I can totally see why Russia would want to have this happen... at least their own distro for use internally within the Russian government.
Developers - By directly sponsoring a complete distro, they have their own developers who are both actively engaged within the greater Linux community, know the kernel cold (there certainly are Russian programmers who can be and are even now developing software currently in the kernel), and have their loyalties to the Russian society even if not directly to the Russian government. This means Russia has the developer base to keep up with the rest of the world in a critical area.
Security - If there is anybody paranoid about security, I don't know who is worse than the Russian government. The only way to have a genuinely secure operating system is to review each and every line of code that goes into that OS by somebody both with the skills necessary to properly evaluate the software, and the loyalty to the organization necessary to fix things that seem out of place. See also the above point, which is even more critical here.
Meeting local needs - by having a group that is embedded within the Russian culture that certainly is not a part of the Silicon Valley culture, they have a much better grasp of what is needed for their own local society. While working with Cyrillic characters isn't that much different from Latin characters, this is but one situation where local support is desperately needed. Interfacing with older Soviet systems is certainly an issue as well... I can only imagine some of the compatibility issues that would have to be worked out there.
National pride - There is also a little bit of national pride on the line here as well. Having something "made in Russia" is powerfully attractive for a number of reasons... at the very least to show that your country is able to keep up with the best and the brightest on the planet. Of all the reasons I've listed, this really is the least significant, but the one most head-smacking obvious and ultimately the one that would best sell to a legislative body that has to pay for any significant expenses to get this project going. I certainly doubt that Russian citizens are going to be upset with a modest expense being directed in this fashion through their tax dollars.
A top to bottom review of the Linux kernel from another group of developers with a completely different interests, backgrounds, and motivations than other major contributors to Linux would also be a very good thing for the development of Linux as a whole. I wish Russia the best on getting this accomplished, and I hope that their success is huge.
It isn't like the American government doesn't do this too. The NSA (National Security Agency... aka the USA cyber spys) has their own distro for most of the reasons I've listed above, and has nearly continuous recruitment going on at college campuses for CS graduates. The Red Flag distro (Chinese) is another national distro that has been done for more than just pressuring Microsoft into lowering the price of Windows.
Frankly, I see Microsoft's involvement here as a red herring and something to ignore for this discussion.
I guess this shows I don't get onto/. more... or that I actually have a life outside of this forum in terms of responding in a quick fashion.
I should point out that the Seattle Space Needle was a target by Al Queida on January 1st, 2000 for the millennial events that caused all of the worry with Y2K issues. The group that tried to take out the Space Needle back then was arrested at the U.S./Canadian border by suspicious border patrol agents. This is one of the better known terrorist incident foils that has ever happened in the USA.
The 9/11 commission report, while extensive, certainly isn't complete nor does it contain all of the evidence/intelligence that was available that day. It mainly covers what happened in NYC and DC... which is where the damage was done.
There have been successful actions by law enforcement to stop terrorist incidents in the past decade, not just confined to what happened on 9/11/2001 as well. Unfortunately (in terms of press reporting), the law enforcement community has set a deliberate policy of not informing the general public when this happens even if folks are caught red-handed with explosives or other equipment and clearly demonstrated intention to carry forth terrorist actions. The assumption that simply because nothing is getting publicized is the same as if nothing is happening is a fallacy.
There is reason to believe that there were other buildings targeted in other cities, including the Seattle Space Needle and downtown Los Angeles. Supposedly, the other Al-Queida teams forgot to account for differences between time zones from one end of the USA to the next and the west coast groups never got into the air, or at least never were able to take over the cockpits like what happened on the east coast.
The rationale for not invoking the EAS on 9/11 was mostly one of the fact that all of the major news outlets had already interrupted programming on that day and were doing 24-hour coverage of the attack anyway. The primary message to the general public, don't bother going to the airport as your flight has been canceled, certainly was transmitted to nearly everybody that it impacted.
I'm no expert, but on a general reading, it sounds like Aries was designed by people trying to meet the specs on paper and this was designed by people who know the astronauts and know what they're doing and want to protect the people and do their job -- not just meet the specs and make a profit.
But I have to admit, calling any spacecraft a Jupiter makes me uneasy. I'd risk a ride in the first one and anything from the third on, but there's no way I'd trust any vehicle referenced at all as the Jupiter II.
First of all, you have no idea how bad it is that Ares has been designed to spec. So much so that with problems in the basic design of the Ares I, rather than trying to fix the problems they are shaving off payload mass and forcing a redesign of the capsule. Ask about the "pogo stick" problems (where the main engines give an incredibly bumpy ride... much worse than the Saturn V ever did). I'm sure a couple billion dollars will eventually fix the Ares I rocket, but for that price they might as well do a fresh "redo".
The Falcon 9-Heavy is going to cost for its full development a fair bit less than $1 billion... and that rocket completely financed through private (not government) funds. Furthermore, the Falcon 9 is quite a bit closer to getting ready to fly than the Ares I. Yes, I do consider this at least comparable to the Ares I in intention and purpose... with the Falcon 9 having a much larger safety margin in terms of launch capacity and room for improvement to achieve proper man-rating.
As for the name Jupiter, this is one with a decidedly interesting history in terms of rocket history, including the Jupiter-C rocket that was designed by none other than Werner Von Braun himself. I call that a heritage to at least build off from and help to inspire the next generation of rocket builders.
It's not designed to do hostile EW warfare. While I'm sure they can do telecasts from it, it can hardly 'override' ground broadcasts on it's own.
While I'm sure that Air Force One isn't designed for high powered RF broadcasts, its principle occupant has the authority to confiscate all FCC-licensed commercial broadcasting and force a broadcast message to be transmitted by all of those stations. The problem is, when was the last time any President had the balls to declare such a national emergency? G.W. Bush, as much as he is derided, didn't even call for such an emergency broadcast on of all days 9/11/2001.
Replanting is great, but does that newly planted tree use as much CO2 as the 100 year old one cut down? Trees take a while to regrow... so saying they're being replanting is a bit disingenuous.
Actually, a forest is most productive in terms of its ability to feed and sustain an arboreal environment just a few years after it has been cleared and replanted. Old-growth forests with huge trees and a dense upper canopies are not nearly as productive in consuming CO2 or providing a habitat for a diverse group of different species of both plants and animals as do much younger forests.
An excellent example of this is the region around Mount St. Helens, where the destruction of the old forest that surrounded this volcano has lead to a huge increase in both the diversity and productivity of the wildlife in the area, now that several years have passed since the eruption in 1980.
This said, I do agree that some "old growth" forests that are cleared and then replanted with substantially different tree species are destructive to the environments they are found in. Removing old growth Redwood species from the American Pacific Northwest and replanting with Douglas Fir is not a sustainable or productive use of that land. But don't take a few exceptions out of context and claim that all lumber harvesting is a horrible thing or even purely destructive when in fact the opposite conclusion can be made.
