Unlike the tiny countries in Europe, the US is a huge place. How would you like to have to drive 150 miles round trip just to see a doctor? Well, there are lots of people here in the states that have to do exactly that. They can't get on a bus or a train, they have no choice but to drive. Again, our country is huge, so expensive fuel has a large impact on everything we purchase because it all needs to be transported around this big country.
Dude, nobody put a gun to your head and told you to live 150 miles from a doctor. Don't go cap-in-hand to the taxpayer looking for subsidies for your roads and infrastructure, you made a choice to live away out in the wilds and you should have known that there were going to be costs associated with that.
Let's stop the influx of "get over it" comments from Europe by removing the taxes from the price discussion. Then we can all equally complain about the cost of refined petrol instead of how much our governments like to add to the fees.
Translation: "Let's not talk about the elephant in the living room. These Europeans are embarrassing us by showing us up for the petulant shower of moaning minnies we are and it's making us cry! Waa waa waa!"
So it's okay to artificially subsidize automobile use and force everyone into long commutes through barren, sprawling suburbs, but it's not okay to encourage more sensible land use and more efficient mass transit?
I was going to say - if I only payed $5.00 a gallon I'd throw a party. Right around $8.50 (give or take based on the exchange rate) a gallon is what I consider normal. Between this and the Americans I heard complaining yesterday that the Raspberry Pi boards didn't look to be available in the US -- I have to say that it comes across as petty whinging to the rest of the world.
The rest of the world can go pound sand then,
Pretty much sums up the attitude of the flyover country crowd.
because the reason you have expensive fuel is your own fault. You elect governments that keep the price artificially high in order to discourage cars and shovel people into mass transit. A huge chunk of your price is taxes.
And you elect governments that keep the cost of motoring artificially low by subsidising gas cheaper than $8/gallon in order to discourage mass transit and shovel people into cars on sprawling and congested freeways.
If high gas and mass transit is what you want, hey, have at it. But quit telling us we're "whining" because we want to do it differently, and actually notice when prices go up.
We're not telling you you're whining because you notice when prices go up. We're telling you you're whining because whining is exactly what you're doing - you're starting to wake up to the consequences of your unsustainably wasteful lifestyle. You're whining about your inability to carry on guzzling through gasoline at twice the rate of everyone else in the world.
Play me the world's smallest violin. I've never met such a shower of crybabies in all my life.
Spot on. I would add that density isn't the only factor. Single-use zoning is IMHO the biggest single cause of long commutes, congestion, and sprawl in North America. If you run out of milk in the evening you can't just walk across the street to the corner store and pick up another bottle because stupid zoning ordinances mean that an area can only be residential, only be retail, only be office space or only industrial. Mixing them up is not allowed. The little corner shop that people in Europe take for granted is illegal in a lot of American cities. I've seen me having to strap myself into the car and drive several miles to the nearest laughably-named "convenience store" just to buy a stupid postage stamp. And they wonder why they consume 25% of the world's oil when they only have 5% of the world's population.
Why the hell can't *I* choose the safety features of *my* own new car?
That'd be fine if you were an automotive safety engineer and knew WTF you were talking about, but most people don't fall into that category and need experts to do the regulating to protect them.
Maybe I'd rather spend that extra money on a car with traction control, or maybe I have a very limited budget, but just want a basic no-frills new car that won't give me any trouble for the next few years. This just smacks of regulators trying to justify their jobs by creating regulations for the sake of regulations.
So you want a car that'll be reliable but a death trap if you do get into a crash (possibly with someone else who doesn't have traction control and skids into a collision course with you through no fault of your own)? There's no accounting for taste I suppose.
Cars are really, really safe now.
And people are still getting killed on roads. But you know who you can thank for the modern safety features of cars? Regulators. And Ralph Nader. Seriously.
Do you really think that Ford would stop putting seatbelts in cars if the government didn't tell them they had to?
They wouldn't have done so in the first place if they hadn't been mandated. Now that the public is used to them (thanks to the regulators) you'd better believe that they wouldn't dare take them out.
The car company that kills fewer of it's customers than its rivals can sell more cars based on this fact. The car company that is consistently killing its customers will likely be out of business soon.
