) of nickel-iron is about 7 billion tons of metal. We use about 1.5 million tons of nickel a year, so that one rock, if delivered to Earth orbit (or the ground) represents a millenium or so of nickel production. Plus five or six years of iron production. And no mines (strip or otherwise) are required on Earth.
and IANAL but to me it seems that the ability to personaly proffit off a celestial body is quite limited under those treaties
Read them again. The Outer-Space Treaty doesn't restrict for-profit enterprises, though it does prevent anyone from gaining sole control of any off-Earth sites.
The Moon Treaty arguably restricts that activities of private citizens in that regard, but the USA hasn't signed onto that one, so it's not an issue (for Americans)
Note further that those Treaties can be withdrawn from with one year's notice. If we decide we need to withdraw for our own interest, we will.
Personally, I think it's a non-issue, since even if the USA were bound to not make any money in space, there are enough countries around that haven't ratified either Treaty for shell-corporations....
There was a LOT of money invested on the space program. What have we really gotten out of it?
As a minimum, the ability to track hurricanes reliably. Once upon a time, hurricanes surprised us - now, we know about them, and can plan for required evacuations/emergency responses days i advance. Of course, I live in down where hurricanes are a problem - people in Nevada might not think so.
Then there's the whole global warming thing - it is unlikely that we'd have the sensors required to notice it with the space program.
Commmunications satellites.
It is arguable that computer technology got a big boost from the space program - the need for smaller and lighter helped a lot of things, but it is not clear whether PC's grew out of the space program or would have been here by now without it.
Regarding #2 there, I have a question: why isn't firearm usage and safety taught in schools?
It is, in some schools - one of my high schools had both rifle and pistol teams, in addition to the more normal football and basketball. Marksmanship was taught by an old Army Sergeant-Major.
Rather fun to go down to the range in the basement and pop off a few magazines full to relieve stress.
There's a diarama at the Chippewa Nature Center, Midland, Michigan, depicting a giant beaver. Stood about 6 feet tall, probably a few hundred pounds. (what kind of trees did this thing gnaw anyway, it'd need lots of them) Always wondered how they would have died off, I can't imagine too many bow-and-arrow or spear wielding humans able to take on something like that.
Fred Bear used to hunt elephants with a recurve bow - it usually took only one shot, if the arrow landed where it was aimed.
And whales were hunted (and still are hunted, by Amerinds and Eskimos) with spears (yah, they're called harpoons, but a harpoon is just a spear with a line tied to the shaft).
In other words, don't underestimate what a man can do with spear or bow, if there is one huge hunk of ambulatory barbeque in front of him, and his wife behind him nagging that the kids are hungry and there's nothing in the larder....
people were tortured and killed by religious authorities for saying the earth was round or rotated on an axis, so modding me down is just the light version of the same persecution. I thank you for lumping me, in a small way, with Gallileo: I'm flattered.
Of course, Galileo was neither tortured nor killed for saying that the Earth was round or rotated on an axis.
In fact, he wasn't tortured or killed. He was required to remain in his palatial home for some years, though.
Also, it is likely that he wouldn't have even been punished by house arrest if his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican" hadn't called the Pope a fool - the name of the Ptolemaic supporter in the dialog was italian for "fool", and Galileo rather foolishly put several of the Pope's statements into the mouth of the "fool"....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the USA was one of the last to leave the gold standard. the UK left in 1931, the USA in 1971.
Yes, FDR made it illegal for Americans to own gold, but he did not remove the USA from the gold standard.
Note that the first country to abandon the Gold Standard was China, several thousand years ago. Of course, since then, they came back to it. and left it. and came back. and left....
Very nice Fair Use you have up there. I trust you'll get to keep it after your government gets through reading this new bill a time or two.
A coalition government does not require the support of the largest party, nor does it require that the largest party leader be appointed PM/Chancellor.
Yes, it usually works out that way, but only because the largest party has the easiest time forming a coalition. The Nazi party only had about 1/3 the seats in the German Parliament. The next two parties (Social Democrats and Communists) combined to more seats than the Nazis held.
Effectively, the Nazis needed the support of at least two other Parties to get Hitler chosen Chancellor. Unfortunately, the Germans politicians were only too happy to work with Hitler rather than hold new elections....
Anything you pay for is not a "right", it's a privilege.
That said, was that last section in boldface (copying your friend's tape) part of your current Copyright Law?
Did you ever look at the definition of "not enough food" in use in most of these "XXX gazillion people are starving!!!!" reports?
It is usually defined in such a way that *I* am "starving" (I skipped lunch yesterday because I was busy, but missing a meal means I am "starving" and have "not enough food").
Of course, I am trying to get my weight down, still. If I were to lose 20 pounds, I'd be in pretty decent shape (assuming I lost 20 pounds of fat, not 20 pounds of muscle).