As to how long between forest clearings should take place, that can be debated. I've seen numbers ranging from 25 to 100 years, and it should be noted that some National Forest lands that have been put into a 100 year cycle are on their second "crop" after being previously harvested more than 100 years ago under USDA regulations. There is no reason why such a harvest couldn't be indefinitely sustained and in fact serve not just the forest lands but the general public in a very productive manner that helps both people and wildlife.
What's convenient about trying to read a broadsheet newspaper in a car, bus, train, plane? Even a tabloid format is challenging on a plane.
As opposed to somebody opening a laptop and trying to read an article, only to discover that the battery wasn't fully charged for a 4-hour flight?
While I find reading printed material to be nauseating (literally, I do get motion sickness reading them) in private automobiles and busses, I don't have so much of a problem on larger vehicles like trains or commercial aviation transport. It certainly isn't the format which is the issue, but rather the issues related to motion sickness that is for me the major problem.
Reading a "broadsheet newspaper" on a commuter rail trip certainly isn't all that difficult, and you certainly don't have to be hunting for the A/C receptacles to plug in your "reader".
This wasn't being obtuse. This was being very direct and to the point, using a minimal number of words.
How about this for more clarity (or at least my own opinion):
Any technology that is seen as a "replacement" for an older technology should not throw away useful and important features of that previous technology simply "because" it is an advance (or change) in technology.
Better put, magazines shouldn't need batteries. Direct, to the point, and clearly on-topic unlike the reply.
My complaint about tazer usage is that their use ought to be treated in a manner comparable to an officer firing his gun. Genuinely professional law enforcement agencies make their officers accountable for every bullet fired, often with formal review boards that are invoked automatically with an officer being suspended from active duty for the duration of the review... even if firing the gun was completely appropriate and according to policy.
Tazers ought to be treated in a very similar fashion, where its usage outside of a formal training situation like a gun range should have the same consequences for the career of an officer who deploys the weapon. Indeed, the manufacturers of those weapons strongly encourage such an attitude, although a great many "local" police agencies encourage a much more casual attitude about tazers because they are "non-lethal".
One of the worst things I ever saw was a morning television news broadcast (where it tends to get a little more casual than the formal evening news reporting) where one of the reporters "voluntarily" was hit with a tazer by an officer. I can only presume it was to demonstrate the non-lethal nature of the weapon and make the general public fall in love with the weapon and think it was harmless. To me, the "reporter" was an idiot to volunteer for it, and the officer who used the weapon should have been formally reprimanded as if he had shot the reporter in the leg with his revolver. My jaw dropped when I saw this on television, with a real worry that the reporter might just die on camera... I guess I watched with a morbid curiosity to see what was going to happen. This "reporter" was clearly not in the best of health either (he was substantially overweight) and had a few other factors like age that would not have made him an ideal candidate either to document the non-lethal nature of the weapon.
I wish that were the case, but even if it isn't "legal" for an employer to fire you for going to court, they can certainly make your life miserable and get you fired anyway through several means.
Either that or have you job duties re-assigned to do some incredibly tedious and boring task like picking up cigarette butts in the parking lot or cleaning out sewage traps when you are supposedly a lead software engineer. Failure to perform those assigned job duties can result in your job being terminated (assuming you don't quit first).
Explicit permission by Amtrack, at least to the best of my knowledge and from reading the article, did not happen. Amtrack was interested in having people (presumably passengers) take photos of their trains, but they did not specify how or where such photos could happen. Those photos could have been from a bridge, from across a highway or river, or from anywhere else that Amtrack has their equipment.
There certainly was not explicit requirement that the photos had to be taken from inside the train station.... which is where the huge fallacy come from even bringing up the contest in the first place.
This said, the photos were taken in a public place and there is no explicit law that grants enforcement authority for police or security agents to prohibit or even confiscate photographic equipment in most typical public place. The only thing the officer had on the photographer was perhaps a loitering charge (where courts have increasingly have found loitering laws unconstitutional) or other public crowd control laws like disturbing the peace and obstructing traffic (in this case pedestrian traffic).
ultimately, it's up to the property owner, not the police, to decide who is allowed to take photos on their property. so the notion that Amtrak was somehow wrong for allowing people to take photos of their trains is simply ass-backwards wrong.
In this case the "property owner" was Amtrack (or at least the "tenant" that has property control rights), of which the police officer was an agent of the property owner (the officer was employed by Amtrack apparently). By this notion, the property owner was asserting "rights" that photography not be done on their property. The issue of the photo contest is that photos of the train could be taken, but the officer is saying "not here".
Mind you, I still think the police officer here overstepped his authority, but appealing to the property owner is likely to backfire in terms of an argument here.
I would have to agree that citing reasons of "national security" or "potential terrorist threat" as rationale for stopping photography of public places is about as lame as it gets. Once the photos are taken, the photographer should simply move on and be done.
This said, I have seen photographers abuse their "1st amendment rights" by setting up what is arguably a campsite with tripods, light meters, lighting, and other equipment that takes up space and can interfere with other patrons or members of the public that need to use those public spaces. Clearly even this photographer was doing more than simply taking a quick snapshot of a friend and moving on, even if he didn't pull out all of the toys of a genuine professional.
In a situation like this, obtaining a "permit" in terms of organizing a more protracted shooting session and letting the station manager know what you are going to be doing there would certainly have at least some value, and they might be able to suggest some more optimal times to take the photographs or locations that would reduce or eliminate interference. You might even be able to get access to areas not normally deemed "public access" as well. Rather than being something of a problem, you might have an escort that would even be helping you out with the shoot.
What really should have happened here was the officer politely but firmly saying: "Excuse me, sir, but you are standing in the way and could you move along and do that somewhere else?" or even "I would rather you be standing over here" (pointing to a logical location that is out of the way). A photographer that insists at that point in being an ass can have multiple charges thrown at him, including failure to obey a lawful order, disturbing the peace, and more. The lawful order here would be to move along and stay out of pedestrian traffic lanes.
Other than having the photographer getting in everybody's way, I don't see any other rationale for prohibiting this sort of photography. Even a rough "move it, buddy" would have at least given a proper message. Clearly this officer needs to have a good indoctrination of what the law actually is in this situation.
I am also curious about what is so special and unique about this new version of Windows.
For me, the "best" version of Windows was Win 2000 Professional, and everything after that simply sucks and is by far and away over bloated. Showing that this new version of Windows is better than Win 2k or XP by a huge margin would certainly help.
Microsoft has shown that it takes a few versions to get thing right. Windows '95 was almost a joke (don't get me started on ME)... but it doesn't stop even there. MS-DOS version 3 was pretty bad until it got to version 3.3. Forget MS-DOS version 4 (a horrible mistake of an OS if I ever saw one) and it didn't really get fixed until version 5.