SAAB must be the most successful car company in the world then.
Oh wait...
I'm not saying there's no place for regulation,
Yes you are.
but this is getting ridiculous.
No it isn't. It's just a logical extension of the seat belt laws, air bags, crash safety standards etc. Yes cars are safe, but why stop there? Why not make them even safer? Why reach a certain arbitrary level of safety (that has not eliminated all road deaths) and stop there?
Maybe next they'll say you can't have a black car because they're harder to see at night, after that, they'll say all cars have to be CalTrans Orange because they're safer.
No. "They" are not going to ban black cars. "They" are not going to mandate that all cars are CalTrans Orange. Seriously.
Regulators regulate, regardless of the necessity of regulation.
No they don't, they regulate out of the necessity of the regulation.
A regulator that doesn't regulate is out of a job.
As much as it pains me to read/. comments these days and wade through the usual girlfriendless know-it-alls who live in their mom's basement who think they're an expert on parenting, and the anti-"nanny state" market fundamentalists who think everything should be left to the whims of the market, I feel the need to get a few things straight:
1 - Kids are unpredictable and are not like pets who can be trained to obey instructions every single time. Get a GF, impregnate her, wait for it to pop out, and then come back to me with your expert opinion. In the meantime, shut it.
2 - There are a million situations that you have not ever conceived where a small child might, for one reason or another, end up behind a vehicle while it's backing out. Just because your limited life experience shields you from the experience doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
3 - Anyone who posts the "just look where you're going" argument deserves to be modded "overrated" into oblivion because they're not paying attention to the deadly combination of small children and large blind spots, something that has become a much bigger problem because of the design of modern vehicles that have much higher read ends than they did in the 70s. These cameras are designed to eliminate those blind spots.
4 - Those speculating about the lack of visibility from the camera need to STFU and leave it to the people who have actually used them and have indicated that they have fish-eye lenses that have a wide field of vision. You're like the people who condemn films and books without having watched or read them.
5 - It's okay for government to step in and insist on safety measures. The industry has a long history of fighting against them as well as environmental measures. Mandatory seat belts were going to bankrupt Detroit (and besides, shouldn't seat belts be a personal choice issue?*). Air bags were going to put too much expense on the industry. Crash safety standards were going to be an unwarranted government interference in the free market where people should expect to die if they get into a crash; the automakers actually thought that they had no duty to protect the people using their products. But Detroit did not go bankrupt because of mandatory safety measures, which A cost a pittance in the grand scheme of things and B were the same for everybody. Detroit just went bankrupt because they thought it was better to buy a congressman than to fix their business model by producing cars that could be competitive with imports.
6 - The cost of flat panel displays and small cameras has plummeted. Every phone has one FFS. Everybody can well afford this. Fact.
7 - The number of lives lost in this tragic way is not "insignificant". One life lost is one too many. Anybody who says that the preventable death of a small child is "insignificant" should be thoroughly ashamed of himself and modded "troll" for the rest of his sorry life.
* No. It shouldn't be a personal choice issue. If you're too stupid to fasten your seat belt then it's okay for the government to make you do it A for your own good, B for your children's own good, and C to save the government the $10,000 taxpayer expense that goes with every road death.
No. Bott's Dots are a completely different animal from cats' eyes. Botts Dots are just white lumps of plastic that stick out of the ground and they break eventually.
Cats' Eyes are a lot more sophisticated. You've got a reflective "retina" behind a glass bead that "looks" out horizontally from inside a heavy duty rubber casing. Driving over the cat's eye pushes the rubber down and causes the glass bead to be wiped clean. All of that is encased in a heavy duty metal casing and buried flush with the road surface with just the rubber sticking up slightly, far enough to reveal the beads and get pushed down by the wheels of the traffic. Different colours of reflective material mean that the middle of the road is marked with white reflectors, the side of the road is marked with reflectors that glow red (or is it yellow? Can't remember.) They glow like little LEDs when headlights shine on them, not like your primitive Bott's Dots.
