Umm, the Electoral College is Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution. The Twelfth Amendment just clarified procedures for the pre-existing Electoral College, as well as certain qualifiers for Pres/VP (they can't be residents of the same State, for instance).
So, you have A and B who are running for Dog Catcher. The ballot system has a five percent margin of error. A has 48% and B has 52%. 52 - 48 = 4 therefore w/n margin of error: the election is cast out. The following week you have a manditory runoff. Continue each week until you have a winner, or one conceeds.
Hmm, given this system were in place for President, with the numbers you specified (5% margin triggers runoff), do you really think that we'd get a President elected?
As an example, bush/Kerry. Do you honestly think some voters would say "well, my guy didn't win the election, so I'll switch to the other guy in the runoff"? Most likely result is that you repeat the election every week until Doomsday, then decide to forget about it.
And who runs things until a winner is picked? the Incumbent? Great idea! We could keep Bush in office virtually forever, if we can just deadlock the next election to within 5% margin of error.
Note that in Clinton's first election, such a system would have required runoffs in 17 States, totalling 211 Electoral Votes. In most of those States, the election wasn't especially close (>3% difference), so it is unlikely that any significant shift would occur during runoffs. So, Clinton could not have been elected under such a system (and he was fairly popular, as such things go, unlike either Bush or Kerry).
Now, such a system could have a major effect in case of a serious third party contender. Reagan's first election (with such a contender), could have easily gone to Carter or Reagen under such a system. Or, just as likely, been severely deadlocked, as Clinton's election would have been.
Kerry kept saying "I have a plan" because if he said what it was, it would confuse the electorate
No, if Kerry said what it was, people would know quite clearly what he stood for, and voted against him in (even larger) droves.
By keeping things ambiguous, he left people open to the possibility that his plan was one they'd approve of. If he'd had a plan that people, in general, would have liked, he could have reduced it to a couple sound bites (yah, big picture only), and sold it.
As it most likely was, a really complicated plan that reduced to "raise everyone's taxes" wouldn't play well in Poughkeepsie. And he knew it.
Why not? Military organizations of other countries have done the same sort of thing (on a smaller scale, of course) since the dawn of man. What makes you think the U.S. military is any different?
Notice that even China couldn't get its Army to break up Tienamen Square, until they imported some Mongolian troops to do the dirty work. America is too homogeneous to play that sort of game anymore.
How do you think tyrants like Saddam Hussein manage to stay in power? He recruited his military personnel from the civilian ranks the same as we do.
He recruited from his own Sunni minority, and had them oppress the hell out of the Kurds and Shiites. Note that they're still tribal enough over there that "Sunni", "Shiite", "Kurd" is more important than "Iraqi".
The U.S. is no exception to this -- the civil war did happen, you know, and those very same psychological methods were used on both sides to convince the troops to fight.
Umm, no. The Union soldiers didn't fight because the Rebels were "subhuman", they fought (mostly) because they thought slavery was evil. Note that the Union had a really hard time getting soldiers to fight until they started making the War a war against slavery, rather than a war to restore the Union.
Note also that, at that time, very few people thought of themselves as "American". They were "Virginians", and "Georgians", and whatever people from New Jersey call themselves ("You from Joisey? I'm from Joisey! What exit?"), etc. It's really a lot easier to get people to fight against "not us" than against "us". And since the War Between the States, we've stopped thinking of ourselves as "Georgians", etc. We're Americans.
You're a fool if you think the current U.S. military is somehow magically immune to this. Believing that is like believing in Santa Claus.
Nothing magic about it. Did you notice that when the Russians rebelled back at the fall of the USSR, the Russian soldiers wouldn't fire on the crowds either? American soldiers won't fight against a civilian rebellion in any meaningful numbers. They would stay in barracks, most likely, much as the Russians did.