Even the early version of Windows, "version 2" (also called Windows-386) almost killed Microsoft as a company. It wasn't until Windows 3 that Microsoft actually had a product worth looking at.
So it is possible that Microsoft finally got their ducks in a row with this new operating system, learning from their previous failures. It is about time too. Still, I will remain highly skeptical until I actually get to see the thing and get to hammer into it for a little while. For the money that Microsoft dumps into a major rev cycle for their flagship operating system, you would think they would put a little more effort into their quality assurance and learn to remove more bloat.
It shouldn't take a case of Blu-ray discs to install an operating system, yet that is what I'm expecting this time.
While not necessarily building condos at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, I wouldn't mind owning some real-estate in Antarctica with mining and oil drilling rights.
If you can tell me how I can do that, it would be appreciated. Not the technological steps, but rather the bureaucratic red tape and what government agencies would be willing to participate in such a sale and assure peaceful control over such real-estate without having to hire or build my own private army to keep idiots off any land I might own.
Pretty much the same bureaucratic red tape that keeps sales of Antarctica from happening is also preventing the development of anything else in the Solar System (or frankly much of the western USA, but I digress here). It isn't if the development of such real estate is technologically or economically viable, but rather if the "power that be" would even permit such a development in the first place.
While I see some logic for protecting the environment of Antarctica, I see absolutely zero logic for protecting the "threatened" species of creatures living on the Moon or protecting the lunar atmosphere from "pollutants". Yet development of lunar resources is actually going to be more complicated from a legal perspective than even extracting similar resources in Antarctica.
While I'm a major critic of Microsoft as a company, some of their basic research activities are simply amazing and certainly aren't done through government subsidies.
Microsoft certainly isn't alone here, and private R&D does happen by forward thinking individuals and companies. IBM is another company who has done some incredible pure research into material science and nano-technology.
Yes, I understand that the government is a major player in scientific research, but it doesn't have to be the only game in town. Certainly relying on only the government to come up with new ideas is a horrible approach for society, and incredibly wasteful of economic resources.
Also, what needs the government has for scientific research are not necessarily things that are needed by ordinary people, for businesses, or even society as a whole. Is there a role for government-sponsored research? Yes! But it isn't the only nor should it be the only possible place for science to be advanced.
BTW, the old AT&T Bell Labs came up with a host of original and innovative scientific advancements.... all coming from non-government dollars. What is left now is a shadow of what it used to be, however this is a direct result of government interference in the company and not as a result of a lack of interest in basic research. Just look at the wiki article about Bell Labs and you can find hundreds of scientific break throughs that came from this non-government sources.
I think we are at a Chicken and the egg type impasse here. Which comes first, the need for a supply of Helium3 to feed the otherwise limited reactors or feed supply to produce the capabilities of them resulting in the creation and dependency on it.
Actually, no, we aren't at a chicken and egg impasse here. There are some sources of Helium-3 here on the Earth that certainly can be used to bootstrap the research reactors that are currently under development and even fuel most of the initial commercial reactors if it came to that. Helium-3 can also be produced in certain "breeder-reactor" type situations, but that is a rather expensive process. It can be manufactured from Deuterium (Hydrogen-2) and Tritium (Hydrogen-3), both isotopes which occur naturally on the Earth.
In other words, once the reactors get built, the economic picture for Helium-3 mining on the Moon will be so stinking bright that you will be having companies jumping on top of each other to get it accomplished. But the research on the reactors must happen first and doesn't depend on finding sources of Helium-3 in order to be proven viable.
I don't think this is so much a problem seeing how out capabilities to safely return to the moon still haven't been reinvented yet. I mean it isn't like we are going tomorrow and at least an abundant supply of the stuff could make the research more availible.
If America of the 1960's could get to the Moon, 21st Century China, Russia, India, or America certainly could get there. This isn't a discovery in a new kind of physics or even wondering what the environment on the Moon was like.
Instead, it is a trip to Northrup-Grumman and asking them "How did you do it?" and talking to Dr. Harrison Schmidt and asking him what it was like when he was there.
Mankind certainly is capable of getting to the Moon, and there are emerging companies certainly more than capable of building spacecraft capable of landing on the Moon. If it wasn't for international politics and other purely political factors, you, yes you, could put a pile of money on the table right now and take a trip around the Moon sometime in the next six months or less. Landing on the Moon is a solved engineering problem, and treating it as something so incredibly difficult but at the same time so casually dismissing the huge engineering and even pure research challenges facing fusion research is astounding.
If you had enough money and determination, you or anybody else could be walking on the Moon within five years or so. I've outlined how this could happen using mostly off the shelf components currently in production, with the sole exception of a vehicle landing on the surface of the Moon itself. That vehicle is in the Smithsonian and certainly could be reproduced if necessary.
As for fusion research, it isn't inevitable. We simply don't know what is necessary for efficient and commercially viable nuclear fusion devices, or if such a device is even possible. The raw physics of how nuclear fusion work has been known for more than a half-century in fine detail, and actual fusion reactors have been built for nearly that length of time.
Unfortunately, getting reactors to produce more energy than it takes to get them started is the key problem, and an issue that has yet to be solved besides piling a huge bunch of gas together which gravitationally confines the reactor core. BTW, that is called a star if you haven't figured that one out. We know stars work, but that seems a bit overkill for what most people want in a nuclear fusion reactor.
You still have to transmit the power to the Earth... and surprisingly water vapor also absorbs a great amount of the energy. A cloudy day on the Earth is therefore going to reduce the amount of power available from these satellites. So yeah, weather has an impact here.
BTW, if you thought global warming due to CO2 production was huge, just wait until you get the figures for what happens to that other 80%+ of the energy that doesn't get collected on the surface. It all gets absorbed directly into the Earth's atmosphere. Talk about anthroprgenic climate change. Has this really been thought through here?
You are talking about a planet-sized object that doesn't have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well.... and the ability to do metal fabrication on an industrial scale using techniques that can only be dreamed about on the Earth.
The Moon has the surface area of North America and has mineral deposits at least equal to anything found on the Earth. Wouldn't it be better to stip mine the Moon to extract resources there rather than to destroy major eco-systems here on the Earth for the same resources?
And don't even get started with some of the high-metal astroids, that even a small asteroid has more precious metals than everything that has ever been mined in the history of all mankind to date. Of course the problem would be on how to mine it and send that to the Earth economically, but that is a problem I'm sure somebody will eventually figure out.
Space gives us two things we seem to be hurting on here on the Earth: raw natural resources and energy. This is energy by far and away more abundant in multiple forms than all of the petroleum reserves, nuclear fuel reserves, and "alternative energy" sources combined that can be exploited over the rest of the history of this planet here on the Earth.
This is also dismissing the fact that even going somewhere else and having to apply human ingenuity to new environments almost always produces side benefits that ultimately help all of the rest of mankind as well. Explicitly because of the development of space sciences to date, mankind as a whole is better fed, lives longer, safer, and much more comfortable.... on a planet-wide basis.... than our species has ever been before.
