Be careful, though... for example, in Massachusetts, potato guns using hairspray are considered firearms (as they use an ignited material, or something)*. Last I heard (and don't take my word for it even if you're here), a compressed air gun is legal without a licence.
I prefer to consider the BAFT a Department, rather than a Bureau, don't you?
* and as it's a custom firearm, it might require a higher class licence, even, but I'm not sure about that.
You'll have to take this with a grain of salt... I'm a mechanical engineer, and I studied thermodynamics (read: nozzle calculations among other things), but it's been years since I was involved in that aspect of things (I'm more into mechanical components)
Now that the qualifier is done... It's going to be hard to get a potato gun supersonic. First, according to the calculations, getting supersonic flow out of compressed air requires a converging/diverging nozzle*. Subsonicly, as the tube diameter decreases, pressure and speed increase. Supersonically (and bizzarly), tube diameter must increase for speed to increase.
If there's no nozzle, you can get supersonic projectiles** (and my experiance doesn't exactly include calculations with obstructions), but with a compressed air gun, you tend to have a large air tank connected to a small diameter barrel (so pressure doesn't drop off linearly). That junction between large tank and small tube looks like a nozzle.
Basically, what I recall happens is a shockwave forms, kind of like an internal sonic boom. The shockwave causes the flow to stagnate (if you can call 'only doing the speed of sound' stagnating). Mach 1 always occurs (if it ever will) at the smallest diameter of the c/d nozzle, the 'neck'.
I'm going to have to look up the equations again.***
* Assuming you don't feel like adding/subtracting heat, anyway.
** well, I'm guessing... and considering some firearms have supersonic projectiles, I'm figuring it's a good guess.
*** This is probably WAY too much information, but here.
"The idea that fusion power is 'clean' is not backed up by the facts"
Huh? Let's see:
Coal: releases radioactive dust into the air. Releases massive amounts of crap into the air (I know, if I leave magnets on my fridge, the edges turn black and you see dark soot outlines if it doesn't rain for a while). Strip mining is highly destructive.
Oil: Less radioactive dust... And oil wells are better for the environment than coal mines. Easier to contaminate large areas of ocean, though.
LNG: Better. Still a lot of CO2 vapor into the air, and as we all know, the air is hard to clean. Not too bad.
Solar: Takes more energy to make a solar panel then you get out of it currently. Manufacturing process has huge amounts of toxic waste.
Wind: Requires huge tracts of land. Otherwise, not bad. I like wind.
Fission: Radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel rods, control rods, and some materials that need to be replaced every decade or so. Modern plants can't melt down - loss of coolent means loss of fission. Bunch of solid radioactive waste that can be dumped in one place instead of forced into the air.
Fusion: Like fission, but no fuel or control rods.
"I remember that in the Bell Curve it was stated that the average I.Q of Africans was something like 75 or 80 (borderline retarded)"
Bear with me a moment, this takes a bit of explaination.
This statistic is essentially correct, from the aspect of the IQ tests used. The problem is that IQ tests are not specifically measuring the nebulous 'intelegence' of a person, but more how much they learned. As you alluded to, in general the annoying fact is that black people are on average* less educated than whites, and I expect that the IQ test they used was probably scaled to accentuate this. That leads to what is an unfair reduction on the measured 'intelegence' of black people.
Just like a test on vibrational loading** would leave a smart person looking around 20 points if you got your baseling from an engineering college.
My instinct on seeing any statistic like that is 'ok, are they correcting for all the variables?' The answer is (I'm guessing - it might be another error) a rather strong 'no' in this case. Big 'surprise'... I don't know what, if anything this does to their conclusions, but it certainly asks questions about them.
Where in Boston were you looking? Cambridge has a high percentage of Portuguese, and I'm sorry to say that from my experiance, my relitives aren't exactly the least discriminating people I know...
* I'm going to be a little less picky about qualifying... I don't want to slip over the bend from careful to condensending
** from experiance, if you get a chance to take a course in this, don't
"Do you really want carloads of drunken students in mechanically unsound vehicles to be hundreds of feet above our cities and houses"
Yes. I know people who own shotguns.