But even without the truly heavy weapons, we're still talking about a many thousands to one advantage in firepower that the military has over the civilian population on a per-man basis, because the civilian population (right or wrong) doesn't have access to artillery, tanks, air support, satellite surveillance, and all the other things that are necessary for modern warfare, and you need access to those things in order to put up a real fight against an opponent that has those things.
Funny, the Iraqis seem to be putting up a fight quite nicely without those things. And the Tamils in Sri Lanka. And...I can go on. Guerrilla warfare is all about civilians fighting Armies, and mostly winning.
Have you ever been made aware of just how hard it is to control a country with just a military? Especially when, like the USA, the civilian population has 100 guns for every soldier in your military.
To argue otherwise is to argue that a country with a lightly armed civilian population doesn't need a military force in order to successfully defend itself from an outside aggressor (an outside aggressor has much less of an advantage over your civilian population than you do, since you already have a strong military presence within it).
Actually, we don't need a standing army to defend ourselves against an outside aggressor. Note that the USA had a TINY military up till post-WW2, excluding periods of war (we ramped up our tiny standing Army for each war we fought, and disbanded them soon as possible after the fighting stopped). We got along alright. It was only when we decided that we had to play global policemen, and defend Europe from the USSR, and later defend the whole world against "communism" (a convenient though misleading label - the "communists" we were talking about were actually just an
But you run the risk of having a legitimate election questioned (one of the tests we use when assessing the fairness of elections over seas is, did the results square with the poll watcher's / exit poller's tally?--if 90% of the voters say they hate Bob Despot and want him out, but he gets 99% of the vote, we tent to say there was fraud).
Sounds like you have a potential problem overseas, then. Because, at least in the USA, polls are increasingly unreliable because of people like me.
You also run the risk of having actual fraud go undetected.
Not especially. Hopefully, the people investigating voter fraud are using something other than exit polls to determine the "correct answer".
And finally, you have to face the fact that lying to lose is stupid, lying to win is wrong, and lying in the hope that you will neither win or lose is pointlessly nilistic.
How about "lying for fun"? I don't lie to pollsters to win (there's no prize for getting the right answer), or to lose (no penalty phase for getting the wrong answer), or in the hopes of neither winning nor losing (since there is no right answer and no wrong answer, winning or losing is irrelevant, and my hopes of same even less so).
Lying to exit pollsters is not, of course, purely a Republican idea. I'm not a Republican (I tend to vote about half Dem, half Rep, though this year I think I only voted for one Dem), and I do it. Guy I used to know back in college voted straight Dem Party ticket (or so he said;) ), but routinely lied to pollsters of all stripe. My wife, on the other hand, tends to just say "It's none of your business", or just scream at pollsters. Takes all kinds.
Something to remember - they're going to hold the election anyway, and they're going to count the votes anyway. With or without exit polls, and no matter the results of any previous polls. Hence, exit polls (and the previous polls) are merely used to attempt to bias the results of the election one way or another. I don't believe in helping other people bias the election. My lying to pollsters is my way of hindering them.
I don't understand this attitude at all. Why would you lie to exit pollsters? Do you lie to your doctor when you go in for a checkup? Do you lie to the waiter about what you want to order in a restraunt?
I would lie to the exit pollsters to screw with their results.
Do I lie to my Doctor? No, but I want him to know the truth.
Same with the waiter at the restaurant I am eating at.
Do I want a pollster to have the truth? Not especially. Because what counts is the election, NOT the EXIT POLL! If I vote Kerry, and tell the pollster I voted Badnarik, his data is slightly slanted, but MY VOTE doesn't change because I lied to a pollster.
However, a Saturn V is not required to reach orbit. Something rather larger than a Gemini or Soyuz would do nicely. The difficulty is the reusability requirement, not the design of a basic goes-up-goes-around-comes-down vehicle. Which we could to in the 60's.
One would hope that our engineering expertise as come a ways in the last 40 years.
Hmm, the first stage of a Saturn is 300t, empty. Total empty weight of Saturn V + Apollo was ~544t, so if you could parachute-recover the first stage, you'd be over 50% reusable right there.