Here's the cluestick - there aren't 36 million people in the USA who are "starving in the streets", as someone said. Nor are there 36 million who are even especially hungry, unless you count the people on the latest diet craze - there might be 36 million of them....
Actually, their oath to "uphold and defend the Constitution" might be considered as forbidding them from passing of unconstitutional laws.
Of course, if that were true, we'd have to impeach (or, better yet, hang) almost every Congresscritter for the last 70 years, and a sizable part of the ones before that.
It's times like this I wish we were operating under the Republic of New Texas Constitution.
That said, it is likely that much, if not all, of this will be overturned if someone has the balls to get behind the eight-ball and take it to court. Which means, among other things, jailtime while the appeals run, since it requires breaking the law to give grounds for appeal, usually.
Umm, no. If you'll check the signatories of the various parts of the Geneva Convention, you'll notice we never signed onto the parts that took care of "terrorists".
Probably because they were originally proposed in the Vietnam Era.
Something few Europeans seem aware of is that the "Geneva Convention" isn't a monolithic entity that one signs onto or not. We signed onto the pieces developed both before and immediately after WW2. We haven't signed onto any pieces since then (not sure why, really, though I expect that Vietnam distorted our PoV regarding unconventional warfare a bit).
Popular misconception. Actually, Hitler was never "voted into power". Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the German President.
Umm, no. It wasn't until 1139 that Catholic priests couldn't marry. And there is much evidence that even after that, they continued to keep concubines and have children. Specifically, priests and their women and kids were one of the complaints of Martin Luther (and even later, a Pope appointed his brother to be a Cardinal, and two of that brothers children to be Cardinals, as I vaguely recall).
In fact, the whole celibate priest thing didn't really take off till the Counter-Reformation, less than 400 years ago.
Yah, and in Florida in 2000, the punchcard ballots they used were idiot-proof and very clear (punch the chad out completely, punch only one). Yet, we had people complaining, and insisting that partially punched chads should count, and that cards with two chads should be counted (as long as one was for Gore, of course).
Make something idiot-proof, and the Universe will compensate with a better grade of idiot.
Quite true. The IRS doesn't consider SS to be the same as "income tax".
It's more trouble than I want to go through to check the effects of SS on "income taxes" for all brackets. However, one can safely assume that in the top income bracket, SS taxes are effectively 0. And in the bottom bracket, assume they are 7.7% (the part of SS taxes you pay - a similar part is paid by your employer, and can arguably be considered part of your income).
Using that (admittedly imcomplete) basis, the top income earners paid ~25.9% of their income as income taxes, and the bottom income earners (less than $20k per year) paid ~10.5% of their income as income taxes (inclusive of the 7.7% SS taxes).
If you add in the employer contribution of 7.7%, and assume income increases by a like amount, then the bottom income earners paid ~16.9% of their income as income taxes - still considerably less than the top income earners paid.
This may be fair if only SS payouts were being funded by SS taxes, but there are surpluses and where is the surplus going? It's going to the general fund to help pay for the war/income tax cuts the benefit the wealthy more.
And your point is? Hate to say this, but the SS surplus has ALWAYS gone into the General Fund, whether the government was run by Democrats or Republicans. It has gone to the general fund whether taxes were cut on the rich, or raised on the rich.
Remember that Clinton's "surpluses" only existed because SS surpluses were tossed into the General Fund to make up the difference between his expenditures and revenues.
Also there is double taxation on the SS taxes
True enough. and double taxation on gasoline taxes, and alcohol taxes, and tobacco taxes.
There are a great many hidden taxes in the USA that you pay income tax on top of. Theoretically, you can deduct those from your income for tax purposes, but practically it is not possible (do you keep track of how much cigarette taxes you pay in a year? Or gasoline taxes?), so you're double-taxed.
Sorry, but there is nothing unique to SS about double taxation, neither is double taxation a new phenomenon nor an especially evil one.
The size of the box it comes in is irrelevant to any measure of the capability of a bomber. Sorry, better luck next time.
"Best"? Try ONLY. It was the only jet fighter to be marginally successful, and the runners up were also German planes. The only Allied entry that might compare is the YP-80, but it was virtually too late to count as being part of the war- it certainly never saw combat.
Never heard of the Gloster Meteor, have you? British jet plane, in squadron service from late-44. In fact, the Meteor saw combat for the first time less than a month after the Me-262 did.
No, the Me-262 was superior primarily for it's JET ENGINES, which NONE of the opposing planes had.
Umm, no. Jet engines made for a potentially fast plane. Otherwise, early jets were most unsatisfactory - fuel usage was horrendous, which meant that jets had terribly short range. Short range was not a problem for defending the homeland from enemy bombers, but was nearly useless for projecting air power over the enemy homelands (which was why the USA didn't place great emphasis on jets - Hap Arnold started investing AAF research funds into jets quite early, but back-burnered it when it became obvious that the jets would never be able to reach Germany from England, or Japan at all.)