I don't know what kind of paint they use in California when striping the roads but when it rains the lane markings pretty much vanish by day and by night. UK roads have much better reflection going on. You've got the really dark tarmac contrasting with sparkling white stripes and the self-cleaning glowing cats' eyes in the middle. Makes even the smallest country road appear to light up like a Christmas tree when you shine your headlights on it.
You know what'd be cool though? Street lights that only switch on when a vehicle approaches. Of course the sensor equipment would be costly so the energy savings would need to be substantial to justify it. I was just struck by a great system I saw in Vancouver airport where the escalators all crawl really slowly until you approach; once your presence is detected they go back up to normal speed again. Good eh?
Slightly on topic, I always wondered why "sex and violence" are mentioned in the same breath so much. It's usually by people who have hang-ups about sex. They want to portray sex as a bad thing, so they always bracket it in with violence which is unquestionably bad. It's a bit like Sen McCarthy who tried to smear the Screen Actors' Guild by repeatedly asking "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or the Screen Actors' Guild", implying that the two were related. Or like clueless bookstore managers who group Sci Fi and Fantasy in together as if they're the same genre.
However these people do more than consider sex and violence to be equally reprehensible, they actually consider sex to be worse than violence. Hence it's okay for a TV show to show someone getting their head sliced off and blood everywhere, but God forbid if anyone should get a glimpse of a nipple, vagina, penis, and other such parts of the human body which (practical though they may be) are evil! Murder? Fine. Lovemaking?! Think of the children!!
I'm speaking of American TV of course. Other parts of the world have less Victorian attitudes to sex.
By then there may be a number of cheaper options to visit space though, Virgin Galactic is making a go at it.
I dont believe they will ever be cheaper.
Careful! Forever is a long time and it's a bit ambitious to try to predict what will and will not happen between now and the end of time. Someone probably once said the same thing about early commercial air travel. Who would ever have envisioned Southwest Airlines or Ryanair in the days of the DC3?
All our most abundand energy comes from the stars, a good mirror can focus more power than a BIG ass laser.
The problem you will run into there is the inverse square rule that makes your light intensity sharply drop off. Unless you're pretty near the sun, you won't even be cooking an ant, much less burning through a spaceship hull.
I foresee colony ships, probes, long range sensor ships, and mirror ships to 'cook' the enemy.
No, once again, anywhere other than right next to a star all your mirror ships will do is project a nice child's bedroom starlight display at your enemy.
I would imagine that the distance between the weapon and its target would be a bigger factor. If your target is close enough, then you can still be 93 million miles away from the star. Concentrated solar energy is powerful enough to drive steam turbines on Earth, why shouldn't it be potent enough to power a weapon?
Why use chemical propellants when you can fire a projectile that'll go on indefinitely until it hits something? No need for the expensive engine to be placed on the disposable weapon itself, just inject the initial acceleration at launch. Rather than a mechanical spring mechanism maybe a linear motor type launch could be used, but only if it's going to get sufficient power in at launch. Any thrusting action on the projectile could be limited to maneuvering for targetting purposes.
As for any explosive material on the projectile, that depends on what kind of armor it's up against. It'd be hard to speculate about the weapons without also speculating about what's likely to be developed to defend against them.
Didn't most of the population of Norway have to go onto a mostly vegetarian diet during WWII because of the Nazi occupation? Cancer rates plummeted in that country during the war IIRC and began to rise again after the war when meat consumption resumed. I'd imagine that's a pretty decent sample size and I wouldn't imagine that the absence of Nazi uniforms is the likely carcinogen.
So you think that all carnivorous animals should be put down if they can't be fed a vegetarian diet?
Poor tigers.
No, I don't think that all carnivorous animals should be put down if they can't be fed a vegetarian diet. If I wanted to say that I'd have said something in my post about the off-topic issue of what wild animals eat, but since this topic was about what humans eat then I addressed the issue of what humans eat.
There once was a website called manbeef.com that claimed to be a source of fresh human meat for human consumption. (It was elaborate and looked real, but there was no contact information about how to actually procure the stuff, so it was a hoax.) However is there any particular reason why human stem cells shouldn't be used and human meat produced for human consumption? I think it'd be interesting. The argument goes that no poor animal has to suffer and die to satisfy our taste buds anymore, surely the same applies to people? If "human" meat tastes a certain way then some people might decide that they like the taste and it might become a delicacy. I remember reacting the same way a lot of people are probably reacting to this post right now when someone first introduced me to the concept of Sushi. "What kind of a sicko would eat raw fish?"