"Hey, it's the drunken college students flying along again. Have anything to say?"
"Hell yeah. PULL!"
Now, I know what you're thinking. That might hurt people on the ground. That's why I say we should move RIGHT NOW and get the federal goverment to mandate that all flying cars be made of bright orange clay. Remember, only you can prevent drunk driving.
Pardon the lack of a link, but I seem to recall 2 things: 1, that the Audi was referred to as a 'hover car', and 2, that when you see it overturned, it looks like chickenwire on the base of the wheel.
The control mechanism is way off for a decent hovercar, especially considering the layout of the 'wheels'. Having the small 'contact area' makes things even worse, as you need higher pressures which are more energy expensive to generate.
Now, the robot carriers, those had spherical wheels. Or... they looked like them, but maybe they were 'hoverballs', too. Don't know.
It would be hard to design a gymballed system with drive power like that, though. Only thing I know of with a similar system is office chairs, and adding a motor to the wheels would do really odd things. I could spend time on it, but honestly, I don't think it's worth the effort...
"Imagine no more forests, just miniature estates every mile"
Part the first does not follow from part the second. If you own a nice parcel of land, you will not mess it up by cutting down all the trees. Using the flying car thing means you wouldn't even need massive roads in the area, further reducing environmental problems.
'urban sprawl' is only a real problem when 1) commuting generates severe amounts of polution (we can assume that even if they become common, the pressures will prevent this from being too much of an issue) and 2) removing large percentages of forest for houses... again, not a problem, because only part of an 'estate' is going to be trimmed back (for the house - a small percentage). As compared to nearly everything when you get close to a city.
Urban sprawl is an artifact of our primary transportation method.
I think you're misinterpreting things... Massachusetts (as least last I heard, a few years ago) had the US's least number of accidents per million miles driven. There's a reason for that: We have to be freaking paranoid to drive around here. Driving in Boston is easy: Assume that the driver next to you is going to take the absolute most agressive action they can. 4 times out of 5, you'll be right. We expect it.
Adding a third will be the same way, except we can avoid the Big Dig by flying over it.
Now, Rhode Island drivers with flying cars... THAT'S a scary thought.
A more correct initial analogy would be the following:
Your list consists of 1) clean bathroom, 2) wash dishes, 3) fumigate* to remove carpenter ant infestation in the basement. The government is puttering around with its 'housekeepers' (the copyright infringement group) washing the dishes and spraying windex around at the file traders, and ignoring the health and physical damage problems of the ant infestation (the commercial pirates, the ones who make millions of dollars of CDs and sell them dirt cheep**)
Even within the same context of copyright 'crimes', there are much, much better targets that do more damage.
* vaguely housekeeping, but close enough for these purposes
** Or as everyone but the RIAA and the government would put it, reasonably priced, but that's another issue.
But the other lawyer could insure such a clause is not in place.
It comes down to who's driving... Does this company have the power, or does Disney have the power? (and that, of course, is open to interpretation from both sides... I'm sure Disney's lawyer believes they have the power because they have the cash, and are entertaining the contract because it's pocket change, and the other group thinks they have the power, because they have a patent, and everyone knows that means they're in the right*.)
* I actually said that with a straight face... I should go into acting.
A gmail invite sent to my hotmail account got summarily dumped into spam, and my anti-spam settings are on the medium level. It's probably hotmail server based, or something.
I don't mean to nitpick, or try to argue against your point, but I feel compelled to point out that men can be rapedby both men and women. (see the second paragraph of the answer)
"ended up killing the medium for pretty much everyone"
You found the point, I think...
"Wonder how much potential revenue they missed out on w/ that fiasco?"
Who are you asking? If you ask the RIAA-types, they'll say that they saved massive amounts of money because it reduced the rampant piracy that DAT would obviously have.
If you ask anyone with a brain, well, that's a differant answer...
