At least, in my head, these are rare occurrences on the scale of Katrina and 9/11 that people would be notified.
If you are so disconnected from the world that you wouldn't have known about Katrina without an emergency alert system then you are probably already a lost cause. A hurricane is something that comes with days of advance warning. One would think that the sight of the neighbors boarding up their windows would suggest to most people that something was afoot......
So were the people killed by the leader of the previous regime. Are you seriously going to claim that in the long run that country isn't better off for him being gone?
Have a heart.
Who said I didn't? My 'sick of the whining' has more to do with the people who still can't get over GWB, despite the fact that he's been gone for almost a year now. I swear that there are some people on this planet that would suffocate themselves out of spite if they heard GWB come out and say that breathing oxygen is a good thing.
That's an extremely naive comparison you've made. Timothy McVeigh as an American citizen who was caught by a civilian peace officer. Al Quada's only connection to our country is the desire to destroy it. Virtually none of it's members (and none of those individuals involved in the 9/11 attacks) are American citizens. None of them were captured on American soil by civilian peace officers.
If Osama Bin Ladin happens to be captured on American soil by an Oklahoma State Trooper then I'd agree that he should be sent through the civilian justice system. When we have to use our military to go after him on foreign soil it seems to me that we've stepped outside the operation of law enforcement and moved into the operation of war. During wartime you don't send your enemies through the civilian justice system. You hold them until the end of hostilities with the option for the military to hold them accountable for any violations of the laws of war that they may have committed.
People are dying right now due to lack of health care coverage, and we are the only first world nation where that is true.
If we are the "only" first world nation where people die from a lack of health care coverage, then how do you explain away statistics like the the 5 yr cancer survival rate? Hint: It's higher in the United States than in most European countries.
Socialism just works better for some things, health care being provably one of them.
Bullshit. Medical procedures that aren't covered by insurance (plastic surgery, lasik surgery, etc.) have consistently come down in price since being introduced to the market. Medical procedures that are covered by insurance have consistently gone up in price even though the technology behind them (MRIs are a great example) has gone down in price since being invented.
Bureaucracy (whether corporate or government) that separates the consumer from the cost of the product is never going to produce a cheaper/more effective outcome than a genuine free market. Replacing private bureaucracy (insurance co.) with government bureaucracy isn't going to solve anything. We'll still have the same broken system. We'll just be paying for it with taxes instead of insurance premiums.
but we will all be better off when we have a single payer system, just like every other first world country
Of course, for better or worse, we aren't going to get a single payer system. Instead we are going to get an unconstitutional mandate that everybody participate in the existing system. For the first time in American history the Government is trying to mandate that you have to do something just because you are an American citizen. Personally, I have a serious problem with that.
What does on thing have to do with the other?
Says the guy who brings up Iraq in a discussion about the 9/11 attacks and the country that harbored those behind them.
I don't think holding the expectation that my country seek out and terminate those who murdered almost 3,000 of my fellow citizens makes me a 'hawk'. It's a viewpoint that's shared by a large majority of Americans from all walks of life.
What's up with that you ask? I'm just annoyed when people like you feel the need to interject Iraq into every single conversation. You make a blanket statement that we "invade other countries". Someone points out the fact that at least one of those cases involved people who attacked us. Your response is a not-so-subtle reference to Iraq, thus disregarding his point in favor of returning to your worn out talking points.
I love it. For pointing out the folly of mass bombardment I'm labeled a troll. I wonder if it was a pissed off white trash redneck conservative who disagreed with me or a aging hippie liberal douche that couldn't bother to read what I wrote?
Ahh, I love the smell of desperate, defensive conservatives in the morning. It smells like... victory.
Fail. I'm not desperate, didn't support the Iraq War and I'm not a conservative. I'm just a middle of the road American that's rather sick of the partisan asshats in both parties:)
Thanks for the refreshing dose of stereotyping though. It probably makes it easier for you to avoid critical thinking when you can pigeonhole those who disagree with you.
Are you talking about Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan? Because we both know you aren't talking about Iraq.
It should be obvious to anyone who cares to evaluate geopolitics deeper than "Bush lied, people died!" that I wasn't talking about Iraq. Personally I'm getting rather sick of the whining about Iraq. You do realize that we are in the process of withdrawing from that country, for better or worse, right?
Hence the negotiations to put anti missile systems in Eastern Europe to stop missiles from Iran (and Russia) that are launched targeting Europe and/or the US
That system wasn't aimed at Russia. Look at a globe sometime. Any missile launched from Russia towards North America is not going to be traveling over Poland......
And they would even have the other half to fix things like their healthcare system for example.
Given that we already spend more per capita than every other nation on health care I'd question the notion that a lack of funding is causing the problems seen in the American health care system.........
A single little bullet from a handgun releases over 12 megawatts
You realize that a 'megawatt' isn't a measurement of energy, right? It's a measure of power. You need to combine it with at least one other variable (time) to figure out how much energy is involved.