We treat such strange concoctions as ducks' livers and certain fish eggs as a delicacy, don't we? Why not synthetic human meat?
I disagree. I've always felt at least a little uncomfortable with the idea of eating animals. I've made several attempts to give up eating meat but this time I think I've succeeded and I've been vegetarian for the last month. It's been bugging me for a while, the way animals are treated in industrial-scale farms and the horror of slaughterhouses. Maybe it's since I started keeping pets that I've become more conscious of the fact that "lower forms of life" have their own quirks, personalities, preferences, etc. I don't drive around with a "meat is murder" bumper sticker on my car, but I've come to believe that it is wrong to keep animals for the purpose of killing them for food and I think that one day we'll look back on the practice and wonder what kind of barbarians we were.
Aside from ethics, there's also the energy efficiency principle. Meat is a hugely inefficient means of converting sunlight to nutrients, and there are health concerns too. My guts actually feel a whole lot better these days, I think it helps that I've cut out a lot of processed food and I've escaped a lot of the ubiquitous High Fructose Corn Syrup that seems to have worked its way into just about everything.
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Unlike the tiny countries in Europe, the US is a huge place. How would you like to have to drive 150 miles round trip just to see a doctor? Well, there are lots of people here in the states that have to do exactly that. They can't get on a bus or a train, they have no choice but to drive. Again, our country is huge, so expensive fuel has a large impact on everything we purchase because it all needs to be transported around this big country.
Dude, nobody put a gun to your head and told you to live 150 miles from a doctor. Don't go cap-in-hand to the taxpayer looking for subsidies for your roads and infrastructure, you made a choice to live away out in the wilds and you should have known that there were going to be costs associated with that.
Let's stop the influx of "get over it" comments from Europe by removing the taxes from the price discussion. Then we can all equally complain about the cost of refined petrol instead of how much our governments like to add to the fees.
Translation: "Let's not talk about the elephant in the living room. These Europeans are embarrassing us by showing us up for the petulant shower of moaning minnies we are and it's making us cry! Waa waa waa!"
So it's okay to artificially subsidize automobile use and force everyone into long commutes through barren, sprawling suburbs, but it's not okay to encourage more sensible land use and more efficient mass transit?
I was going to say - if I only payed $5.00 a gallon I'd throw a party. Right around $8.50 (give or take based on the exchange rate) a gallon is what I consider normal. Between this and the Americans I heard complaining yesterday that the Raspberry Pi boards didn't look to be available in the US -- I have to say that it comes across as petty whinging to the rest of the world.
The rest of the world can go pound sand then,
Pretty much sums up the attitude of the flyover country crowd.
because the reason you have expensive fuel is your own fault. You elect governments that keep the price artificially high in order to discourage cars and shovel people into mass transit. A huge chunk of your price is taxes.
And you elect governments that keep the cost of motoring artificially low by subsidising gas cheaper than $8/gallon in order to discourage mass transit and shovel people into cars on sprawling and congested freeways.
If high gas and mass transit is what you want, hey, have at it. But quit telling us we're "whining" because we want to do it differently, and actually notice when prices go up.
We're not telling you you're whining because you notice when prices go up. We're telling you you're whining because whining is exactly what you're doing - you're starting to wake up to the consequences of your unsustainably wasteful lifestyle. You're whining about your inability to carry on guzzling through gasoline at twice the rate of everyone else in the world.
Play me the world's smallest violin. I've never met such a shower of crybabies in all my life.
Spot on. I would add that density isn't the only factor. Single-use zoning is IMHO the biggest single cause of long commutes, congestion, and sprawl in North America. If you run out of milk in the evening you can't just walk across the street to the corner store and pick up another bottle because stupid zoning ordinances mean that an area can only be residential, only be retail, only be office space or only industrial. Mixing them up is not allowed. The little corner shop that people in Europe take for granted is illegal in a lot of American cities. I've seen me having to strap myself into the car and drive several miles to the nearest laughably-named "convenience store" just to buy a stupid postage stamp. And they wonder why they consume 25% of the world's oil when they only have 5% of the world's population.