"So, I come up with creative ways to circumvent the draconian password policy instead"
I used to need to keep 3 seperate passwords. Then one joker made 2 of them require new passwords every 30 days, kept a record of passwords that it said was for the last 5 but was at least 10 long, compared any new passwords to all of those 10 for common points of referance (as in, of more than 50% was similar, it would not allow it), and did a few other checks that they never mentioned in any way (and failed to train the tech people as to what the full guidelines are).
You know what I did? I kept all but my network/screensaver password on a peice of paper taped to my monitor. I can't come up with passwords I can remember that satisfied all the requirements (took me 2 hours at one time to come up with an 'acceptable' password that I could remember). So instead of increasing security, they destroyed it. And, as I'm here, I'm sure you can guess that I was more willing to go along with computer security than most people, so you can also guess how good security was in general...
"Would you have sex if it were neither meaningful nor pleasurable, but gave you kids, even whom you didn't love"
No, because I do not want kids. This is not an arguement.
"Unfortunately, the emotion was attached to the act of sex, not to the birth"
Nothing unfortunate about it. It's a good thing. That way, you can get the emotions without being forced to have kids. It's not an argument. You're trying to say that sex is only a part of a relationship because we evolved that way to encourage kids. I'm saying that now that we can CHOOSE to have kids or not, the emotional aspect is the primary reason for sex, not children. The reason sex is pleasurable is irrelevent to the discussion of it's primary modern 'purpose'.
That's a very limited view. Biologically that is correct... However, emotionally, that is not correct. Some people do not wish to have kids. Therefore, for them, the point of sex is not 'to have kids', but something else.
Just because something was 'designed' (and I use that term loosly) for a particular purpose doesn't mean that is the only reason for it. Lasers were designed for a reason... I don't think cat toys was it, though. That doesn't mean that using a laser as a cat toy is somehow not a valid use.
Ummm... Where's the warrent for that? Do they have proof that I'm moving $10,000 because I'm a terrorist/drug dealer/whatever? Yes? Then they have no trouble getting a warrent. If not, what the hell are they doing looking at me?
It's your money. Doing what you want with it (legally) should not make you suddenly the target of suspicion.
Sure people should get security if they're moving 10 grand. But that is THEIR call, not the government's. If they want to, they can take the money and scatter it across a parade. It's not the feds' business.
"You find for me a method of birth control that doesn't fuck up my skin (allergic to spermicide), fuck up my body (hormones make me crazy), or fuck up my mind"
"Don't Have Sex?" - See bold for answer to your question. Abstinance is not a solution to the question, it is ignoring the question.
There are people (I happen to agree with them, as do most people I know - especially including those that say 'no sex before marriage') that a relationship's closeness depends (not in full, or even by majority, but still in part) on intimate relations. People only differ on deciding how close people should get before marriage, not really on the basics of that statement.
So, why should people who have no wish for children, or who are not ready for them, be denied that vital aspect to a romantic relationship?
"The majority of Guard members are ordinary citizens with some military training"
The majority of Guard members are professionally trained (they do go through boot camp, etc.) and are subject to military protocol. They are not ordinary citizens, they are military personel in a reserve force, and are subject to military chain of command.
"Even then, the only way they are considered part of the regular army is their chain-of-command. Their unit reports to the theater commander, and from there up the chain of command is the same as for every military unit there."
My point exactly. They are subect to military chain of command, therefore they ARE part of the army. And therefore not a militia. A militia is specifically supposed to be under STATE, not FEDERAL, jurisdiction. I quote the Constitution, something of an authority on US law:
The militia belong to the states respectively, and are subject, both in their civil and military capacities, to the jurisdiction and laws of the state, except so far as these laws are controlled by acts of congress, constitutionally made.
Or, in other words, the states have control over the militia. As the constitution forbids the Fed to meddle with the States, that last bit doesn't add much, except that the militia can't be used to violate constitutional rights by the states. I'll admit the interstate commerce clause has been overinterpreted to give a bit more power to this, but we're talking what was intended, not what people have altered reality to allow.
