Intentionally inflicting intense pain on a person to illicite a response is torture. Saying the pain is non-damaging and short term, doesn't change the fact that it's torture.
By that definition any means of physical cohesion is torture, from truncheons and the Judas Chair to a kick under the table at dinner. I wonder why you would adopt such a loose and obviously useless definition.
This is a mass torture device.
Oh, I get it. You wish to vilify this device without actually having to justify your feelings so you associate it with the first thing that comes to mind and DAMN ACTUALLY HAVING TO THINK ABOUT WHAT THAT MIGHT MEAN!
The fact that your brand of intellectual laziness can get modded 'insightful' by anyone is the reason such a devices are needed in the first place.
Also we all laughed while the film had a diagram of most of the oil evaporating and doing little harm in Valdez.
That's actually what happens, you know. Most of the lighter fractions of crude oil (the majority of the oil, that is) evaporate very quickly leaving behind the sticky tars and such. One of the most ecologically sound methods of getting rid of an oil spill is to light it up (since that's what were going do with the oil anyway), but that can't happen after the lighter fractions evaporate since the tars need 'help' to burn.
That wouldn't be saving energy, that would be collecting it from an ubiquitous source. A sailing ship equipped with systems this research develops would outperform one without them.
Somehow using wind to suppliment conventional fuels is a good idea though. Why pay for what you can get for free? clicky --> http://www.skysails.info/
A house made of wood feels somehow un-solid (and unsafe, given the strictly positive probability of a fire that is always present).
Remember that English castle that burned a while back? It was brick and mortar but the parts where the fire couldnt be controlled burnt right down to the outside masonry.
The walls of the houses you visited were probably all covered by sheetrock, which is basically cement and soap bubbles sandwiched between heavy paper. Sheetrock doesn't burn, so any wall covered in it acts as a firebreak, containing fire for some time. If a fire gets big enough to burn *through* sheetrock it's basically as uncontrollable as ye olde English castle fire was.
The only difference between wood and masonry then is that a wood framed house will burn to the ground instead of just down to the supporting masonry (which will be severely fire damaged anyway).
Plus, immediately after arriving in Canada (my first encounter with N. America), I was struck by the fact that all houses I visited (I was looking for a room to rent in Victoria, BC, Canada, and visited quite a few houses in my first several days there) had a strong, pungent, "chemical" smell. First I thought it has to be some commonly used cleaning substance. Later I decided that it has to be some chemicals that the wood had been treated with, probably to repel wood-eating insects or to prevent the wood from decaying.
Most wood isn't treated. Treating costs money. Wood used for framing is normally cut, sorted, dried, planed, bundled and sold. Treated wood is only used when it will *absolutely* be in contact with moisture.
The chemical smell was probably just a common cleaner.
Religious people of pretty much any flavour seem to be normal people until you hit that one spot where the gears seem to just mash into each other and they go haywire.
I think that applies to everyone. Everyone's got a button that when pressed, causes them to focus insanely on that subject and usually abandon rationality. The most laid-back, accepting people on the planet - pot heads - will start spitting nails if you tell them they shouldnt smoke pot. (Try it!) With heavily religous people their button is just more likely to be about religion (and things that relate to thier religions teachings).
While a working fusion reactor would be _fantastic_, it wouldn't suit smaller cities, the remote energy needs of industry (i.e mining), or transport.
AFAIK smaller cities are connected to the same power grid as larger ones, so I fail to see the problem there. Large mines are also connected to the grid too. Remote energy needs will always be serviced by diesel, gasoline and propane. Trying to use renewable energy does not make sense when power and dependability are the first concerns. The same with transport. Urban busses can be changed to straight electric so they can run off the grid as well but for busses that go to less populated areas they will need to use some form of chemical fuel.
Science has been "fighting" with religion for centuries. Do you think that fight is over?