Why the hell can't *I* choose the safety features of *my* own new car?
That'd be fine if you were an automotive safety engineer and knew WTF you were talking about, but most people don't fall into that category and need experts to do the regulating to protect them.
Maybe I'd rather spend that extra money on a car with traction control, or maybe I have a very limited budget, but just want a basic no-frills new car that won't give me any trouble for the next few years. This just smacks of regulators trying to justify their jobs by creating regulations for the sake of regulations.
So you want a car that'll be reliable but a death trap if you do get into a crash (possibly with someone else who doesn't have traction control and skids into a collision course with you through no fault of your own)? There's no accounting for taste I suppose.
Cars are really, really safe now.
And people are still getting killed on roads. But you know who you can thank for the modern safety features of cars? Regulators. And Ralph Nader. Seriously.
Do you really think that Ford would stop putting seatbelts in cars if the government didn't tell them they had to?
They wouldn't have done so in the first place if they hadn't been mandated. Now that the public is used to them (thanks to the regulators) you'd better believe that they wouldn't dare take them out.
The car company that kills fewer of it's customers than its rivals can sell more cars based on this fact. The car company that is consistently killing its customers will likely be out of business soon.
SAAB must be the most successful car company in the world then.
Oh wait...
I'm not saying there's no place for regulation,
Yes you are.
but this is getting ridiculous.
No it isn't. It's just a logical extension of the seat belt laws, air bags, crash safety standards etc. Yes cars are safe, but why stop there? Why not make them even safer? Why reach a certain arbitrary level of safety (that has not eliminated all road deaths) and stop there?
Maybe next they'll say you can't have a black car because they're harder to see at night, after that, they'll say all cars have to be CalTrans Orange because they're safer.
No. "They" are not going to ban black cars. "They" are not going to mandate that all cars are CalTrans Orange. Seriously.
Regulators regulate, regardless of the necessity of regulation.
No they don't, they regulate out of the necessity of the regulation.
A regulator that doesn't regulate is out of a job.
And rightly so.
Seriously.
As much as it pains me to read /. comments these days and wade through the usual girlfriendless know-it-alls who live in their mom's basement who think they're an expert on parenting, and the anti-"nanny state" market fundamentalists who think everything should be left to the whims of the market, I feel the need to get a few things straight:
1 - Kids are unpredictable and are not like pets who can be trained to obey instructions every single time. Get a GF, impregnate her, wait for it to pop out, and then come back to me with your expert opinion. In the meantime, shut it.
2 - There are a million situations that you have not ever conceived where a small child might, for one reason or another, end up behind a vehicle while it's backing out. Just because your limited life experience shields you from the experience doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
3 - Anyone who posts the "just look where you're going" argument deserves to be modded "overrated" into oblivion because they're not paying attention to the deadly combination of small children and large blind spots, something that has become a much bigger problem because of the design of modern vehicles that have much higher read ends than they did in the 70s. These cameras are designed to eliminate those blind spots.
4 - Those speculating about the lack of visibility from the camera need to STFU and leave it to the people who have actually used them and have indicated that they have fish-eye lenses that have a wide field of vision. You're like the people who condemn films and books without having watched or read them.
5 - It's okay for government to step in and insist on safety measures. The industry has a long history of fighting against them as well as environmental measures. Mandatory seat belts were going to bankrupt Detroit (and besides, shouldn't seat belts be a personal choice issue?*). Air bags were going to put too much expense on the industry. Crash safety standards were going to be an unwarranted government interference in the free market where people should expect to die if they get into a crash; the automakers actually thought that they had no duty to protect the people using their products. But Detroit did not go bankrupt because of mandatory safety measures, which A cost a pittance in the grand scheme of things and B were the same for everybody. Detroit just went bankrupt because they thought it was better to buy a congressman than to fix their business model by producing cars that could be competitive with imports.