"If every civilian who is physically fit is in the militia, then every 18yr old in HighSchool is in the militia. Doesn't matter if they have a gun, or if they do, how to use it."
Correct. The Massachusetts state law says (and I use Mass both because I'm familiar with it, and because the only more liberal state is California, and that's iffy in some ways) that all males between 18 and 35 (40 if they served in the military) and all females between 18 and 30 (35 with service) are members of the state militia. Most states have similar laws, I believe.
Ayyway, it doesn't matter, as the 2nd amendment clearly gives a individual rather than collective right to the people to own guns. See previous link.
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I prefer to consider the BAFT a Department, rather than a Bureau, don't you?
* and as it's a custom firearm, it might require a higher class licence, even, but I'm not sure about that.
Now that the qualifier is done... It's going to be hard to get a potato gun supersonic. First, according to the calculations, getting supersonic flow out of compressed air requires a converging/diverging nozzle*. Subsonicly, as the tube diameter decreases, pressure and speed increase. Supersonically (and bizzarly), tube diameter must increase for speed to increase.
If there's no nozzle, you can get supersonic projectiles** (and my experiance doesn't exactly include calculations with obstructions), but with a compressed air gun, you tend to have a large air tank connected to a small diameter barrel (so pressure doesn't drop off linearly). That junction between large tank and small tube looks like a nozzle.
Basically, what I recall happens is a shockwave forms, kind of like an internal sonic boom. The shockwave causes the flow to stagnate (if you can call 'only doing the speed of sound' stagnating). Mach 1 always occurs (if it ever will) at the smallest diameter of the c/d nozzle, the 'neck'.
I'm going to have to look up the equations again.***
* Assuming you don't feel like adding/subtracting heat, anyway.
** well, I'm guessing... and considering some firearms have supersonic projectiles, I'm figuring it's a good guess.
*** This is probably WAY too much information, but here.
Huh? Let's see:
Coal: releases radioactive dust into the air. Releases massive amounts of crap into the air (I know, if I leave magnets on my fridge, the edges turn black and you see dark soot outlines if it doesn't rain for a while). Strip mining is highly destructive.
Oil: Less radioactive dust... And oil wells are better for the environment than coal mines. Easier to contaminate large areas of ocean, though.
LNG: Better. Still a lot of CO2 vapor into the air, and as we all know, the air is hard to clean. Not too bad.
Solar: Takes more energy to make a solar panel then you get out of it currently. Manufacturing process has huge amounts of toxic waste.
Wind: Requires huge tracts of land. Otherwise, not bad. I like wind.
Fission: Radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel rods, control rods, and some materials that need to be replaced every decade or so. Modern plants can't melt down - loss of coolent means loss of fission. Bunch of solid radioactive waste that can be dumped in one place instead of forced into the air.
Fusion: Like fission, but no fuel or control rods.
So, compared to the alternitives... It's clean.
Bear with me a moment, this takes a bit of explaination.
This statistic is essentially correct, from the aspect of the IQ tests used. The problem is that IQ tests are not specifically measuring the nebulous 'intelegence' of a person, but more how much they learned. As you alluded to, in general the annoying fact is that black people are on average* less educated than whites, and I expect that the IQ test they used was probably scaled to accentuate this. That leads to what is an unfair reduction on the measured 'intelegence' of black people.
Just like a test on vibrational loading** would leave a smart person looking around 20 points if you got your baseling from an engineering college.
My instinct on seeing any statistic like that is 'ok, are they correcting for all the variables?' The answer is (I'm guessing - it might be another error) a rather strong 'no' in this case. Big 'surprise'... I don't know what, if anything this does to their conclusions, but it certainly asks questions about them.
Where in Boston were you looking? Cambridge has a high percentage of Portuguese, and I'm sorry to say that from my experiance, my relitives aren't exactly the least discriminating people I know...
* I'm going to be a little less picky about qualifying... I don't want to slip over the bend from careful to condensending
** from experiance, if you get a chance to take a course in this, don't
Yes. I know people who own shotguns.