I'm sure what you mean to say is that there have been some conflicts between some scientifically minded people and some religious authorities over the centuries. To say that every religion has opposed every attempt to further science is just plain wrong. One only needs to point to Newton and Galileo who were both very religious people and the Vatican which directly funds research in astronomy to see this.
In an age where some stem cell research is banned for religious reasons, managing only to drive the research overseas, is it wise to ignore the battle between science and religion?
Stem cell research isn't and has not been made illegal by the US federal government at any time. The only restriction that was put in place was a ceaseation of *federal* funding for *embryonic* stem cell research using *new* stem cell lines. What was federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2000? $0.00. What was federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2003? ~$25 million. I'm not even an American and I know this off hand. Criticize all you want, but if you're going to do it find a real issue where you don't have to resort to omission of information to make your point.
From what I've read they have to be dismantled rather carefully, mostly due to the conventional explosives used in nukes rather than the nuclear materials. The process is complicated by the fact that the cores of many nuclear bombs are made of multiple layers of materials which need to be separated.
Once the nuclear materials are separated they can be used for whatever nuclear materials are used for. Sometimes they're put in drums and stored, sometimes it's used to build new bombs and other times it gets burnt in commercial nuclear reactors in MOX or another mixture.
That stuff is only counted as waste since it could possibly, in a one in a hundred million shot be contaminated with a miniscule ammount of something slighly dangerous.
It's like at hospitals where they do PET scans they have to make radioactive flourine. The glove they handle the stuff with are counted as radioactive waste, but what do they do with them? They incierate then (in a closed container) and put the ash in the municipal dump because they're really not that dangerous.
The nuclear industry is facidious about keeping radioactive things away from people. The internal radiation detectors they use can be set off by a rain-soaked umbrella, since rain absorbs ambient radon gas as it falls.
The mop heads and rubber gloves you talk about are only waste as a precaution. It's this attention to detail that has allowed the nuclear industry in the West to run for fifty years with only a single major incident (which only served to prove that the fail-safe design actually worked).
And of course it's going to reduce thier revinue - at least temporaraly. What will happen is that the movie companies (to use them as an example) will find that thier next-to-fraudulent and arguably deceptive methods of getting people into the theater won't actually net them revinue anymore if the movie is bad. Because people can choose to seek a refund if they find the product is not what they wanted the movie companies will have to produce good moveis people want to pay for in order to gain revinue.
A huge marketing budget and flashy trailers wont net them a good opening weekend if the movie actually is a huge steaming pile of crap. That's where the majority of the loss of revinue will be.
In any case, most other businesses are already in the position of having to refund used but unwanted goods - even goods that cannot be resold - and they seem to get by just fine. It's called "the cost of doing business", and if a company can't handle it, they dont rightfully deserve to be in business.
Of course, this will also drive up the price of a movie ticket to a degree but that only leads to the question of "Would I be willing to pay more for good movies if I didnt have to pay for the bad ones." The answer is yes.
How about I get a bunch of people together and sue the **AA for all the "lost entertainment value" I have experienced from thier respective industries high priced albums and shitty movies.
How about this deal: You allow after-viewing refunds on tickets so I can get my money back after you waste my two hours in a theater, and I'll start letting you have my money when you make something decent.
"A hundred years ago we were putting up coal dust and soot. These days it is carbon dioxide and sufuric oxides."
I think what you mean is that a hundered years ago the most harmful pollutant was coal dust and soot, whereas today, it's carbon-oxides and sulfer-oxides. Coal burnt a hundred year ago still produced carbon and sulfer oxides.
Any gas supply store such as a welding shop should be able to order deuterium.
Shows how much of a science geek I am but I actually checked once for a science fair project. It's not cheap ($70 CAN for a couple of liters) but it's avilable, at least in Canada.
History has shown that whenever a rag tag army gets together during a
militaristic dictatorship, it would be *behind* the dictator, and in fact often
culpable of the worst of his crimes. When the at least disciplined professional
troops or policemen would decline to be involved in an atrocity, a crazed
volunteer bunch would be willing to lend their imaginative efforts."