6 - The cost of flat panel displays and small cameras has plummeted. Every phone has one FFS. Everybody can well afford this. Fact.
7 - The number of lives lost in this tragic way is not "insignificant". One life lost is one too many. Anybody who says that the preventable death of a small child is "insignificant" should be thoroughly ashamed of himself and modded "troll" for the rest of his sorry life.
* No. It shouldn't be a personal choice issue. If you're too stupid to fasten your seat belt then it's okay for the government to make you do it A for your own good, B for your children's own good, and C to save the government the $10,000 taxpayer expense that goes with every road death.
It's not remastered but the whole series is available right now on Netflix actually. So is DS9 (a personal favourite of mine), VOY and TOS.
There's a bit of Enterprise in there too but who gives a toss?
Down with this sort of thing!
Already been done. Is the entire population of Denmark not a big enough sample size for you?
The anti-vaccine crowd doesn't have a valid argument. It's all based on emotional hyperbole and has shit all to do with science.
It's the day of your driving test. The examiner starts with a question:
Name three road users
1) Cars
2) Um...
Well done. You've failed your driving test.
If you'd have said cyclists and pedestrians, you would have passed.
Don't forget about other road users. They often make the most mess.
Cyclists and pedestrians aren't allowed on motorways, which is what we're talking about here.
No. Bott's Dots are a completely different animal from cats' eyes. Botts Dots are just white lumps of plastic that stick out of the ground and they break eventually.
Cats' Eyes are a lot more sophisticated. You've got a reflective "retina" behind a glass bead that "looks" out horizontally from inside a heavy duty rubber casing. Driving over the cat's eye pushes the rubber down and causes the glass bead to be wiped clean. All of that is encased in a heavy duty metal casing and buried flush with the road surface with just the rubber sticking up slightly, far enough to reveal the beads and get pushed down by the wheels of the traffic. Different colours of reflective material mean that the middle of the road is marked with white reflectors, the side of the road is marked with reflectors that glow red (or is it yellow? Can't remember.) They glow like little LEDs when headlights shine on them, not like your primitive Bott's Dots.
I don't know what kind of paint they use in California when striping the roads but when it rains the lane markings pretty much vanish by day and by night. UK roads have much better reflection going on. You've got the really dark tarmac contrasting with sparkling white stripes and the self-cleaning glowing cats' eyes in the middle. Makes even the smallest country road appear to light up like a Christmas tree when you shine your headlights on it.
You know what'd be cool though? Street lights that only switch on when a vehicle approaches. Of course the sensor equipment would be costly so the energy savings would need to be substantial to justify it. I was just struck by a great system I saw in Vancouver airport where the escalators all crawl really slowly until you approach; once your presence is detected they go back up to normal speed again. Good eh?
..just go the whole hog and stick data centres on both poles? Plenty of cool stuff to melt, plenty of sunlight for both halves of the year.
Southern would be expensive to get to. Northern one would sink when the ice vanishes.
Slightly on topic, I always wondered why "sex and violence" are mentioned in the same breath so much. It's usually by people who have hang-ups about sex. They want to portray sex as a bad thing, so they always bracket it in with violence which is unquestionably bad. It's a bit like Sen McCarthy who tried to smear the Screen Actors' Guild by repeatedly asking "Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or the Screen Actors' Guild", implying that the two were related. Or like clueless bookstore managers who group Sci Fi and Fantasy in together as if they're the same genre.
However these people do more than consider sex and violence to be equally reprehensible, they actually consider sex to be worse than violence. Hence it's okay for a TV show to show someone getting their head sliced off and blood everywhere, but God forbid if anyone should get a glimpse of a nipple, vagina, penis, and other such parts of the human body which (practical though they may be) are evil! Murder? Fine. Lovemaking?! Think of the children!!
I'm speaking of American TV of course. Other parts of the world have less Victorian attitudes to sex.
I know my iPod touch had a porn app... it was called Safari.
+ Youporn. A winning combination.
If the brain is showing abnormality at birth or close to it then we can at least rule out post-natal causes (e.g vaccines).
Well they already have been, but maybe this'll convince the Oprah/Jenny McCarthy/Jim Carey crowd.
I was asking a question. No need to be such a dick about it.