A.45 caliber handgun fires a 230 grain bullet at about 830 feet per second. Converting those numbers into metric yields the following:
Weight of the projectile: 0.0149037493 kilos
Velocity of the projectile: 252.984 m/s
The kinetic energy formula is 0.5 * mass * velocity squared. For our.45 caliber handgun with the numbers above that works out to 476.93 joules. A joule is equivalent to a watt-second. That means that the energy in that handgun round isn't even sufficient to power a 60 watt light bulb for ten seconds (60 * 10 = 600). It's certainly no where near 'megawatt' class. Hell, even the.50 BMG only works out to ~17,000 joules, which would run your 60 watt light bulb for about five minutes.
For shits and giggles, here's that same calculation as applied to the 16" gun of the Iowa Class Battleship:
Weight of projectile: 1,224.6994 kilos (2,700 pounds for the armor piercing round)
Speed of projectile: 819.91200 m/s (2,690 feet per second)
Kinetic energy of projectile at the muzzle: 411,655,568.71 joules.
Applying the methods used to win WW2 to the operations in Afghanistan or Iraq wouldn't end the insurgency in either place.
It wouldn't hurt. In WW2 we subjected enemies who declined to follow the laws of war to summary execution on the battlefield. Read what happened to the German soldiers who fought behind the line under a false flag during the Battle of the Bulge. It was even worse in the Pacific theater -- the Japanese committed so many war crimes under the cover of white flags (perfidy) that our troops stopped attempting to take prisoners and just shot "surrendering" Japanese troops on the spot.
The tactics of WW2 (mass bombardment, armored warfare, submarine warfare, etc) aren't very relevant here but we could certainly learn a thing or two from the way the Greatest Generation behaved on the battlefield. Tying one hand behind our backs and following the rules when our enemies refuse to do the same is extremely foolhardy. You don't fight fair -- you fight to win. We used to understand that. Our enemies still do.
Carpet bombing industrial (ie, population) centers. The fact that we don't anymore has more to do with the availability of precision bombs than development of new ethics.
What industrial centers? Afghanistan is probably the poorest country on Earth. If it's not #1 then it's certainly in the top ten. I don't think mass bombardment of "industrial centers" is going to have much effect on an enemy whose primary weapons are AK-47s and homemade bombs.
That's a very profitable idea but you might want to consult with IBM [ibmandtheholocaust.com] about how history views those who comply with fascism for monetary return.
Interesting that you mention a historical example but fail to note the modern-day examples. Yes, I'm looking at you Google, Yahoo, and Cisco.
Interestingly enough there seems to a disproportionate number of IT people involved in the shooting sports. At my local shooting range virtually all of the shooters under the age of 40 are involved in IT in one way or another.
I guess a firearm is nothing more than technology once you strip away the mystique and fear surrounding them. Maybe that explains why so many IT geeks seem to get a kick out of playing around with them.
Maybe he has pets? Maybe he doesn't want to come home to a hot house and force the A/C to work non-stop to catch up? At my old apartment it would take the A/C three hours to make the house comfortable if I waited until coming home from work to turn it on. Thanks, but no thanks.
I don't live in a part of the world where it's required, but I don't heat my house when I'm not there.
There are parts of the world that require that? What a joke. Reminds me of my last trip to Europe. I had to pay extra money (5 euros a day) to have the A/C activated in my room. Despite the fact that I was paying for (paying way more than it actually costs I might add) they still went into my room every single time I left and turned it off. Pissed me off royally.
I am not so sure having extra occupants in an apartment with free electricity is a no harm situation.
Yeah, because at $0.12/KwH having an extra person spend the night might wind up costing the landlord a dime or something. That totally justifies a $10/day (the fee from my lease, I just checked) charge. Seriously, how much power do you think one guest is going to use? Even if they engage in energy intensive activities (shower, clothes washing) it's not going to amount to hardly anything.
Assuming global warming is caused by California's use of hydroelectric power - which seems unlikely.
Actually there's an argument to be made that hydro contributes significantly to global warming. Rotting vegetation from the land that was flooded creates methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
a hair dryer? a clothes dryer? an oven? all of these and more draw more than 2 kW.
What kind of hair dryer are you using? Most 120V appliances in the United States/Canada max out at 1,500 watts. Most outlets won't put out more than 1,875 (15 amps * 120 volts), although a few will go up to 2,400 (20 amps * 120 volts).
The part where their kid gets shot by someone bearing arms.
Lock up the people who commit those crimes and we wouldn't have to worry about them occurring as often as they do. Depending on whose numbers you believe anywhere between 60% to 80% of first-time murderers already have violent criminal histories. That seems to beg the question of why are they getting out of jail in the first place?
I have no problem with rehabilitation for non-violent offenders but once you demonstrate that your moral compass is so fucked up that you are willing to use violence against your fellow human beings then I don't think we owe you anything more than an 8'x10' and the chance to break big rocks into small rocks.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, in my head, these are rare occurrences on the scale of Katrina and 9/11 that people would be notified.