Bigger is not "more advanced", it just means you have more construction resources to build with (including luxuries like aerospace factories that get bombed fewer than twice per month). In terms of successful engineering innovation, the B-29 doesn't even begin to compare with the Mistel.
Really? Let's see. The B-29 bombed Japan for a year and change. It dropped the first atomic bomb. And the second. And continued in service through the Korean War as a bomber.
The Mistel...hmmm. It shot up a couple of bridges, and MAY have delayed the Soviets by as much as three days. Not a spectacular achievement, even for something that is nothing more than a humongous TOW missile.
The top speed of a Mistel was 686 km/h, while the B-29's max speed was 574 km/h. Of course, those are outbound speeds.
Umm, no. The FW-190 could manage 686 Km/hr. A Ju-88 (the core of the Mistel) could only manage 472 Km/hr. The combination probably couldn't go quite that fast, even ignoring range limits imposed by high speed.
Also, a Mistel could defeat a B-29 in air-to-air combat.
It's certainly possible that a FW-190 could beat a B-29. Of course, B-29's never travelled alone, much less over Germany, so we'll never know for sure.
Nope. They didn't build one because they didn't need one. In their military situation, it would've been a waste of resources.
If such planes had existed at the outset of the war, such as for the battle of Britain or the first year of the USSR incursion, then they would've been important. But by the time the USA had decent heavy bombers, it would've been meaningless for the Germans to build something similar. Air superiority had already turned too much against them.
Hmm, the Germans failed to knock Great Britain out of the war for lack a a fleet of heavy bombers and adequate excorts for same, which shows that they didn't need a heavy bomber??
I beg to differ.
Of course, the Germans didn't need a heavy bomber after we were pounding the crap out of them every day (and the Brits were doing the same every night). But when they needed one (before we started pounding the crap out of them), they didn't have one. Sorry, better luck next time.
There are many strategic reasons for this, mainly that Allied air superior
Umm, no. Wealth, of course, is problematic - we don't tax wealth, we tax income. And for income:
the top 2% make 10.7% of the "adjusted gross income", and pay 21% of the income tax. So they're taxed at about twice the average rate.
Since the other 89.3% of the income is paying 79% of the income taxes, they're paying about 2.2x the rate the rest of us are.
Note - figures from the IRS, as of 2001. Later figures are not yet available, and will no doubt be modified somewhat for later years - the last time the rich got a tax cut, they ended up paying a higher fraction of the income taxes.
Umm, no. The B-29 Superfortress was over twice as large as he Me-323. The Me-323 was the largest land-based cargo transport, but that isn't saying much.
Nor was the Mistel the most advanced bomber. Though it might have qualified as the most advanced cruise-missile. Again, the B-29 seems to have been faster, longer-ranged, had a heavier bomb load, and been more accurate as a bombing platform.
It is certainly true that the Me-262 was the best jet fighter of WW2. However, its engines were nothing to write home about. The British built better, and the Americans (who copied British designs, mostly) did as well. The -262 was a superior performer primarily for its swept wings - much like the Corsair's inverted gullwing, they were aerodynamically superior by accident.
Combining those excellent starting points into an effective long-range heavy bomber would take far less time than designing and manufacturing the hypothetical bomb itself.
And yet, the Germans did not ever manage to build even a halfway decent long-range heavy bomber. Obviously not so trivial a problem as all that.
Second, if you look at the diagram you'll see that it is initiated a gun-type trigger, something that is impossible for Pu. This makes the diagram look like the work of someone that doesn't know what they are doing. Maybe this was deliberate (though rather obvious) misinformation by a scientist who didn't want Hitler to get the bomb.
Not so obvious. The Plutonium gun-type bomb was being worked on in the USA up till the middle of 1944. Research along that line finally stopped when they had enough Pu on hand to find out that the Pu produced in the reactors had too much Pu-240 to make a gun feasible.
It is entirely possible that such a weapon could have been envisioned by the Germans, since it was a fairly obvious design, whose flaws wouldn't have been seen until you actually produced significant amounts of Pu (which they never quite managed to do).
Note that this is not meant to imply that I think the drawing is not a hoax. I do not have enough information to say one way or another.
Umm, no. If the FSF said "Sure, go ahead, you can use any code we have the copyright on in your commercial closed-source product", it would be well within their rights. It does not, however, excuse you if the code you want to use is not in the set "we have the copyright".
It might get you off the hook for wilful infringement, but won't prevent the Copyright owner from suing you successfully to make you stop violating his Copyright (the triple damages go away, but nothing else).
Simply being the last to contribute to something doesn't mean that you gain the copyright over the rest of the code.