Every single problem you think may be plaguing mankind... from war, famine, disease, and natural disasters... has been made more comfortable and less damaging due to advances in space science. Name a problem you think should be fixed, and I'll tell you explicit space projects and missions that have made life much easier.
If you want to live like people did in the 1930's before any of this happened... go ahead. Just make sure you know what life was like back then before you push the rest of us back to that sort of lifestyle. I really don't think you want to go back to living under those conditions... even if you lived in a place like the USA or Europe of the 1930's.
The problem with Helium 3 is that the fusion device to be able to practically use it has yet to be invented.
This particular isotope of Helium is found in the outer-atmosphere of the Sun and has been blowing onto the surface of the Moon for billions of years. As such, it permeates the top layers of the Moon and can be extracted economically to be able to... by itself... pay for manned trips to the Moon.
The problem is that the world-wide demand for Helium-3 right now is so minuscule that a single trip to the Moon would satisfy world-wide demand for the substance over the rest of this century.
Assuming that some fusionreactors actually get built and can produce practical energy supplies, there would certainly be demand for this on an industrial scale to justify permanent mining operations on the Moon. But that is assuming technological break-throughs are going to happen here... which has at least so far proven to be quite difficult to achieve for fusion devices.
As if NASA has done much original exploration lately. How long has it been since anybody has been to the Moon?
About the only genuinely ground breaking missions currently on tap are the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Dawn mission to the asteroids. I am excited about both, but they certainly don't need an agency the current size of NASA to support either or both missions.
The spirit to boldly go where nobody has been before seems to be lost right now with NASA. No astronauts are setting altitude (aka distance) records to explore the depths of the Solar System. Heck, it was Apollo 13... a "failed" mission... that set the all-time distance record for anybody away from the Earth. There just doesn't seem to be any fire in the policy makers to have a difference here. This isn't even a Democrat or Republican issue, as both political parties are to blame.
Why does this have to involve NASA at all? Yes, NASA seems to be the agency with experience in dealing with spaceflight, but NASA certainly isn't the only (nor even the largest agency in the U.S. government) that is involved with spaceflight.
In terms of dollars actually spent on spaceflight, I don't know which is larger: The NSA (National Security Agency... who operate the spy satellites and hack into the internet) and the U.S. Air Force Space Directorate. Both are larger than NASA. The Air Force at one point even built their own private launch complex for the Shuttle... even though it was never actually used.
If NASA were completely eliminated as an agency, American activities in space certainly wouldn't end. It wouldn't even be the end of civilian space efforts that are done by agencies like NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Also, I hardly consider the Ares I rocket to be an efficient use of limited funds to build power-sats, but that is fodder for a completely separate post.
I hate responding to an AC here... as this is usually an exercise in futility. Still.... I hate to see stuff like this get posted that is so blatantly untrue.
Law students apparently get to argue whether or not the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments) are valid, since their adoption did not follow the process laid out in the Constitution. (One side says they were adopted WITH the Constitution, another side says they have been adopted by stare decisis (respect for prior decisions), and one side argues petulantly that they are not valid.)
I don't get this. The Bill of rights clearly followed the procedure of Article V of the original constitution, including having the 1st U.S. Congress pass the wording on twelve amendments and submitted them to the state legislatures for approval.
Of those original twelve suggested amendments, ten of them were passed by the required number of state legislatures rather quickly and became known as the "bill of rights". One of them, now known as the 27th Amendment, was finally "approved" in 1992 when the Michigan state legislature ratified that amendment proposal and is surprisingly the most recent addition to the U.S. Constitution.
This amendment, BTW, attempts to stop Congress from giving themselves pay raises while in office... although it hasn't seemed to work out very well, nor has Congress really followed the intent of this amendment since its passage.
What happened to amendment #12 of this original proposal? It was about how Congress (the U.S. House of Representatives in particular) could in theory be expanded substantially if the population of the USA were to grow significantly from 1780 levels. The House is no where near the maximum number of representatives allowed under the U.S. Constitution, so this amendment is really irrelevant to the current conditions of the country.
Where it gets unconstitutional is that the passage of the Constitution was provisional for some states until the bill of rights were passed and approved. So technically the meeting of the 1st congress was unconstitutional as the constitution wasn't yet approved completely.
This shouldn't imply, however, that the founding political leaders of the USA didn't like the bill of rights and didn't think it should be in the document. The only argument against the bill of rights is that "rights" not found in this document would be taken away by the government on a whim. This has, unfortunately, proven to be a correct assessment as well.
You are missing the point that prominent and visible Christian leaders do openly condemn the actions of the Ku Klux Klan and openly preach against the bigotry that comes from similar groups. There is also a condemnation of what happened in Northern Ireland and the religious intolerance that happened there throughout much of the 20th Century.
Wahhabism and explicitly anti-western teachings (aka the USA is the "great satan") is unfortunately deeply imbedded in Muslim society to the point that many governments of predominately Muslim countries are openly supporting and even financing this religious movement. In spite of Saudi claims to the contrary, much of this political and financial support for hard-core reactionary Islam still continues.
Yes, I will acknowledge that some "Christian" political leaders are associated with bigoted groups as well, but neither should be found acceptable. I certainly don't see state-financing of the Klan in America.
I do not condone the practice of homosexuality because it is explicitly labelled as sin in the Bible, and for me to do otherwise would be inconsistent with my beliefs at best, hypocritical at worst. Does this make me a bigoted Mormon?
I think the problem here is that you don't have a strongly liberal attitude that "anything I can think of doing should be allowed".
The very thought that there might be actions and practices, while perfectly legal, have some moral and "ethical" boundaries defined by a group of like-minded folks is an alien concept for some people. BTW, this isn't even restricted to just religious groups, but groups of any kind which do have standards and ethics that can and do arise.
What is happening with the "Gay, Lesbian, and Alternative Lifestyle" community vs. the LDS community is not so much a clash of cultures (which is also happening) but that they are also talking past each other. Certainly there are ethics and morals within the homosexual community, but there are also positions held inviolate within that community such that their typical behavior patterns must be found acceptable with the society as a whole.
Unfortunately, there are groups like the LDS Church which find that sort of behavior to be morally reprehensible and contrary to their own set of moral codes. What is interesting, for myself, is the bigotry and sheer ignorance that seem to be coming from at least some rather vocal members of the Homosexual community... both in the protest marches and the on-line discussions. They don't really know what being a Mormon is like, and most of the information they do find seems to be coming from anti-Mormon sources. This is akin to trying to find out about the Apollo moon landings from the lunar landing hoax crowd. While there have been some problems with the governance and actions of some leaders of the LDS church in the past, these are usually blown way out of proportion by the critics of the LDS church... and they (the critics) don't usually tell the whole story either and usually spin the stories to fit their own narrative rather than try to find anything factual.