Like the Warsaw uprising I suppose?
History has shown that most of those 'rag tag' armies were the only ones allowed
to keep their guns expressly *because* they were behind the dictator. Dictators
do not allow their opposition to walk around with the means to defend themselves
while they are perfectly fine in letting their supporters do whatever they want.
In many dictatorships guns are banned from private ownership - often ironically
- as a public safety measure while the local enforcers get to carry whatever
they want. If the local thugs don't have their own the militias are armed by the
dictators themselves, and when guns aren't available the local dictator will
simply bring in a load of machetes.
The fact that you assume the causation goes "own gun --> support dictator" and
not "support dictator --> own gun" simply shows that you are supposing your
conclusion and then concluding it.
"The first thing such governments do is to turn people against each other."
No, the first thing such governments do is turn their supporters against their
enemies. Of course, the government can afford to arm its supporters so when
their enemies have no access to arms, well, you know what happens next.
"Letting people have guns is meaningless, because the gun owners are the ones
who form the militias, and who gets rewarded by the government with the powers
to keep the rest of the population in check."
What was I saying about supposing your conclusion? Here, you said it
yourself: "Gun owners are the ones who support dictators."
As you also said: "Rubbish".
How many times does it have to be repeated that dictators are fond of arming
only their supporters? Dictators ban private gun ownership so that no one can
put up any kind of resistance to the militias the dictator themselves formed.
"Armed mobs of civilians swept the Nazis into power, and then they organized
clubs to train the youth in military tactics."
Actually an act of the Reichstag called "The Enabling Act" swept the Nazis into
power.
Because his grasp on power was assumed peacefully there was no initial sign
Hitler was going to act so dictatorially... oh, wait, there was one: He use the
existing registration laws to confiscate all privately owned firearms. Except
those of his supporters of course.
"Armed and anarchic mobs of students conducted the cultural revolution.
Ordinary people, equipped with weapons the state handed out, conducted the
Rawandan massacre."
Right, exactly what I was saying about "Dictators handing out weapons to control
those who don't like them/ letting their supporters do what they want"
How freaking hard is this thing to understand?
"When was the last time there was a totalitarian state where the people would
rebel - if only they had the guns to do so?"
Germany, 1953.
Hungary, 1956.
Czechoslovakia, 1968.
Germany, 1989. The soveits wanted to bring in the army but it refused and disobeyed orders.
I'm sure there's more.
"Until people stop being idiots who will buy into any and all propaganda they
find, guns in the hands of the majority are just as likely to be tools of
oppression as they are liberation."
What a piece of property does not determined by the property. Inanimate objects
have no will of their own. A gun is a hunk of metal, plastic and wood. What it
does, be it liberation or oppression is determined by the person holding it.
Canada doesn't have armed militias roving the street because the millions of
people who own guns in Canada have no interest in using their arms for
oppression.
"Do we get a rag tag army together, march up to the gates in front of Downing street and start shooting at people, until they send the tanks in?"
If it gets to the point where street violence is necessary what you do is seize every police station, post office or other place of government so that whoever is trying to dictate to the country can't rule outside the walls of their office.
And if it gets to the point where a dictator in the UK wants the nation's army to crush you there's a good chance part of the army will be standing right next to you with the keys to their tanks.
Mao may have been an asshole but he did get it right when he said "power flows from the barrel of a gun". Relying on the government to let you have power (ie, vote) is not a viable long-term strategy because all governments have a track record of not wanting to let anyone do anything they can't control.
If you personally don't like firearms, that's fine. You don't have to own one. But history shows that the first thing dictatorial governments do is make sure that *no one* can own a modern firearm, and the reason they do that is so that the population cannot exercise martial power to oppose them.
Good thing the UK is safer now that they've virtually abolished the private ownership of firearms. There's now no chance of those dangerous and unseemly uprisings that generally happen when parts of the govornment are bypassed.