The second stage of a Saturn V stack, with the third stage and Apollo removed, and an aeroshell added) could just about reach orbit by itself, so a SSTO isn't totally out of the realm of possibility, even with 60's technology, much less with the rather better materials technology of today.
It's millions to one if you account for the truly big stuff, like nuclear and biological weapons.
So, you truly believe that if a President were to order the nuclear incineration of Atlanta that the military who actually have to do the work would do it?!?
Somehow, I think not.
As to the rest of the arsenal (the tanks, planes, artillery), yah, it gives the soldiers an advantage. But it is not really very much on a per-soldier basis.
An Army Division will have around 70 big guns, maybe 300 tanks, maybe 3000 guys with rifles. And number around 20,000 men. A big gun may be worth 1000 men (quite an exaggeration, I think), but even so, and even if you give the same value to a tank, you only get an equivalent of a factor 20 increase in the average firepower per man. And even with that 20-fold increase in firepower, the civilians have the edge, just on numbers alone.
Real reason we won't do a civil war is that you couldn't convince the military to crack down and oppress the civilian populace enough to make the civilians get excited about it.
orry, 3 years is infeasible for the kind of development this will take. How long was SS1 in development? This is at least an order of magnitude more complicated.
More complicated? I think not. More difficult? Certainly. One must remember that it was possible to achieve orbit with 1950's technology. The Saturn V went from drawing board to test flight in only six years, and it was enormously more capable than a vehicle capable of winning this prize must be.
Given that much early spaceflight technology is no longer under patent protection (even the Shuttle tiles aren't still patented, though refinements may very well be), the available technologies are quite extensive, and it's just an engineering problem.
"it's just an engineering problem" doesn't mean it's trivial of course. A lot depends on things like how that 20% expendable is defined - cost, mass, what?
If cost is the key issue, then a big dumb cheap booster can be part of this setup. Which makes it a lot easier.
Mass is harder to game than cost, though. if only 20% of the dry mass of your launch vehicle can be disposable, you'll have to design VERY carefully, indeed. Or use expensive ultralight weight materials for the throwaway pieces.
Plans for a 'thin constellation of three to six spacecraft' in orbit, which would target enemy missiles as they took off or landed, are planned, according to Hitchens. The document, said Hitchens, signals that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws the use of weapons in orbit, will be ignored.
Someone should have read the Treaty before they wrote the article. Only WMD are banned. "normal" weapons are perfectly OK, so long as they are not put an a "celestial body".
This situation has no resolution short of violent revolution, and that can't succeed with the firepower advantage (thousands to millions to one, depending on which weapons you want to count, on a per-soldier versus per-civilian basis) the military has over the civilian population.
While your average soldier has more firepower than your average civilian (at least, if you only count the soldiers at the pointy end - most soldiers are REMF in this day and age), it is not so overwhelming as all that. An M-16 (most soldiers won't have more firepower than this - the few who do skew the numbers quite a lot) shoots quite a lot faster than an AR-15, but doesn't hit nearly as hard as an M1A (civilian version of M-14). It tends to balance out.
And this ignores the fact that the civilians outnumber the soldiers 100 to 1.
And ignores the fact that many, if not most, soldiers would be on the rebelling side in such a situation. Notice how many officers and men went with their States in 1861, rather than with the Union. Alas, most of them were pretty ethical guys - when a USN ship comes into port, the captain turns the ship over to the OIC of the port, then leads the crew south to join the CSN, something is dreadfully wrong (or right, depending on persepctive).
I thought the shuttle took about nineteen minutes to do a complete orbit.
Ninety. 90 minutes, not 19 minutes.
That said, a couple orbits at the required altitude would take no more than four hours.
Reasons for not wanting to actually do the orbits, though:
If you do one (or more) orbit(s), your landing site may not be under you until an inconvenient time has passed. So, in order to save you from having to ferry the orbiter back from Istanbul, or the south Pacific, it might be more convenient to de-orbit without bothering to finish the 2 orbits. For instance, you can launch from the West Coast, achieve orbit before you reach the east Coast, and land in Florida.