By then there may be a number of cheaper options to visit space though, Virgin Galactic is making a go at it.
I dont believe they will ever be cheaper.
Careful! Forever is a long time and it's a bit ambitious to try to predict what will and will not happen between now and the end of time. Someone probably once said the same thing about early commercial air travel. Who would ever have envisioned Southwest Airlines or Ryanair in the days of the DC3?
All our most abundand energy comes from the stars, a good mirror can focus more power than a BIG ass laser.
The problem you will run into there is the inverse square rule that makes your light intensity sharply drop off. Unless you're pretty near the sun, you won't even be cooking an ant, much less burning through a spaceship hull.
I foresee colony ships, probes, long range sensor ships, and mirror ships to 'cook' the enemy.
No, once again, anywhere other than right next to a star all your mirror ships will do is project a nice child's bedroom starlight display at your enemy.
I would imagine that the distance between the weapon and its target would be a bigger factor. If your target is close enough, then you can still be 93 million miles away from the star. Concentrated solar energy is powerful enough to drive steam turbines on Earth, why shouldn't it be potent enough to power a weapon?
Why use chemical propellants when you can fire a projectile that'll go on indefinitely until it hits something? No need for the expensive engine to be placed on the disposable weapon itself, just inject the initial acceleration at launch. Rather than a mechanical spring mechanism maybe a linear motor type launch could be used, but only if it's going to get sufficient power in at launch. Any thrusting action on the projectile could be limited to maneuvering for targetting purposes.
As for any explosive material on the projectile, that depends on what kind of armor it's up against. It'd be hard to speculate about the weapons without also speculating about what's likely to be developed to defend against them.
Didn't most of the population of Norway have to go onto a mostly vegetarian diet during WWII because of the Nazi occupation? Cancer rates plummeted in that country during the war IIRC and began to rise again after the war when meat consumption resumed. I'd imagine that's a pretty decent sample size and I wouldn't imagine that the absence of Nazi uniforms is the likely carcinogen.
So you think that all carnivorous animals should be put down if they can't be fed a vegetarian diet?
Poor tigers.
No, I don't think that all carnivorous animals should be put down if they can't be fed a vegetarian diet. If I wanted to say that I'd have said something in my post about the off-topic issue of what wild animals eat, but since this topic was about what humans eat then I addressed the issue of what humans eat.
Any other smart alec questions?
There once was a website called manbeef.com that claimed to be a source of fresh human meat for human consumption. (It was elaborate and looked real, but there was no contact information about how to actually procure the stuff, so it was a hoax.) However is there any particular reason why human stem cells shouldn't be used and human meat produced for human consumption? I think it'd be interesting. The argument goes that no poor animal has to suffer and die to satisfy our taste buds anymore, surely the same applies to people? If "human" meat tastes a certain way then some people might decide that they like the taste and it might become a delicacy. I remember reacting the same way a lot of people are probably reacting to this post right now when someone first introduced me to the concept of Sushi. "What kind of a sicko would eat raw fish?"
We treat such strange concoctions as ducks' livers and certain fish eggs as a delicacy, don't we? Why not synthetic human meat?
Nothing wrong with killing animals for food.
I disagree. I've always felt at least a little uncomfortable with the idea of eating animals. I've made several attempts to give up eating meat but this time I think I've succeeded and I've been vegetarian for the last month. It's been bugging me for a while, the way animals are treated in industrial-scale farms and the horror of slaughterhouses. Maybe it's since I started keeping pets that I've become more conscious of the fact that "lower forms of life" have their own quirks, personalities, preferences, etc. I don't drive around with a "meat is murder" bumper sticker on my car, but I've come to believe that it is wrong to keep animals for the purpose of killing them for food and I think that one day we'll look back on the practice and wonder what kind of barbarians we were.
Aside from ethics, there's also the energy efficiency principle. Meat is a hugely inefficient means of converting sunlight to nutrients, and there are health concerns too. My guts actually feel a whole lot better these days, I think it helps that I've cut out a lot of processed food and I've escaped a lot of the ubiquitous High Fructose Corn Syrup that seems to have worked its way into just about everything.