Never forget that any govornment that does not fear it citizens will eventually abuse its citizen.
Looks like the govornment in the UK is losing its fear.
Slashdot Mirror
By that definition any means of physical cohesion is torture, from truncheons and the Judas Chair to a kick under the table at dinner. I wonder why you would adopt such a loose and obviously useless definition.
Oh, I get it. You wish to vilify this device without actually having to justify your feelings so you associate it with the first thing that comes to mind and DAMN ACTUALLY HAVING TO THINK ABOUT WHAT THAT MIGHT MEAN!
The fact that your brand of intellectual laziness can get modded 'insightful' by anyone is the reason such a devices are needed in the first place.
If you wanted people to see a movie why would you give it to PBS? I mean, aside from during the week they run their Red Dwarf marathon.
That's actually what happens, you know. Most of the lighter fractions of crude oil (the majority of the oil, that is) evaporate very quickly leaving behind the sticky tars and such. One of the most ecologically sound methods of getting rid of an oil spill is to light it up (since that's what were going do with the oil anyway), but that can't happen after the lighter fractions evaporate since the tars need 'help' to burn.
Didn't I just say that?
That wouldn't be saving energy, that would be collecting it from an ubiquitous source. A sailing ship equipped with systems this research develops would outperform one without them.
Somehow using wind to suppliment conventional fuels is a good idea though. Why pay for what you can get for free?
clicky --> http://www.skysails.info/
Remember that English castle that burned a while back? It was brick and mortar but the parts where the fire couldnt be controlled burnt right down to the outside masonry.
The walls of the houses you visited were probably all covered by sheetrock, which is basically cement and soap bubbles sandwiched between heavy paper. Sheetrock doesn't burn, so any wall covered in it acts as a firebreak, containing fire for some time. If a fire gets big enough to burn *through* sheetrock it's basically as uncontrollable as ye olde English castle fire was.
The only difference between wood and masonry then is that a wood framed house will burn to the ground instead of just down to the supporting masonry (which will be severely fire damaged anyway).
Most wood isn't treated. Treating costs money. Wood used for framing is normally cut, sorted, dried, planed, bundled and sold. Treated wood is only used when it will *absolutely* be in contact with moisture.
The chemical smell was probably just a common cleaner.
I'd mod you '+1 funny' if I had the points, sir. Well played.
I think that applies to everyone. Everyone's got a button that when pressed, causes them to focus insanely on that subject and usually abandon rationality. The most laid-back, accepting people on the planet - pot heads - will start spitting nails if you tell them they shouldnt smoke pot. (Try it!) With heavily religous people their button is just more likely to be about religion (and things that relate to thier religions teachings).
Marx is the opiate of the stupid.
AFAIK smaller cities are connected to the same power grid as larger ones, so I fail to see the problem there. Large mines are also connected to the grid too. Remote energy needs will always be serviced by diesel, gasoline and propane. Trying to use renewable energy does not make sense when power and dependability are the first concerns. The same with transport. Urban busses can be changed to straight electric so they can run off the grid as well but for busses that go to less populated areas they will need to use some form of chemical fuel.
Methane oxidizes into water and carbon-dioxide.
Would it kill the doom and gloom too much to point out that CH4 + 2 O2 --> 2 H2O + CO2 ?
I'm sure what you mean to say is that there have been some conflicts between some scientifically minded people and some religious authorities over the centuries. To say that every religion has opposed every attempt to further science is just plain wrong. One only needs to point to Newton and Galileo who were both very religious people and the Vatican which directly funds research in astronomy to see this.
Stem cell research isn't and has not been made illegal by the US federal government at any time. The only restriction that was put in place was a ceaseation of *federal* funding for *embryonic* stem cell research using *new* stem cell lines. What was federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2000? $0.00. What was federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2003? ~$25 million. I'm not even an American and I know this off hand. Criticize all you want, but if you're going to do it find a real issue where you don't have to resort to omission of information to make your point.