That's certainly one interpretation. However, if the work is defined as a "joint work", then all contributors share copyright equally.
Probably the biggest weakness (and it's not very big) of the whole issue is whether a given file is a "joint work" or a "derivative work" under Copyright law.
Note, however, that in neither case does the first Copyright holder lose his own Copyright - the interpretation (joint/derivative) just affects the rights of subsequent Copyright holders (do they own Copyright to just their own piece, or do they own a share of the Copyright to the whole work?)
The tenets of evolution assure no such thing
Actually, they do. Darwin, remember? "Survival of the fittest" was his catchphrase.
However, what he carefully ignored was that it was a meaningless statement, really. The "fittest" survive. How do we determine what is the "fittest"? If it survives, it's the "fittest". So, what survives, survives.
Yah, we all knew that one without Darwin coming along and telling us. Realistically, "survival of the fittest" is only useful for ex post facto analysis of life - this moth is here, now, so it must have some subtle advantage over the moths that used to be here (like, it's dark colored, and the older moths were light colored)....
Actually, apparently this did happen once. Some loon bought a frozen mammoth, and served his hunting club mammoth steaks.
Don't recall just how it went over, but I don't think anyone died (or upchucked).
the Moon: Solar Power Satellites can be built far more easily using Lunar raw materials than by boosting the tens of thousands of tons each into orbit from Earth. Yah, big infrastructure is required, but it's still way cheaper than doing it all from Canaveral (or anywhere else down here).
How much money can be made from Solar Power Satellites? Not sure, but assume $0.05/KWh (close enough to what I pay now), and 5GW per SPS gives you about $2 billion per year per satellite. And no greenhouse gases, so the global warming guys should be happy.
Mars. Hmm, that's a toughie. But, as was said once upon a time (about the Moon) "There's a WHOLE NEW WORLD out there - if we can't find a way to make a buck on that, maybe we should go back to selling both sides of the same hill in Arkansas" (mangled, no doubt, but original was in "The Man Who Sold the Moon", by RAH).
Seriously, if nothing else a Mars base can sell carbon and iron to the guys living on the Moon - cheaper to ship it from Mars than from Earth.
Big picture: one small asteroid (say, 1Km^3) of nickel-iron is about 7 billion tons of metal. We use about 1.5 million tons of nickel a year, so that one rock, if delivered to Earth orbit (or the ground) represents a millenium or so of nickel production. Plus five or six years of iron production. And no mines (strip or otherwise) are required on Earth.
And there are thousands of asteroids.
Read them again. The Outer-Space Treaty doesn't restrict for-profit enterprises, though it does prevent anyone from gaining sole control of any off-Earth sites.
The Moon Treaty arguably restricts that activities of private citizens in that regard, but the USA hasn't signed onto that one, so it's not an issue (for Americans)
Note further that those Treaties can be withdrawn from with one year's notice. If we decide we need to withdraw for our own interest, we will.
Personally, I think it's a non-issue, since even if the USA were bound to not make any money in space, there are enough countries around that haven't ratified either Treaty for shell-corporations....
As a minimum, the ability to track hurricanes reliably. Once upon a time, hurricanes surprised us - now, we know about them, and can plan for required evacuations/emergency responses days i advance. Of course, I live in down where hurricanes are a problem - people in Nevada might not think so.
Then there's the whole global warming thing - it is unlikely that we'd have the sensors required to notice it with the space program.
Commmunications satellites.
It is arguable that computer technology got a big boost from the space program - the need for smaller and lighter helped a lot of things, but it is not clear whether PC's grew out of the space program or would have been here by now without it.
It is, in some schools - one of my high schools had both rifle and pistol teams, in addition to the more normal football and basketball. Marksmanship was taught by an old Army Sergeant-Major.
Rather fun to go down to the range in the basement and pop off a few magazines full to relieve stress.
Fred Bear used to hunt elephants with a recurve bow - it usually took only one shot, if the arrow landed where it was aimed.
And whales were hunted (and still are hunted, by Amerinds and Eskimos) with spears (yah, they're called harpoons, but a harpoon is just a spear with a line tied to the shaft).
In other words, don't underestimate what a man can do with spear or bow, if there is one huge hunk of ambulatory barbeque in front of him, and his wife behind him nagging that the kids are hungry and there's nothing in the larder....
Of course, Galileo was neither tortured nor killed for saying that the Earth was round or rotated on an axis.
In fact, he wasn't tortured or killed. He was required to remain in his palatial home for some years, though.
Also, it is likely that he wouldn't have even been punished by house arrest if his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican" hadn't called the Pope a fool - the name of the Ptolemaic supporter in the dialog was italian for "fool", and Galileo rather foolishly put several of the Pope's statements into the mouth of the "fool"....