Quibble - the Moon is high enough up that its orbital speed is in the range of a good rifle-bullet.
If you're willing to accept a less than circular orbit, 60,000 Km up, a good varmint rifle ought to be able to manage an orbit that just missed atmosphere at perigee.
Has the UK actually done anything other than sign/ratify the Treaty?
Seems to me that Kyoto hasn't even gone into effect yet (takes 90 days after the requisite nations have ratified it, which condition had not been achieved as of October 2004)
Yah, the Renewables Obligation (4.9% now, unless you just pay the bribe, er - Buyout Option, so it doesn't apply) might have some effect, but it isn't really Kyoto, since Kyoto isn't yet in effect.
(as in, for instance, not losing California to the Atlantic Ocean
I think it is safe to say that California is pretty much safe from risk of being inundated by the Atlantic Ocean. What with 45 other states in the way.
I don't think the prize money is enough. It cost about half that to attain something much less by SpaceShipOne. My guess is that it will cost closer to $100 mil to do such a thing and claim the prize.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of Prize-motivated activities where the Prize covered development costs. People do this sort of thing for the fame, not the money.
He's not aiming for philanthropy. He's aiming for having access to manned launch vehicles to support his own orbital habitat module, which he intends to have in space in the same time-frame.
Note that he's doing this because he thinks US government competition for available Soyuz will quickly price Soyuz beyond the reach of his business model.
Which is all the more fascinating when you realize that that's pretty much how they started - the Democrat-Republican Party was the opposition to the Whigs, before it divided on the issue of slavery, which issue the Whigs ducked.
either way extending presidential term limits is something both parties suppor
Not surprised, really. Term Limits for President were put in to keep someone like Roosevelt from doing four terms again. The Democrats would like it, so they could re-elect Clinton. The Republicans would like it, so they could re-elect Reagan (ok, he's dead, but the point is that both Parties have had immensely popular Presidents in recent decades, who were hobbled by Term Limits)
Still, it is unlikely that either Amendment could be passed today. And it is not terribly likely that either Amendment would make it out of Committee in either house of Congress.
It could be written as one Amendment, but that would lower its chances of success. Best write it as two, and hope one passes. It won't, but combining won't help (there are people who'd be willing to let Presidents serve more than two who won't like the idea of foreign born Presidents, and vice versa).
You also forget that only 2/3 of the states are required
Umm, no. Reread the Constitution.:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Note that 2/3 of the House and 2/3 the Senate (or 2/3 the States) must PROPOSE an amendment, but 3/4 are required to ratify it.
As to the rest of your comment, unlikely in the extreme.
-eclipsed large portions of face of the giant planet
Did anyone look at the pictures before they wrote this? "teeny-weeny portions of the face of the giant planet" might be more appropriate. The red spot was many times larger than the eclipse shadow.
Slashdot Mirror
So start one. If you have good ideas, you'll get support. Hell, you might even get MY support, if you agree enough with my basic positions.
alright, how do you define "the True Will of Voters"? And how do you determine whether it has been interfered with?
Umm, the Electoral College is Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution. The Twelfth Amendment just clarified procedures for the pre-existing Electoral College, as well as certain qualifiers for Pres/VP (they can't be residents of the same State, for instance).
Hmm, given this system were in place for President, with the numbers you specified (5% margin triggers runoff), do you really think that we'd get a President elected?
As an example, bush/Kerry. Do you honestly think some voters would say "well, my guy didn't win the election, so I'll switch to the other guy in the runoff"? Most likely result is that you repeat the election every week until Doomsday, then decide to forget about it.
And who runs things until a winner is picked? the Incumbent? Great idea! We could keep Bush in office virtually forever, if we can just deadlock the next election to within 5% margin of error.