I've known some "homosexual Mormons", some that even enjoy full fellowship within the LDS Church. Those that do maintain full fellowship (aka even have a "temple recommend") usually are celibate (required by the top LDS leadership) and don't push their views on other members of the church regarding homosexuality. There are some over zealous local church leaders that sometimes go over the top in dealing with members like this... usually against the wishes of the top leadership of the LDS Church I might add.
I also know of a congregation of "LDS Church members"... or perhaps better noted as "former LDS Church members"... that openly supports homosexual relationships. I don't necessarily agree with these folks, but it is an aspect of "Mormon culture" that is apparently lost on the hard-core San Francisco alternative lifestyle crowd. Being for or against homosexuality doesn't directly correlate to an acceptance of the Book of Mormon as scripture or a belief that Joseph Smith talked to God in upstate New York.
The explicit targeting of Mormons as a source of hate and anger about the passage of proposition 8 is doing far more damage to "gay rights" than anything the LDS Church could possibly do even if it deliberately tried. I see the protest marches as having undone any progress these folks may have made in terms of at least getting others to "tolerate" their lifestyles in a larger political sense, and is setting up a larger anti-homosexual movement to counter these actions. There certainly are other churches and religious groups that are thinking "I might be next" in term of becoming a target of this sort of scathing hatred that has happened against Mormons.
Slashdot Mirror
I can totally see why Russia would want to have this happen... at least their own distro for use internally within the Russian government.
A top to bottom review of the Linux kernel from another group of developers with a completely different interests, backgrounds, and motivations than other major contributors to Linux would also be a very good thing for the development of Linux as a whole. I wish Russia the best on getting this accomplished, and I hope that their success is huge.
It isn't like the American government doesn't do this too. The NSA (National Security Agency... aka the USA cyber spys) has their own distro for most of the reasons I've listed above, and has nearly continuous recruitment going on at college campuses for CS graduates. The Red Flag distro (Chinese) is another national distro that has been done for more than just pressuring Microsoft into lowering the price of Windows.
Frankly, I see Microsoft's involvement here as a red herring and something to ignore for this discussion.
There must be some /. readers at LucasFilm... you think?
I guess this shows I don't get onto /. more... or that I actually have a life outside of this forum in terms of responding in a quick fashion.
I should point out that the Seattle Space Needle was a target by Al Queida on January 1st, 2000 for the millennial events that caused all of the worry with Y2K issues. The group that tried to take out the Space Needle back then was arrested at the U.S./Canadian border by suspicious border patrol agents. This is one of the better known terrorist incident foils that has ever happened in the USA.
The 9/11 commission report, while extensive, certainly isn't complete nor does it contain all of the evidence/intelligence that was available that day. It mainly covers what happened in NYC and DC... which is where the damage was done.
There have been successful actions by law enforcement to stop terrorist incidents in the past decade, not just confined to what happened on 9/11/2001 as well. Unfortunately (in terms of press reporting), the law enforcement community has set a deliberate policy of not informing the general public when this happens even if folks are caught red-handed with explosives or other equipment and clearly demonstrated intention to carry forth terrorist actions. The assumption that simply because nothing is getting publicized is the same as if nothing is happening is a fallacy.
There is reason to believe that there were other buildings targeted in other cities, including the Seattle Space Needle and downtown Los Angeles. Supposedly, the other Al-Queida teams forgot to account for differences between time zones from one end of the USA to the next and the west coast groups never got into the air, or at least never were able to take over the cockpits like what happened on the east coast.
The rationale for not invoking the EAS on 9/11 was mostly one of the fact that all of the major news outlets had already interrupted programming on that day and were doing 24-hour coverage of the attack anyway. The primary message to the general public, don't bother going to the airport as your flight has been canceled, certainly was transmitted to nearly everybody that it impacted.
I'm no expert, but on a general reading, it sounds like Aries was designed by people trying to meet the specs on paper and this was designed by people who know the astronauts and know what they're doing and want to protect the people and do their job -- not just meet the specs and make a profit.
But I have to admit, calling any spacecraft a Jupiter makes me uneasy. I'd risk a ride in the first one and anything from the third on, but there's no way I'd trust any vehicle referenced at all as the Jupiter II.
First of all, you have no idea how bad it is that Ares has been designed to spec. So much so that with problems in the basic design of the Ares I, rather than trying to fix the problems they are shaving off payload mass and forcing a redesign of the capsule. Ask about the "pogo stick" problems (where the main engines give an incredibly bumpy ride... much worse than the Saturn V ever did). I'm sure a couple billion dollars will eventually fix the Ares I rocket, but for that price they might as well do a fresh "redo".
The Falcon 9-Heavy is going to cost for its full development a fair bit less than $1 billion... and that rocket completely financed through private (not government) funds. Furthermore, the Falcon 9 is quite a bit closer to getting ready to fly than the Ares I. Yes, I do consider this at least comparable to the Ares I in intention and purpose... with the Falcon 9 having a much larger safety margin in terms of launch capacity and room for improvement to achieve proper man-rating.
As for the name Jupiter, this is one with a decidedly interesting history in terms of rocket history, including the Jupiter-C rocket that was designed by none other than Werner Von Braun himself. I call that a heritage to at least build off from and help to inspire the next generation of rocket builders.
While I'm sure that Air Force One isn't designed for high powered RF broadcasts, its principle occupant has the authority to confiscate all FCC-licensed commercial broadcasting and force a broadcast message to be transmitted by all of those stations. The problem is, when was the last time any President had the balls to declare such a national emergency? G.W. Bush, as much as he is derided, didn't even call for such an emergency broadcast on of all days 9/11/2001.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System
for more information
Replanting is great, but does that newly planted tree use as much CO2 as the 100 year old one cut down? Trees take a while to regrow... so saying they're being replanting is a bit disingenuous.
Actually, a forest is most productive in terms of its ability to feed and sustain an arboreal environment just a few years after it has been cleared and replanted. Old-growth forests with huge trees and a dense upper canopies are not nearly as productive in consuming CO2 or providing a habitat for a diverse group of different species of both plants and animals as do much younger forests.
An excellent example of this is the region around Mount St. Helens, where the destruction of the old forest that surrounded this volcano has lead to a huge increase in both the diversity and productivity of the wildlife in the area, now that several years have passed since the eruption in 1980.
This said, I do agree that some "old growth" forests that are cleared and then replanted with substantially different tree species are destructive to the environments they are found in. Removing old growth Redwood species from the American Pacific Northwest and replanting with Douglas Fir is not a sustainable or productive use of that land. But don't take a few exceptions out of context and claim that all lumber harvesting is a horrible thing or even purely destructive when in fact the opposite conclusion can be made.
As to how long between forest clearings should take place, that can be debated. I've seen numbers ranging from 25 to 100 years, and it should be noted that some National Forest lands that have been put into a 100 year cycle are on their second "crop" after being previously harvested more than 100 years ago under USDA regulations. There is no reason why such a harvest couldn't be indefinitely sustained and in fact serve not just the forest lands but the general public in a very productive manner that helps both people and wildlife.