"Hey, it's the drunken college students flying along again. Have anything to say?"
"Hell yeah. PULL!"
Now, I know what you're thinking. That might hurt people on the ground. That's why I say we should move RIGHT NOW and get the federal goverment to mandate that all flying cars be made of bright orange clay. Remember, only you can prevent drunk driving.
Especially considering you'll have a freaking 125 cubic meter bumper to help that out. :)
The control mechanism is way off for a decent hovercar, especially considering the layout of the 'wheels'. Having the small 'contact area' makes things even worse, as you need higher pressures which are more energy expensive to generate.
Now, the robot carriers, those had spherical wheels. Or... they looked like them, but maybe they were 'hoverballs', too. Don't know.
It would be hard to design a gymballed system with drive power like that, though. Only thing I know of with a similar system is office chairs, and adding a motor to the wheels would do really odd things. I could spend time on it, but honestly, I don't think it's worth the effort...
Part the first does not follow from part the second. If you own a nice parcel of land, you will not mess it up by cutting down all the trees. Using the flying car thing means you wouldn't even need massive roads in the area, further reducing environmental problems.
'urban sprawl' is only a real problem when 1) commuting generates severe amounts of polution (we can assume that even if they become common, the pressures will prevent this from being too much of an issue) and 2) removing large percentages of forest for houses... again, not a problem, because only part of an 'estate' is going to be trimmed back (for the house - a small percentage). As compared to nearly everything when you get close to a city.
Urban sprawl is an artifact of our primary transportation method.
I think you're misinterpreting things... Massachusetts (as least last I heard, a few years ago) had the US's least number of accidents per million miles driven. There's a reason for that: We have to be freaking paranoid to drive around here. Driving in Boston is easy: Assume that the driver next to you is going to take the absolute most agressive action they can. 4 times out of 5, you'll be right. We expect it.
Adding a third will be the same way, except we can avoid the Big Dig by flying over it.
Now, Rhode Island drivers with flying cars... THAT'S a scary thought.
Your list consists of 1) clean bathroom, 2) wash dishes, 3) fumigate* to remove carpenter ant infestation in the basement. The government is puttering around with its 'housekeepers' (the copyright infringement group) washing the dishes and spraying windex around at the file traders, and ignoring the health and physical damage problems of the ant infestation (the commercial pirates, the ones who make millions of dollars of CDs and sell them dirt cheep**)
Even within the same context of copyright 'crimes', there are much, much better targets that do more damage.
* vaguely housekeeping, but close enough for these purposes ** Or as everyone but the RIAA and the government would put it, reasonably priced, but that's another issue.
(p.s. I have no idea where that came from)
It comes down to who's driving... Does this company have the power, or does Disney have the power? (and that, of course, is open to interpretation from both sides... I'm sure Disney's lawyer believes they have the power because they have the cash, and are entertaining the contract because it's pocket change, and the other group thinks they have the power, because they have a patent, and everyone knows that means they're in the right*.)
* I actually said that with a straight face... I should go into acting.
A gmail invite sent to my hotmail account got summarily dumped into spam, and my anti-spam settings are on the medium level. It's probably hotmail server based, or something.
Goddess... Remind me not to get onto a elevator with you.
I don't mean to nitpick, or try to argue against your point, but I feel compelled to point out that men can be raped by both men and women. (see the second paragraph of the answer)
You wouldn't need to. Just look for a sudden increase in the number of strangled US admirals.
You found the point, I think...
"Wonder how much potential revenue they missed out on w/ that fiasco?"
Who are you asking? If you ask the RIAA-types, they'll say that they saved massive amounts of money because it reduced the rampant piracy that DAT would obviously have.
If you ask anyone with a brain, well, that's a differant answer...
They must have been waiting for the patents to expire.