Note that in Clinton's first election, such a system would have required runoffs in 17 States, totalling 211 Electoral Votes. In most of those States, the election wasn't especially close (>3% difference), so it is unlikely that any significant shift would occur during runoffs. So, Clinton could not have been elected under such a system (and he was fairly popular, as such things go, unlike either Bush or Kerry).
Now, such a system could have a major effect in case of a serious third party contender. Reagan's first election (with such a contender), could have easily gone to Carter or Reagen under such a system. Or, just as likely, been severely deadlocked, as Clinton's election would have been.
No, if Kerry said what it was, people would know quite clearly what he stood for, and voted against him in (even larger) droves.
By keeping things ambiguous, he left people open to the possibility that his plan was one they'd approve of. If he'd had a plan that people, in general, would have liked, he could have reduced it to a couple sound bites (yah, big picture only), and sold it.
As it most likely was, a really complicated plan that reduced to "raise everyone's taxes" wouldn't play well in Poughkeepsie. And he knew it.
Notice that even China couldn't get its Army to break up Tienamen Square, until they imported some Mongolian troops to do the dirty work. America is too homogeneous to play that sort of game anymore.
How do you think tyrants like Saddam Hussein manage to stay in power? He recruited his military personnel from the civilian ranks the same as we do.
He recruited from his own Sunni minority, and had them oppress the hell out of the Kurds and Shiites. Note that they're still tribal enough over there that "Sunni", "Shiite", "Kurd" is more important than "Iraqi".
The U.S. is no exception to this -- the civil war did happen, you know, and those very same psychological methods were used on both sides to convince the troops to fight.
Umm, no. The Union soldiers didn't fight because the Rebels were "subhuman", they fought (mostly) because they thought slavery was evil. Note that the Union had a really hard time getting soldiers to fight until they started making the War a war against slavery, rather than a war to restore the Union.
Note also that, at that time, very few people thought of themselves as "American". They were "Virginians", and "Georgians", and whatever people from New Jersey call themselves ("You from Joisey? I'm from Joisey! What exit?"), etc. It's really a lot easier to get people to fight against "not us" than against "us". And since the War Between the States, we've stopped thinking of ourselves as "Georgians", etc. We're Americans.
You're a fool if you think the current U.S. military is somehow magically immune to this. Believing that is like believing in Santa Claus.
Nothing magic about it. Did you notice that when the Russians rebelled back at the fall of the USSR, the Russian soldiers wouldn't fire on the crowds either? American soldiers won't fight against a civilian rebellion in any meaningful numbers. They would stay in barracks, most likely, much as the Russians did.
But even without the truly heavy weapons, we're still talking about a many thousands to one advantage in firepower that the military has over the civilian population on a per-man basis, because the civilian population (right or wrong) doesn't have access to artillery, tanks, air support, satellite surveillance, and all the other things that are necessary for modern warfare, and you need access to those things in order to put up a real fight against an opponent that has those things.
Funny, the Iraqis seem to be putting up a fight quite nicely without those things. And the Tamils in Sri Lanka. And...I can go on. Guerrilla warfare is all about civilians fighting Armies, and mostly winning.
Have you ever been made aware of just how hard it is to control a country with just a military? Especially when, like the USA, the civilian population has 100 guns for every soldier in your military.
To argue otherwise is to argue that a country with a lightly armed civilian population doesn't need a military force in order to successfully defend itself from an outside aggressor (an outside aggressor has much less of an advantage over your civilian population than you do, since you already have a strong military presence within it).
Actually, we don't need a standing army to defend ourselves against an outside aggressor. Note that the USA had a TINY military up till post-WW2, excluding periods of war (we ramped up our tiny standing Army for each war we fought, and disbanded them soon as possible after the fighting stopped). We got along alright. It was only when we decided that we had to play global policemen, and defend Europe from the USSR, and later defend the whole world against "communism" (a convenient though misleading label - the "communists" we were talking about were actually just an
Sounds like you have a potential problem overseas, then. Because, at least in the USA, polls are increasingly unreliable because of people like me.