What's convenient about trying to read a broadsheet newspaper in a car, bus, train, plane? Even a tabloid format is challenging on a plane.
As opposed to somebody opening a laptop and trying to read an article, only to discover that the battery wasn't fully charged for a 4-hour flight?
While I find reading printed material to be nauseating (literally, I do get motion sickness reading them) in private automobiles and busses, I don't have so much of a problem on larger vehicles like trains or commercial aviation transport. It certainly isn't the format which is the issue, but rather the issues related to motion sickness that is for me the major problem.
Reading a "broadsheet newspaper" on a commuter rail trip certainly isn't all that difficult, and you certainly don't have to be hunting for the A/C receptacles to plug in your "reader".
This wasn't being obtuse. This was being very direct and to the point, using a minimal number of words.
How about this for more clarity (or at least my own opinion):
Any technology that is seen as a "replacement" for an older technology should not throw away useful and important features of that previous technology simply "because" it is an advance (or change) in technology.
Better put, magazines shouldn't need batteries. Direct, to the point, and clearly on-topic unlike the reply.
My complaint about tazer usage is that their use ought to be treated in a manner comparable to an officer firing his gun. Genuinely professional law enforcement agencies make their officers accountable for every bullet fired, often with formal review boards that are invoked automatically with an officer being suspended from active duty for the duration of the review... even if firing the gun was completely appropriate and according to policy.
Tazers ought to be treated in a very similar fashion, where its usage outside of a formal training situation like a gun range should have the same consequences for the career of an officer who deploys the weapon. Indeed, the manufacturers of those weapons strongly encourage such an attitude, although a great many "local" police agencies encourage a much more casual attitude about tazers because they are "non-lethal".
One of the worst things I ever saw was a morning television news broadcast (where it tends to get a little more casual than the formal evening news reporting) where one of the reporters "voluntarily" was hit with a tazer by an officer. I can only presume it was to demonstrate the non-lethal nature of the weapon and make the general public fall in love with the weapon and think it was harmless. To me, the "reporter" was an idiot to volunteer for it, and the officer who used the weapon should have been formally reprimanded as if he had shot the reporter in the leg with his revolver. My jaw dropped when I saw this on television, with a real worry that the reporter might just die on camera... I guess I watched with a morbid curiosity to see what was going to happen. This "reporter" was clearly not in the best of health either (he was substantially overweight) and had a few other factors like age that would not have made him an ideal candidate either to document the non-lethal nature of the weapon.
I wish that were the case, but even if it isn't "legal" for an employer to fire you for going to court, they can certainly make your life miserable and get you fired anyway through several means.
Either that or have you job duties re-assigned to do some incredibly tedious and boring task like picking up cigarette butts in the parking lot or cleaning out sewage traps when you are supposedly a lead software engineer. Failure to perform those assigned job duties can result in your job being terminated (assuming you don't quit first).
Explicit permission by Amtrack, at least to the best of my knowledge and from reading the article, did not happen. Amtrack was interested in having people (presumably passengers) take photos of their trains, but they did not specify how or where such photos could happen. Those photos could have been from a bridge, from across a highway or river, or from anywhere else that Amtrack has their equipment.
There certainly was not explicit requirement that the photos had to be taken from inside the train station.... which is where the huge fallacy come from even bringing up the contest in the first place.
This said, the photos were taken in a public place and there is no explicit law that grants enforcement authority for police or security agents to prohibit or even confiscate photographic equipment in most typical public place. The only thing the officer had on the photographer was perhaps a loitering charge (where courts have increasingly have found loitering laws unconstitutional) or other public crowd control laws like disturbing the peace and obstructing traffic (in this case pedestrian traffic).
In this case the "property owner" was Amtrack (or at least the "tenant" that has property control rights), of which the police officer was an agent of the property owner (the officer was employed by Amtrack apparently). By this notion, the property owner was asserting "rights" that photography not be done on their property. The issue of the photo contest is that photos of the train could be taken, but the officer is saying "not here".
Mind you, I still think the police officer here overstepped his authority, but appealing to the property owner is likely to backfire in terms of an argument here.
I would have to agree that citing reasons of "national security" or "potential terrorist threat" as rationale for stopping photography of public places is about as lame as it gets. Once the photos are taken, the photographer should simply move on and be done.
This said, I have seen photographers abuse their "1st amendment rights" by setting up what is arguably a campsite with tripods, light meters, lighting, and other equipment that takes up space and can interfere with other patrons or members of the public that need to use those public spaces. Clearly even this photographer was doing more than simply taking a quick snapshot of a friend and moving on, even if he didn't pull out all of the toys of a genuine professional.
In a situation like this, obtaining a "permit" in terms of organizing a more protracted shooting session and letting the station manager know what you are going to be doing there would certainly have at least some value, and they might be able to suggest some more optimal times to take the photographs or locations that would reduce or eliminate interference. You might even be able to get access to areas not normally deemed "public access" as well. Rather than being something of a problem, you might have an escort that would even be helping you out with the shoot.
What really should have happened here was the officer politely but firmly saying: "Excuse me, sir, but you are standing in the way and could you move along and do that somewhere else?" or even "I would rather you be standing over here" (pointing to a logical location that is out of the way). A photographer that insists at that point in being an ass can have multiple charges thrown at him, including failure to obey a lawful order, disturbing the peace, and more. The lawful order here would be to move along and stay out of pedestrian traffic lanes.
Other than having the photographer getting in everybody's way, I don't see any other rationale for prohibiting this sort of photography. Even a rough "move it, buddy" would have at least given a proper message. Clearly this officer needs to have a good indoctrination of what the law actually is in this situation.
I am also curious about what is so special and unique about this new version of Windows.
For me, the "best" version of Windows was Win 2000 Professional, and everything after that simply sucks and is by far and away over bloated. Showing that this new version of Windows is better than Win 2k or XP by a huge margin would certainly help.
Microsoft has shown that it takes a few versions to get thing right. Windows '95 was almost a joke (don't get me started on ME)... but it doesn't stop even there. MS-DOS version 3 was pretty bad until it got to version 3.3. Forget MS-DOS version 4 (a horrible mistake of an OS if I ever saw one) and it didn't really get fixed until version 5.
Even the early version of Windows, "version 2" (also called Windows-386) almost killed Microsoft as a company. It wasn't until Windows 3 that Microsoft actually had a product worth looking at.
So it is possible that Microsoft finally got their ducks in a row with this new operating system, learning from their previous failures. It is about time too. Still, I will remain highly skeptical until I actually get to see the thing and get to hammer into it for a little while. For the money that Microsoft dumps into a major rev cycle for their flagship operating system, you would think they would put a little more effort into their quality assurance and learn to remove more bloat.
