This basically means that any soldier unlucky enough to be near the impact, or who moves into the impact area shortly after the round has hit, can be exposed to vaporised heavy metal, which is certainly not healthy for them if they breath it in.
You mean like lead? Why is it a big deal that it was DU as opposed to lead, aside from DU being more dense, that is. It's not like they're running stories about "thousands of Iraqi electronics techs sickened" because of soldering without proper ventilation.
Unless, maybe, they just needed to feed themselves and their family. I'd imagine that *now* there may be a lot of SCO coders thinking that they're really going to need new employment soon.
Since, even with changes in party of the executive branch, most of the people giving info to the executive doesn't change, and since we're talking about two republican terms, in this case (no, not Bush and Bush), I thought schizophrenia was a reasonable metaphor. The US is the US, after all.
Never said (or meant to imply) that it was cut-and-dried. Just that we put the bastard in, and now we're (rightfully so, I might add) taking him out.
As someone who once visited Iraq in an Army uniform (early 1991), I can speak intelligently on how bad he made it for the people there. I'm extremely glad that he'll be leaving soon.
So, not only did I sneak off to the server room and type in a uri that I *knew* had to lead to something disgusting, I even resorted to a google search for "fecaljapan", since evidently a lot of slashdotters read your post, or the server is just broken.
I think I have reached my quota of disgusting pictures related to human sphincters today.
Yes you can -- like when a small asteroid 10,000 miles away has an order of magnignitude more effect on you than the earth does. All things are relative and, although gravity has infinite reach (bound only by the speed of light), it's effects after a certain point drop below the gravitational 'noise' level.
First, a change of an order of magnitude is only that. Despite the difference in magnitude of gravitational influence, the asteroid and the earth would both *still* have an influence on you, and on each other.
All things being relative is a good comment, but doesn't apply to this situation. We also don't know for sure that gravity is limited by the speed of light.
The idea of a gravitational "noise" level is an interesting one, but such noise would be caused by matter with mass, and, as such, you are once again pointing out that everything with mass exerts a gravitational influence on everything else with mass. This means that gravity's effects can't drop below such a noise level, because they, in effect *are* the noise.
You *can* say that you have achieved sufficient velocity to overcome another object's gravitational pull, but you will never be free of it's influence.
With no velocity between objects, gravity pulls things inexorably together (like your feet and the floor), and with high enough velocity, it doesn't (like the voyager sattelite and the same spot on the floor), but its influence is always there.
Magnitude doesn't change the underlying physics.
Re:Humans are also ill-suited for the ocean...
on
The Return of Apollo?
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· Score: 1
I see an AC beat me to responding (and did a decent job), but oh well.
Why does scale matter? We're not talking about what's bigger, we're talking about what's more survivable. A naked human being would not last significantly longer in the middle of the pacific ocean than that same naked human in space when talking about the scale of a normal human lifetime.
Seconds vs. hours taken against a life-span of 80 years is not even close to a percentage of difference. I think you're stuck on the bit about there being no air in space, and no air in the ocean, which, while convenient, is an unneccesary comparison.
Compare the amount of time a naked human can survive in a room full of chlorine gas vs. time in space, and they're probably more equal...care to guess as to whether humans have a machine that would allow them to survive in an environment of chlorine gas?
The problem is not with my analogy, it's with your conception of what we're comparing. You said (in effect, not specifically) that travelling vast distances through space wasn't possible with humans in their current form, and cited the toxic nature of space and vast distances as the reasons.
My first argument is that toxicity isn't only defined by vacuum or lack of oxygen, but other factors as well. Seawater is not as bad for most parts of the human body as vacuum, but it is still "toxic" if you are forced to breathe it. My second argument is that humans have a knack for finding ways around things that would otherwise kill us, and for going places that have no obvious avenue of approach with ever-greater speed. I remain optimistic.
In order to get to the moon, we created enough velocity to escape earth's gravity well (barring interference, we would have continued moving away from the earth, at that velocity).