You also run the risk of having actual fraud go undetected.
Not especially. Hopefully, the people investigating voter fraud are using something other than exit polls to determine the "correct answer".
And finally, you have to face the fact that lying to lose is stupid, lying to win is wrong, and lying in the hope that you will neither win or lose is pointlessly nilistic.
How about "lying for fun"? I don't lie to pollsters to win (there's no prize for getting the right answer), or to lose (no penalty phase for getting the wrong answer), or in the hopes of neither winning nor losing (since there is no right answer and no wrong answer, winning or losing is irrelevant, and my hopes of same even less so).
Lying to exit pollsters is not, of course, purely a Republican idea. I'm not a Republican (I tend to vote about half Dem, half Rep, though this year I think I only voted for one Dem), and I do it. Guy I used to know back in college voted straight Dem Party ticket (or so he said ;) ), but routinely lied to pollsters of all stripe. My wife, on the other hand, tends to just say "It's none of your business", or just scream at pollsters. Takes all kinds.
Something to remember - they're going to hold the election anyway, and they're going to count the votes anyway. With or without exit polls, and no matter the results of any previous polls. Hence, exit polls (and the previous polls) are merely used to attempt to bias the results of the election one way or another. I don't believe in helping other people bias the election. My lying to pollsters is my way of hindering them.
How odd that the Exit Pollsters claimed 3-4% margin of error.
I would lie to the exit pollsters to screw with their results.
Do I lie to my Doctor? No, but I want him to know the truth.
Same with the waiter at the restaurant I am eating at.
Do I want a pollster to have the truth? Not especially. Because what counts is the election, NOT the EXIT POLL! If I vote Kerry, and tell the pollster I voted Badnarik, his data is slightly slanted, but MY VOTE doesn't change because I lied to a pollster.
However, a Saturn V is not required to reach orbit. Something rather larger than a Gemini or Soyuz would do nicely. The difficulty is the reusability requirement, not the design of a basic goes-up-goes-around-comes-down vehicle. Which we could to in the 60's.
One would hope that our engineering expertise as come a ways in the last 40 years.
The second stage of a Saturn V stack, with the third stage and Apollo removed, and an aeroshell added) could just about reach orbit by itself, so a SSTO isn't totally out of the realm of possibility, even with 60's technology, much less with the rather better materials technology of today.
So, you truly believe that if a President were to order the nuclear incineration of Atlanta that the military who actually have to do the work would do it?!?
Somehow, I think not.
As to the rest of the arsenal (the tanks, planes, artillery), yah, it gives the soldiers an advantage. But it is not really very much on a per-soldier basis.
An Army Division will have around 70 big guns, maybe 300 tanks, maybe 3000 guys with rifles. And number around 20,000 men. A big gun may be worth 1000 men (quite an exaggeration, I think), but even so, and even if you give the same value to a tank, you only get an equivalent of a factor 20 increase in the average firepower per man. And even with that 20-fold increase in firepower, the civilians have the edge, just on numbers alone.
Real reason we won't do a civil war is that you couldn't convince the military to crack down and oppress the civilian populace enough to make the civilians get excited about it.
More complicated? I think not. More difficult? Certainly. One must remember that it was possible to achieve orbit with 1950's technology. The Saturn V went from drawing board to test flight in only six years, and it was enormously more capable than a vehicle capable of winning this prize must be.
Given that much early spaceflight technology is no longer under patent protection (even the Shuttle tiles aren't still patented, though refinements may very well be), the available technologies are quite extensive, and it's just an engineering problem.
"it's just an engineering problem" doesn't mean it's trivial of course. A lot depends on things like how that 20% expendable is defined - cost, mass, what?
If cost is the key issue, then a big dumb cheap booster can be part of this setup. Which makes it a lot easier.
Mass is harder to game than cost, though. if only 20% of the dry mass of your launch vehicle can be disposable, you'll have to design VERY carefully, indeed. Or use expensive ultralight weight materials for the throwaway pieces.