It shouldn't take a case of Blu-ray discs to install an operating system, yet that is what I'm expecting this time.
While not necessarily building condos at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, I wouldn't mind owning some real-estate in Antarctica with mining and oil drilling rights.
If you can tell me how I can do that, it would be appreciated. Not the technological steps, but rather the bureaucratic red tape and what government agencies would be willing to participate in such a sale and assure peaceful control over such real-estate without having to hire or build my own private army to keep idiots off any land I might own.
Pretty much the same bureaucratic red tape that keeps sales of Antarctica from happening is also preventing the development of anything else in the Solar System (or frankly much of the western USA, but I digress here). It isn't if the development of such real estate is technologically or economically viable, but rather if the "power that be" would even permit such a development in the first place.
While I see some logic for protecting the environment of Antarctica, I see absolutely zero logic for protecting the "threatened" species of creatures living on the Moon or protecting the lunar atmosphere from "pollutants". Yet development of lunar resources is actually going to be more complicated from a legal perspective than even extracting similar resources in Antarctica.
How about Microsoft Research?
While I'm a major critic of Microsoft as a company, some of their basic research activities are simply amazing and certainly aren't done through government subsidies.
Microsoft certainly isn't alone here, and private R&D does happen by forward thinking individuals and companies. IBM is another company who has done some incredible pure research into material science and nano-technology.
Yes, I understand that the government is a major player in scientific research, but it doesn't have to be the only game in town. Certainly relying on only the government to come up with new ideas is a horrible approach for society, and incredibly wasteful of economic resources.
Also, what needs the government has for scientific research are not necessarily things that are needed by ordinary people, for businesses, or even society as a whole. Is there a role for government-sponsored research? Yes! But it isn't the only nor should it be the only possible place for science to be advanced.
BTW, the old AT&T Bell Labs came up with a host of original and innovative scientific advancements.... all coming from non-government dollars. What is left now is a shadow of what it used to be, however this is a direct result of government interference in the company and not as a result of a lack of interest in basic research. Just look at the wiki article about Bell Labs and you can find hundreds of scientific break throughs that came from this non-government sources.
Actually, no, we aren't at a chicken and egg impasse here. There are some sources of Helium-3 here on the Earth that certainly can be used to bootstrap the research reactors that are currently under development and even fuel most of the initial commercial reactors if it came to that. Helium-3 can also be produced in certain "breeder-reactor" type situations, but that is a rather expensive process. It can be manufactured from Deuterium (Hydrogen-2) and Tritium (Hydrogen-3), both isotopes which occur naturally on the Earth.
In other words, once the reactors get built, the economic picture for Helium-3 mining on the Moon will be so stinking bright that you will be having companies jumping on top of each other to get it accomplished. But the research on the reactors must happen first and doesn't depend on finding sources of Helium-3 in order to be proven viable.
If America of the 1960's could get to the Moon, 21st Century China, Russia, India, or America certainly could get there. This isn't a discovery in a new kind of physics or even wondering what the environment on the Moon was like.
Instead, it is a trip to Northrup-Grumman and asking them "How did you do it?" and talking to Dr. Harrison Schmidt and asking him what it was like when he was there.
Mankind certainly is capable of getting to the Moon, and there are emerging companies certainly more than capable of building spacecraft capable of landing on the Moon. If it wasn't for international politics and other purely political factors, you, yes you, could put a pile of money on the table right now and take a trip around the Moon sometime in the next six months or less. Landing on the Moon is a solved engineering problem, and treating it as something so incredibly difficult but at the same time so casually dismissing the huge engineering and even pure research challenges facing fusion research is astounding.
If you had enough money and determination, you or anybody else could be walking on the Moon within five years or so. I've outlined how this could happen using mostly off the shelf components currently in production, with the sole exception of a vehicle landing on the surface of the Moon itself. That vehicle is in the Smithsonian and certainly could be reproduced if necessary.
As for fusion research, it isn't inevitable. We simply don't know what is necessary for efficient and commercially viable nuclear fusion devices, or if such a device is even possible. The raw physics of how nuclear fusion work has been known for more than a half-century in fine detail, and actual fusion reactors have been built for nearly that length of time.
Unfortunately, getting reactors to produce more energy than it takes to get them started is the key problem, and an issue that has yet to be solved besides piling a huge bunch of gas together which gravitationally confines the reactor core. BTW, that is called a star if you haven't figured that one out. We know stars work, but that seems a bit overkill for what most people want in a nuclear fusion reactor.
You still have to transmit the power to the Earth... and surprisingly water vapor also absorbs a great amount of the energy. A cloudy day on the Earth is therefore going to reduce the amount of power available from these satellites. So yeah, weather has an impact here.
BTW, if you thought global warming due to CO2 production was huge, just wait until you get the figures for what happens to that other 80%+ of the energy that doesn't get collected on the surface. It all gets absorbed directly into the Earth's atmosphere. Talk about anthroprgenic climate change. Has this really been thought through here?
You are talking about a planet-sized object that doesn't have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravity well.... and the ability to do metal fabrication on an industrial scale using techniques that can only be dreamed about on the Earth.
The Moon has the surface area of North America and has mineral deposits at least equal to anything found on the Earth. Wouldn't it be better to stip mine the Moon to extract resources there rather than to destroy major eco-systems here on the Earth for the same resources?
And don't even get started with some of the high-metal astroids, that even a small asteroid has more precious metals than everything that has ever been mined in the history of all mankind to date. Of course the problem would be on how to mine it and send that to the Earth economically, but that is a problem I'm sure somebody will eventually figure out.
Space gives us two things we seem to be hurting on here on the Earth: raw natural resources and energy. This is energy by far and away more abundant in multiple forms than all of the petroleum reserves, nuclear fuel reserves, and "alternative energy" sources combined that can be exploited over the rest of the history of this planet here on the Earth.
This is also dismissing the fact that even going somewhere else and having to apply human ingenuity to new environments almost always produces side benefits that ultimately help all of the rest of mankind as well. Explicitly because of the development of space sciences to date, mankind as a whole is better fed, lives longer, safer, and much more comfortable.... on a planet-wide basis.... than our species has ever been before.
Every single problem you think may be plaguing mankind... from war, famine, disease, and natural disasters... has been made more comfortable and less damaging due to advances in space science. Name a problem you think should be fixed, and I'll tell you explicit space projects and missions that have made life much easier.
If you want to live like people did in the 1930's before any of this happened... go ahead. Just make sure you know what life was like back then before you push the rest of us back to that sort of lifestyle. I really don't think you want to go back to living under those conditions... even if you lived in a place like the USA or Europe of the 1930's.
The problem with Helium 3 is that the fusion device to be able to practically use it has yet to be invented.
This particular isotope of Helium is found in the outer-atmosphere of the Sun and has been blowing onto the surface of the Moon for billions of years. As such, it permeates the top layers of the Moon and can be extracted economically to be able to... by itself... pay for manned trips to the Moon.