I used to need to keep 3 seperate passwords. Then one joker made 2 of them require new passwords every 30 days, kept a record of passwords that it said was for the last 5 but was at least 10 long, compared any new passwords to all of those 10 for common points of referance (as in, of more than 50% was similar, it would not allow it), and did a few other checks that they never mentioned in any way (and failed to train the tech people as to what the full guidelines are).
You know what I did? I kept all but my network/screensaver password on a peice of paper taped to my monitor. I can't come up with passwords I can remember that satisfied all the requirements (took me 2 hours at one time to come up with an 'acceptable' password that I could remember). So instead of increasing security, they destroyed it. And, as I'm here, I'm sure you can guess that I was more willing to go along with computer security than most people, so you can also guess how good security was in general...
No, because I do not want kids. This is not an arguement.
"Unfortunately, the emotion was attached to the act of sex, not to the birth"
Nothing unfortunate about it. It's a good thing. That way, you can get the emotions without being forced to have kids. It's not an argument. You're trying to say that sex is only a part of a relationship because we evolved that way to encourage kids. I'm saying that now that we can CHOOSE to have kids or not, the emotional aspect is the primary reason for sex, not children. The reason sex is pleasurable is irrelevent to the discussion of it's primary modern 'purpose'.
That's a very limited view. Biologically that is correct... However, emotionally, that is not correct. Some people do not wish to have kids. Therefore, for them, the point of sex is not 'to have kids', but something else.
Just because something was 'designed' (and I use that term loosly) for a particular purpose doesn't mean that is the only reason for it. Lasers were designed for a reason... I don't think cat toys was it, though. That doesn't mean that using a laser as a cat toy is somehow not a valid use.
Great. Go use a bank with those (mis-)features in their terms of service. What you don't do is force EVERYONE to put up with your desires.
It's your money. Doing what you want with it (legally) should not make you suddenly the target of suspicion.
Sure people should get security if they're moving 10 grand. But that is THEIR call, not the government's. If they want to, they can take the money and scatter it across a parade. It's not the feds' business.
"Don't Have Sex?" - See bold for answer to your question. Abstinance is not a solution to the question, it is ignoring the question.
There are people (I happen to agree with them, as do most people I know - especially including those that say 'no sex before marriage') that a relationship's closeness depends (not in full, or even by majority, but still in part) on intimate relations. People only differ on deciding how close people should get before marriage, not really on the basics of that statement.
So, why should people who have no wish for children, or who are not ready for them, be denied that vital aspect to a romantic relationship?
The majority of Guard members are professionally trained (they do go through boot camp, etc.) and are subject to military protocol. They are not ordinary citizens, they are military personel in a reserve force, and are subject to military chain of command.
"Even then, the only way they are considered part of the regular army is their chain-of-command. Their unit reports to the theater commander, and from there up the chain of command is the same as for every military unit there."
My point exactly. They are subect to military chain of command, therefore they ARE part of the army. And therefore not a militia. A militia is specifically supposed to be under STATE, not FEDERAL, jurisdiction. I quote the Constitution, something of an authority on US law:
The militia belong to the states respectively, and are subject, both in their civil and military capacities, to the jurisdiction and laws of the state, except so far as these laws are controlled by acts of congress, constitutionally made.
Or, in other words, the states have control over the militia. As the constitution forbids the Fed to meddle with the States, that last bit doesn't add much, except that the militia can't be used to violate constitutional rights by the states. I'll admit the interstate commerce clause has been overinterpreted to give a bit more power to this, but we're talking what was intended, not what people have altered reality to allow.
"If every civilian who is physically fit is in the militia, then every 18yr old in HighSchool is in the militia. Doesn't matter if they have a gun, or if they do, how to use it."
Correct. The Massachusetts state law says (and I use Mass both because I'm familiar with it, and because the only more liberal state is California, and that's iffy in some ways) that all males between 18 and 35 (40 if they served in the military) and all females between 18 and 30 (35 with service) are members of the state militia. Most states have similar laws, I believe.
Ayyway, it doesn't matter, as the 2nd amendment clearly gives a individual rather than collective right to the people to own guns. See previous link.