Someone should have read the Treaty before they wrote the article. Only WMD are banned. "normal" weapons are perfectly OK, so long as they are not put an a "celestial body".
While your average soldier has more firepower than your average civilian (at least, if you only count the soldiers at the pointy end - most soldiers are REMF in this day and age), it is not so overwhelming as all that. An M-16 (most soldiers won't have more firepower than this - the few who do skew the numbers quite a lot) shoots quite a lot faster than an AR-15, but doesn't hit nearly as hard as an M1A (civilian version of M-14). It tends to balance out.
And this ignores the fact that the civilians outnumber the soldiers 100 to 1.
And ignores the fact that many, if not most, soldiers would be on the rebelling side in such a situation. Notice how many officers and men went with their States in 1861, rather than with the Union. Alas, most of them were pretty ethical guys - when a USN ship comes into port, the captain turns the ship over to the OIC of the port, then leads the crew south to join the CSN, something is dreadfully wrong (or right, depending on persepctive).
61.7%, according to this
Ninety. 90 minutes, not 19 minutes.
That said, a couple orbits at the required altitude would take no more than four hours.
Reasons for not wanting to actually do the orbits, though:
If you do one (or more) orbit(s), your landing site may not be under you until an inconvenient time has passed. So, in order to save you from having to ferry the orbiter back from Istanbul, or the south Pacific, it might be more convenient to de-orbit without bothering to finish the 2 orbits. For instance, you can launch from the West Coast, achieve orbit before you reach the east Coast, and land in Florida.
If you're willing to accept a less than circular orbit, 60,000 Km up, a good varmint rifle ought to be able to manage an orbit that just missed atmosphere at perigee.
Has the UK actually done anything other than sign/ratify the Treaty?
Seems to me that Kyoto hasn't even gone into effect yet (takes 90 days after the requisite nations have ratified it, which condition had not been achieved as of October 2004)
Yah, the Renewables Obligation (4.9% now, unless you just pay the bribe, er - Buyout Option, so it doesn't apply) might have some effect, but it isn't really Kyoto, since Kyoto isn't yet in effect.
I think it is safe to say that California is pretty much safe from risk of being inundated by the Atlantic Ocean. What with 45 other states in the way.
The Pacific Ocean, on the other hand....
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any examples of Prize-motivated activities where the Prize covered development costs. People do this sort of thing for the fame, not the money.
Note that he's doing this because he thinks US government competition for available Soyuz will quickly price Soyuz beyond the reach of his business model.
Which is all the more fascinating when you realize that that's pretty much how they started - the Democrat-Republican Party was the opposition to the Whigs, before it divided on the issue of slavery, which issue the Whigs ducked.
either way extending presidential term limits is something both parties suppor
Not surprised, really. Term Limits for President were put in to keep someone like Roosevelt from doing four terms again. The Democrats would like it, so they could re-elect Clinton. The Republicans would like it, so they could re-elect Reagan (ok, he's dead, but the point is that both Parties have had immensely popular Presidents in recent decades, who were hobbled by Term Limits)
Still, it is unlikely that either Amendment could be passed today. And it is not terribly likely that either Amendment would make it out of Committee in either house of Congress.
It could be written as one Amendment, but that would lower its chances of success. Best write it as two, and hope one passes. It won't, but combining won't help (there are people who'd be willing to let Presidents serve more than two who won't like the idea of foreign born Presidents, and vice versa).
You also forget that only 2/3 of the states are required
Umm, no. Reread the Constitution.:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.
Note that 2/3 of the House and 2/3 the Senate (or 2/3 the States) must PROPOSE an amendment, but 3/4 are required to ratify it.
As to the rest of your comment, unlikely in the extreme.
Did anyone look at the pictures before they wrote this? "teeny-weeny portions of the face of the giant planet" might be more appropriate. The red spot was many times larger than the eclipse shadow.