The problem is that the world-wide demand for Helium-3 right now is so minuscule that a single trip to the Moon would satisfy world-wide demand for the substance over the rest of this century.
Assuming that some fusion reactors actually get built and can produce practical energy supplies, there would certainly be demand for this on an industrial scale to justify permanent mining operations on the Moon. But that is assuming technological break-throughs are going to happen here... which has at least so far proven to be quite difficult to achieve for fusion devices.
As if NASA has done much original exploration lately. How long has it been since anybody has been to the Moon?
About the only genuinely ground breaking missions currently on tap are the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Dawn mission to the asteroids. I am excited about both, but they certainly don't need an agency the current size of NASA to support either or both missions.
The spirit to boldly go where nobody has been before seems to be lost right now with NASA. No astronauts are setting altitude (aka distance) records to explore the depths of the Solar System. Heck, it was Apollo 13... a "failed" mission... that set the all-time distance record for anybody away from the Earth. There just doesn't seem to be any fire in the policy makers to have a difference here. This isn't even a Democrat or Republican issue, as both political parties are to blame.
Why does this have to involve NASA at all? Yes, NASA seems to be the agency with experience in dealing with spaceflight, but NASA certainly isn't the only (nor even the largest agency in the U.S. government) that is involved with spaceflight.
In terms of dollars actually spent on spaceflight, I don't know which is larger: The NSA (National Security Agency... who operate the spy satellites and hack into the internet) and the U.S. Air Force Space Directorate. Both are larger than NASA. The Air Force at one point even built their own private launch complex for the Shuttle... even though it was never actually used.
If NASA were completely eliminated as an agency, American activities in space certainly wouldn't end. It wouldn't even be the end of civilian space efforts that are done by agencies like NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Also, I hardly consider the Ares I rocket to be an efficient use of limited funds to build power-sats, but that is fodder for a completely separate post.
I hate responding to an AC here... as this is usually an exercise in futility. Still.... I hate to see stuff like this get posted that is so blatantly untrue.
I don't get this. The Bill of rights clearly followed the procedure of Article V of the original constitution, including having the 1st U.S. Congress pass the wording on twelve amendments and submitted them to the state legislatures for approval.
Of those original twelve suggested amendments, ten of them were passed by the required number of state legislatures rather quickly and became known as the "bill of rights". One of them, now known as the 27th Amendment, was finally "approved" in 1992 when the Michigan state legislature ratified that amendment proposal and is surprisingly the most recent addition to the U.S. Constitution.
This amendment, BTW, attempts to stop Congress from giving themselves pay raises while in office... although it hasn't seemed to work out very well, nor has Congress really followed the intent of this amendment since its passage.
What happened to amendment #12 of this original proposal? It was about how Congress (the U.S. House of Representatives in particular) could in theory be expanded substantially if the population of the USA were to grow significantly from 1780 levels. The House is no where near the maximum number of representatives allowed under the U.S. Constitution, so this amendment is really irrelevant to the current conditions of the country.
Where it gets unconstitutional is that the passage of the Constitution was provisional for some states until the bill of rights were passed and approved. So technically the meeting of the 1st congress was unconstitutional as the constitution wasn't yet approved completely.
This shouldn't imply, however, that the founding political leaders of the USA didn't like the bill of rights and didn't think it should be in the document. The only argument against the bill of rights is that "rights" not found in this document would be taken away by the government on a whim. This has, unfortunately, proven to be a correct assessment as well.
You are missing the point that prominent and visible Christian leaders do openly condemn the actions of the Ku Klux Klan and openly preach against the bigotry that comes from similar groups. There is also a condemnation of what happened in Northern Ireland and the religious intolerance that happened there throughout much of the 20th Century.
Wahhabism and explicitly anti-western teachings (aka the USA is the "great satan") is unfortunately deeply imbedded in Muslim society to the point that many governments of predominately Muslim countries are openly supporting and even financing this religious movement. In spite of Saudi claims to the contrary, much of this political and financial support for hard-core reactionary Islam still continues.
Yes, I will acknowledge that some "Christian" political leaders are associated with bigoted groups as well, but neither should be found acceptable. I certainly don't see state-financing of the Klan in America.
I think the problem here is that you don't have a strongly liberal attitude that "anything I can think of doing should be allowed".
The very thought that there might be actions and practices, while perfectly legal, have some moral and "ethical" boundaries defined by a group of like-minded folks is an alien concept for some people. BTW, this isn't even restricted to just religious groups, but groups of any kind which do have standards and ethics that can and do arise.
What is happening with the "Gay, Lesbian, and Alternative Lifestyle" community vs. the LDS community is not so much a clash of cultures (which is also happening) but that they are also talking past each other. Certainly there are ethics and morals within the homosexual community, but there are also positions held inviolate within that community such that their typical behavior patterns must be found acceptable with the society as a whole.
Unfortunately, there are groups like the LDS Church which find that sort of behavior to be morally reprehensible and contrary to their own set of moral codes. What is interesting, for myself, is the bigotry and sheer ignorance that seem to be coming from at least some rather vocal members of the Homosexual community... both in the protest marches and the on-line discussions. They don't really know what being a Mormon is like, and most of the information they do find seems to be coming from anti-Mormon sources. This is akin to trying to find out about the Apollo moon landings from the lunar landing hoax crowd. While there have been some problems with the governance and actions of some leaders of the LDS church in the past, these are usually blown way out of proportion by the critics of the LDS church... and they (the critics) don't usually tell the whole story either and usually spin the stories to fit their own narrative rather than try to find anything factual.
I've known some "homosexual Mormons", some that even enjoy full fellowship within the LDS Church. Those that do maintain full fellowship (aka even have a "temple recommend") usually are celibate (required by the top LDS leadership) and don't push their views on other members of the church regarding homosexuality. There are some over zealous local church leaders that sometimes go over the top in dealing with members like this... usually against the wishes of the top leadership of the LDS Church I might add.
I also know of a congregation of "LDS Church members"... or perhaps better noted as "former LDS Church members"... that openly supports homosexual relationships. I don't necessarily agree with these folks, but it is an aspect of "Mormon culture" that is apparently lost on the hard-core San Francisco alternative lifestyle crowd. Being for or against homosexuality doesn't directly correlate to an acceptance of the Book of Mormon as scripture or a belief that Joseph Smith talked to God in upstate New York.
The explicit targeting of Mormons as a source of hate and anger about the passage of proposition 8 is doing far more damage to "gay rights" than anything the LDS Church could possibly do even if it deliberately tried. I see the protest marches as having undone any progress these folks may have made in terms of at least getting others to "tolerate" their lifestyles in a larger political sense, and is setting up a larger anti-homosexual movement to counter these actions. There certainly are other churches and religious groups that are thinking "I might be next" in term of becoming a target of this sort of scathing hatred that has happened against Mormons.