The moon is, indeed in the earth's gravity well, and the earth is in the moon's, for that matter.
Note that gravity works regardless of distance, so you can never technically say you've left any other object's gravitational influence.
So, I guess there should be no humans in, say Hawaii, since it's impossible to swim that far (hey, if you can stay awake long enough not to drown, knock yourself out).
A LOT of things are toxic to humans. Because of this, and a fortunate ability to create tools and record information, we've been able to create a lot of different machines to allow us to go places that should kill us, or that we could not go unassisted.
We are now purely organic beings, but that relationship between man and machine is already very strong. Without the machines we have created, we would be unable to feed ourselves, without some of the inventions that were unimagined 50 years ago, you wouldn't be reading this now.
Humans as they exist now are the same as humans as they existed 1000 years ago, with the benefit of a number of very useful inventions. It is just as likely that meaningful space travel will take tens of thousands of years (and the creation of "colony" ships or the hibernation you mentioned) as it is that some amazing new breakthrough in propulsion (steam power, internal combustion, rockets, etc.) will change that timeline to something more well-aligned with normal human lifespans.
Mechanical augmentation, medical knowledge, and biological engineering are already extending the lifetimes of humans and restoring lost function to broken bodies, so that kind of integration is a given, but to say that is the only way we'll ever get outta here is just silly.
Actually, I'd say we're finally about to start moving forward again. The last 30 years (as far as the advancement of spaceflight goes) have been crap. We made it to orbit, circled the globe a few times, finally made it to the moon, and then stayed in orbit for 30 years. It's about damn time we (humans) left Terra's gravity well again.
Dept. Homeland Securtiy - A HUGE addition to both goverment power and bloat.
Right...we all know no democrats voted for *that* (I do agree that Dept of Homeland Scrutiny sucks, though)
No Child Left Behind - A program that PAYS parents (with your tax money) to join the PTA.
<sarcasm>Obviously a conservative frivolity, right? I mean, who wants to encourage parents to be more involved with their kids schools? How stupid.</sarcasm> That doesn't, however increase the size of government.
Supports Sen. Rick Santorium, the guy who thinks its OK for the goverment to regulate what people do in their own bedroom.
With you on this one...Santorum is an asshole.
$5 billion bailout and $10 billion loan for airlines via the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act.
Pretty sure that act didn't make it through the legislature without a lot of support from both sides. BTW, that doesn't increase the size of government, all though it is expensive.
Yeah, its the democrats (read Liberals) that are all about increasing big government...
I think we've found some good signs that some non-partisan things are getting done in Washington...not the ones I'd necesarily like to see, but the only example of increasing govt. size you gave seems pretty party-neutral to me.
Umm...do you have any idea what amnesty international does (okay, tries to do)? True, they make noise about executions, but they have very little to do with things in the US, and most of their efforts focus on human rights abuses in third-world countries...pretty much exactly the opposite of what you said. That wasn't a troll, was it?
VoIP, on the other hand, requires a constant two-way stream of a few kilobytes per second each way and usually needs some sort of quality-of-service improvement technique to keep the stream's latency from fluctuating wildly when stream packets get queued up behind big bursts.
So yes, VoIP traffic is fundamentally different from that of other popular Internet services, and if the routing algorithms aren't tweaked to accommodate it, there will be ruts.
Most conversations I can think of have a distinctly unidirectional characteristic (at least at any given moment...they do alternate directions, but tend to be half-duplex). Given that, VOIP isn't really different from other forms of communications on the internet. I don't think of a 600MB download of an.iso image from an ftp server as inherently "bursty".
More to the point, the providers of said service are specifically not screwing with the other internet traffic that's out there...your VOIP phone call won't have precedence over anything else. If the stream's latency fluctuates, the software that manages things at either end will have to try and cope with it, and may fail, hey, that's the nature of internet communications. As it is, things should be fine, but if they *do* tweak it so that VOIP=POTS, there will be ruts.