Why not? It would make "World's Wildest Police Chases" that much more entertaining.
From what I've read they have to be dismantled rather carefully, mostly due to the conventional explosives used in nukes rather than the nuclear materials. The process is complicated by the fact that the cores of many nuclear bombs are made of multiple layers of materials which need to be separated.
Once the nuclear materials are separated they can be used for whatever nuclear materials are used for. Sometimes they're put in drums and stored, sometimes it's used to build new bombs and other times it gets burnt in commercial nuclear reactors in MOX or another mixture.
"Because first they're going to get a bunch of their theoreticians to work the math on the problem to make sure it's viable."
"Your solution may be emminently practical, but does it work in theory?"
--unknown
That stuff is only counted as waste since it could possibly, in a one in a hundred million shot be contaminated with a miniscule ammount of something slighly dangerous.
It's like at hospitals where they do PET scans they have to make radioactive flourine. The glove they handle the stuff with are counted as radioactive waste, but what do they do with them? They incierate then (in a closed container) and put the ash in the municipal dump because they're really not that dangerous.
The nuclear industry is facidious about keeping radioactive things away from people. The internal radiation detectors they use can be set off by a rain-soaked umbrella, since rain absorbs ambient radon gas as it falls.
The mop heads and rubber gloves you talk about are only waste as a precaution. It's this attention to detail that has allowed the nuclear industry in the West to run for fifty years with only a single major incident (which only served to prove that the fail-safe design actually worked).
And of course it's going to reduce thier revinue - at least temporaraly. What will happen is that the movie companies (to use them as an example) will find that thier next-to-fraudulent and arguably deceptive methods of getting people into the theater won't actually net them revinue anymore if the movie is bad. Because people can choose to seek a refund if they find the product is not what they wanted the movie companies will have to produce good moveis people want to pay for in order to gain revinue.
A huge marketing budget and flashy trailers wont net them a good opening weekend if the movie actually is a huge steaming pile of crap. That's where the majority of the loss of revinue will be.
In any case, most other businesses are already in the position of having to refund used but unwanted goods - even goods that cannot be resold - and they seem to get by just fine. It's called "the cost of doing business", and if a company can't handle it, they dont rightfully deserve to be in business.
Of course, this will also drive up the price of a movie ticket to a degree but that only leads to the question of "Would I be willing to pay more for good movies if I didnt have to pay for the bad ones." The answer is yes.
How about I get a bunch of people together and sue the **AA for all the "lost entertainment value" I have experienced from thier respective industries high priced albums and shitty movies.
How about this deal: You allow after-viewing refunds on tickets so I can get my money back after you waste my two hours in a theater, and I'll start letting you have my money when you make something decent.
Telescreens are here.
Seriously, put one of these up and *everyone* will give you a nice mug-shot when they look it.
Maybe I should invest in a company that makes Guy Faulks masks.
"A hundred years ago we were putting up coal dust and soot. These days it is carbon dioxide and sufuric oxides."
I think what you mean is that a hundered years ago the most harmful pollutant was coal dust and soot, whereas today, it's carbon-oxides and sulfer-oxides. Coal burnt a hundred year ago still produced carbon and sulfer oxides.
"Where can a person go to buy [deuterium]?"
Any gas supply store such as a welding shop should be able to order deuterium.
Shows how much of a science geek I am but I actually checked once for a science fair project. It's not cheap ($70 CAN for a couple of liters) but it's avilable, at least in Canada.
"Rubbish.
History has shown that whenever a rag tag army gets together during a militaristic dictatorship, it would be *behind* the dictator, and in fact often culpable of the worst of his crimes. When the at least disciplined professional troops or policemen would decline to be involved in an atrocity, a crazed volunteer bunch would be willing to lend their imaginative efforts."
Like the Warsaw uprising I suppose?