If you're saying people requiring POTS-class service on a VOIP line should be charged for prioritized traffic, I agree, but I don't think that most VOIP subscribers are as worried about call quality as they are about price.
Differential taxation based on use of a single infrastructure is nothing new. Semi-truck drivers pay road taxes that automobile drivers don't, for instance.
True, but VOIP users aren't creating digital ruts in the information superhighway, now, are they?
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like lead? Why is it a big deal that it was DU as opposed to lead, aside from DU being more dense, that is. It's not like they're running stories about "thousands of Iraqi electronics techs sickened" because of soldering without proper ventilation.
Unless, maybe, they just needed to feed themselves and their family. I'd imagine that *now* there may be a lot of SCO coders thinking that they're really going to need new employment soon.
that last one was me...sorry...damn hotmail.
Never said (or meant to imply) that it was cut-and-dried. Just that we put the bastard in, and now we're (rightfully so, I might add) taking him out.
As someone who once visited Iraq in an Army uniform (early 1991), I can speak intelligently on how bad he made it for the people there. I'm extremely glad that he'll be leaving soon.
Didn't you see "red planet", "anaconda" or "ernest saves christmas"? For crying out loud, how high *are* your standards, anyway?
So, not only did I sneak off to the server room and type in a uri that I *knew* had to lead to something disgusting, I even resorted to a google search for "fecaljapan", since evidently a lot of slashdotters read your post, or the server is just broken.
I think I have reached my quota of disgusting pictures related to human sphincters today.
a) I'm at work
b) I recall quite vividly <shudder> the content of the last link
I will write it down and go look at it on my workstation in the server room, which has no windows, one door, and nobody ever enters but me.
I don't know where you saw the movie, but I didn't see any guys in suits that didn't have Smith's face. Strange...
ARRRGGGHHH!!! my EYES.
And not to mention the fact that after your car is stolen, you no longer have your car.
First, a change of an order of magnitude is only that. Despite the difference in magnitude of gravitational influence, the asteroid and the earth would both *still* have an influence on you, and on each other.
All things being relative is a good comment, but doesn't apply to this situation. We also don't know for sure that gravity is limited by the speed of light.
The idea of a gravitational "noise" level is an interesting one, but such noise would be caused by matter with mass, and, as such, you are once again pointing out that everything with mass exerts a gravitational influence on everything else with mass. This means that gravity's effects can't drop below such a noise level, because they, in effect *are* the noise.
You *can* say that you have achieved sufficient velocity to overcome another object's gravitational pull, but you will never be free of it's influence.
With no velocity between objects, gravity pulls things inexorably together (like your feet and the floor), and with high enough velocity, it doesn't (like the voyager sattelite and the same spot on the floor), but its influence is always there.
Magnitude doesn't change the underlying physics.
Why does scale matter? We're not talking about what's bigger, we're talking about what's more survivable. A naked human being would not last significantly longer in the middle of the pacific ocean than that same naked human in space when talking about the scale of a normal human lifetime.
Seconds vs. hours taken against a life-span of 80 years is not even close to a percentage of difference. I think you're stuck on the bit about there being no air in space, and no air in the ocean, which, while convenient, is an unneccesary comparison.
Compare the amount of time a naked human can survive in a room full of chlorine gas vs. time in space, and they're probably more equal...care to guess as to whether humans have a machine that would allow them to survive in an environment of chlorine gas?
The problem is not with my analogy, it's with your conception of what we're comparing. You said (in effect, not specifically) that travelling vast distances through space wasn't possible with humans in their current form, and cited the toxic nature of space and vast distances as the reasons.
My first argument is that toxicity isn't only defined by vacuum or lack of oxygen, but other factors as well. Seawater is not as bad for most parts of the human body as vacuum, but it is still "toxic" if you are forced to breathe it. My second argument is that humans have a knack for finding ways around things that would otherwise kill us, and for going places that have no obvious avenue of approach with ever-greater speed. I remain optimistic.
That'd be Saddam Hussein...don't you love the US's schizophrenic foriegn policy in the middle-east?
Note that gravity works regardless of distance, so you can never technically say you've left any other object's gravitational influence.
A LOT of things are toxic to humans. Because of this, and a fortunate ability to create tools and record information, we've been able to create a lot of different machines to allow us to go places that should kill us, or that we could not go unassisted.
We are now purely organic beings, but that relationship between man and machine is already very strong. Without the machines we have created, we would be unable to feed ourselves, without some of the inventions that were unimagined 50 years ago, you wouldn't be reading this now.
Humans as they exist now are the same as humans as they existed 1000 years ago, with the benefit of a number of very useful inventions. It is just as likely that meaningful space travel will take tens of thousands of years (and the creation of "colony" ships or the hibernation you mentioned) as it is that some amazing new breakthrough in propulsion (steam power, internal combustion, rockets, etc.) will change that timeline to something more well-aligned with normal human lifespans.
Mechanical augmentation, medical knowledge, and biological engineering are already extending the lifetimes of humans and restoring lost function to broken bodies, so that kind of integration is a given, but to say that is the only way we'll ever get outta here is just silly.
But at least we're close to removing the insufferable bastard that we put in charge of Iraq.
Actually, I'd say we're finally about to start moving forward again. The last 30 years (as far as the advancement of spaceflight goes) have been crap. We made it to orbit, circled the globe a few times, finally made it to the moon, and then stayed in orbit for 30 years. It's about damn time we (humans) left Terra's gravity well again.
Dammit, you almost made me spit bowtie pasta all over my keyboard.
Dept. Homeland Securtiy - A HUGE addition to both goverment power and bloat.
Right...we all know no democrats voted for *that* (I do agree that Dept of Homeland Scrutiny sucks, though)
No Child Left Behind - A program that PAYS parents (with your tax money) to join the PTA.
<sarcasm>Obviously a conservative frivolity, right? I mean, who wants to encourage parents to be more involved with their kids schools? How stupid.</sarcasm> That doesn't, however increase the size of government.
Supports Sen. Rick Santorium, the guy who thinks its OK for the goverment to regulate what people do in their own bedroom.
With you on this one...Santorum is an asshole.
$5 billion bailout and $10 billion loan for airlines via the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act.
Pretty sure that act didn't make it through the legislature without a lot of support from both sides. BTW, that doesn't increase the size of government, all though it is expensive.
Yeah, its the democrats (read Liberals) that are all about increasing big government...
I think we've found some good signs that some non-partisan things are getting done in Washington...not the ones I'd necesarily like to see, but the only example of increasing govt. size you gave seems pretty party-neutral to me.
Umm...do you have any idea what amnesty international does (okay, tries to do)? True, they make noise about executions, but they have very little to do with things in the US, and most of their efforts focus on human rights abuses in third-world countries...pretty much exactly the opposite of what you said. That wasn't a troll, was it?
Reaper, that comment just got you friended.
Most conversations I can think of have a distinctly unidirectional characteristic (at least at any given moment...they do alternate directions, but tend to be half-duplex). Given that, VOIP isn't really different from other forms of communications on the internet. I don't think of a 600MB download of an .iso image from an ftp server as inherently "bursty".
More to the point, the providers of said service are specifically not screwing with the other internet traffic that's out there...your VOIP phone call won't have precedence over anything else. If the stream's latency fluctuates, the software that manages things at either end will have to try and cope with it, and may fail, hey, that's the nature of internet communications. As it is, things should be fine, but if they *do* tweak it so that VOIP=POTS, there will be ruts.
If you're saying people requiring POTS-class service on a VOIP line should be charged for prioritized traffic, I agree, but I don't think that most VOIP subscribers are as worried about call quality as they are about price.
True, but VOIP users aren't creating digital ruts in the information superhighway, now, are they?
Well, assuming the customers are obtaining the phone numbers in question from Vonage, Vonage is already paying that tax.
Let alone the ones on the right-hand-side...