History has shown that most of those 'rag tag' armies were the only ones allowed to keep their guns expressly *because* they were behind the dictator. Dictators do not allow their opposition to walk around with the means to defend themselves while they are perfectly fine in letting their supporters do whatever they want.
In many dictatorships guns are banned from private ownership - often ironically - as a public safety measure while the local enforcers get to carry whatever they want. If the local thugs don't have their own the militias are armed by the dictators themselves, and when guns aren't available the local dictator will simply bring in a load of machetes.
The fact that you assume the causation goes "own gun --> support dictator" and not "support dictator --> own gun" simply shows that you are supposing your conclusion and then concluding it.
"The first thing such governments do is to turn people against each other."
No, the first thing such governments do is turn their supporters against their enemies. Of course, the government can afford to arm its supporters so when their enemies have no access to arms, well, you know what happens next.
"Letting people have guns is meaningless, because the gun owners are the ones who form the militias, and who gets rewarded by the government with the powers to keep the rest of the population in check."
What was I saying about supposing your conclusion? Here, you said it yourself: "Gun owners are the ones who support dictators."
As you also said: "Rubbish".
How many times does it have to be repeated that dictators are fond of arming only their supporters? Dictators ban private gun ownership so that no one can put up any kind of resistance to the militias the dictator themselves formed.
"Armed mobs of civilians swept the Nazis into power, and then they organized clubs to train the youth in military tactics."
Actually an act of the Reichstag called "The Enabling Act" swept the Nazis into power.
Because his grasp on power was assumed peacefully there was no initial sign Hitler was going to act so dictatorially... oh, wait, there was one: He use the existing registration laws to confiscate all privately owned firearms. Except those of his supporters of course.
"Armed and anarchic mobs of students conducted the cultural revolution. Ordinary people, equipped with weapons the state handed out, conducted the Rawandan massacre."
Right, exactly what I was saying about "Dictators handing out weapons to control those who don't like them/ letting their supporters do what they want"
How freaking hard is this thing to understand?
"When was the last time there was a totalitarian state where the people would rebel - if only they had the guns to do so?"
Germany, 1953.
Hungary, 1956.
Czechoslovakia, 1968.
Germany, 1989. The soveits wanted to bring in the army but it refused and disobeyed orders.
I'm sure there's more.
"Until people stop being idiots who will buy into any and all propaganda they find, guns in the hands of the majority are just as likely to be tools of oppression as they are liberation."
What a piece of property does not determined by the property. Inanimate objects have no will of their own. A gun is a hunk of metal, plastic and wood. What it does, be it liberation or oppression is determined by the person holding it.
Canada doesn't have armed militias roving the street because the millions of people who own guns in Canada have no interest in using their arms for oppression.
"Do we get a rag tag army together, march up to the gates in front of Downing street and start shooting at people, until they send the tanks in?"
If it gets to the point where street violence is necessary what you do is seize every police station, post office or other place of government so that whoever is trying to dictate to the country can't rule outside the walls of their office.
And if it gets to the point where a dictator in the UK wants the nation's army to crush you there's a good chance part of the army will be standing right next to you with the keys to their tanks.
Mao may have been an asshole but he did get it right when he said "power flows from the barrel of a gun". Relying on the government to let you have power (ie, vote) is not a viable long-term strategy because all governments have a track record of not wanting to let anyone do anything they can't control.
If you personally don't like firearms, that's fine. You don't have to own one. But history shows that the first thing dictatorial governments do is make sure that *no one* can own a modern firearm, and the reason they do that is so that the population cannot exercise martial power to oppose them.
Good thing the UK is safer now that they've virtually abolished the private ownership of firearms. There's now no chance of those dangerous and unseemly uprisings that generally happen when parts of the govornment are bypassed.
Never forget that any govornment that does not fear it citizens will eventually abuse its citizen.
Looks like the govornment in the UK is losing its fear.