If you are so disconnected from the world that you wouldn't have known about Katrina without an emergency alert system then you are probably already a lost cause. A hurricane is something that comes with days of advance warning. One would think that the sight of the neighbors boarding up their windows would suggest to most people that something was afoot......
These are real people.
So were the people killed by the leader of the previous regime. Are you seriously going to claim that in the long run that country isn't better off for him being gone?
Have a heart.
Who said I didn't? My 'sick of the whining' has more to do with the people who still can't get over GWB, despite the fact that he's been gone for almost a year now. I swear that there are some people on this planet that would suffocate themselves out of spite if they heard GWB come out and say that breathing oxygen is a good thing.
Pansy ass children like yourself
I find it amusingly typical of /. that I'm the one being modded down while you hurl the insults. I think we are done here. Good day to you :)
That's an extremely naive comparison you've made. Timothy McVeigh as an American citizen who was caught by a civilian peace officer. Al Quada's only connection to our country is the desire to destroy it. Virtually none of it's members (and none of those individuals involved in the 9/11 attacks) are American citizens. None of them were captured on American soil by civilian peace officers.
If Osama Bin Ladin happens to be captured on American soil by an Oklahoma State Trooper then I'd agree that he should be sent through the civilian justice system. When we have to use our military to go after him on foreign soil it seems to me that we've stepped outside the operation of law enforcement and moved into the operation of war. During wartime you don't send your enemies through the civilian justice system. You hold them until the end of hostilities with the option for the military to hold them accountable for any violations of the laws of war that they may have committed.
People are dying right now due to lack of health care coverage, and we are the only first world nation where that is true.
If we are the "only" first world nation where people die from a lack of health care coverage, then how do you explain away statistics like the the 5 yr cancer survival rate? Hint: It's higher in the United States than in most European countries.
Socialism just works better for some things, health care being provably one of them.
Bullshit. Medical procedures that aren't covered by insurance (plastic surgery, lasik surgery, etc.) have consistently come down in price since being introduced to the market. Medical procedures that are covered by insurance have consistently gone up in price even though the technology behind them (MRIs are a great example) has gone down in price since being invented.
Bureaucracy (whether corporate or government) that separates the consumer from the cost of the product is never going to produce a cheaper/more effective outcome than a genuine free market. Replacing private bureaucracy (insurance co.) with government bureaucracy isn't going to solve anything. We'll still have the same broken system. We'll just be paying for it with taxes instead of insurance premiums.
but we will all be better off when we have a single payer system, just like every other first world country
Of course, for better or worse, we aren't going to get a single payer system. Instead we are going to get an unconstitutional mandate that everybody participate in the existing system. For the first time in American history the Government is trying to mandate that you have to do something just because you are an American citizen. Personally, I have a serious problem with that.
What does on thing have to do with the other?
Says the guy who brings up Iraq in a discussion about the 9/11 attacks and the country that harbored those behind them.
I don't think holding the expectation that my country seek out and terminate those who murdered almost 3,000 of my fellow citizens makes me a 'hawk'. It's a viewpoint that's shared by a large majority of Americans from all walks of life.
What's up with that you ask? I'm just annoyed when people like you feel the need to interject Iraq into every single conversation. You make a blanket statement that we "invade other countries". Someone points out the fact that at least one of those cases involved people who attacked us. Your response is a not-so-subtle reference to Iraq, thus disregarding his point in favor of returning to your worn out talking points.
Seriously, get the fuck over it already.
I love it. For pointing out the folly of mass bombardment I'm labeled a troll. I wonder if it was a pissed off white trash redneck conservative who disagreed with me or a aging hippie liberal douche that couldn't bother to read what I wrote?
Ahh, I love the smell of desperate, defensive conservatives in the morning. It smells like... victory.
Fail. I'm not desperate, didn't support the Iraq War and I'm not a conservative. I'm just a middle of the road American that's rather sick of the partisan asshats in both parties :)
Thanks for the refreshing dose of stereotyping though. It probably makes it easier for you to avoid critical thinking when you can pigeonhole those who disagree with you.
Are you talking about Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan? Because we both know you aren't talking about Iraq.
It should be obvious to anyone who cares to evaluate geopolitics deeper than "Bush lied, people died!" that I wasn't talking about Iraq. Personally I'm getting rather sick of the whining about Iraq. You do realize that we are in the process of withdrawing from that country, for better or worse, right?
Hence the negotiations to put anti missile systems in Eastern Europe to stop missiles from Iran (and Russia) that are launched targeting Europe and/or the US
That system wasn't aimed at Russia. Look at a globe sometime. Any missile launched from Russia towards North America is not going to be traveling over Poland......
And they would even have the other half to fix things like their healthcare system for example.
Given that we already spend more per capita than every other nation on health care I'd question the notion that a lack of funding is causing the problems seen in the American health care system.........
A single little bullet from a handgun releases over 12 megawatts
You realize that a 'megawatt' isn't a measurement of energy, right? It's a measure of power. You need to combine it with at least one other variable (time) to figure out how much energy is involved.
A .45 caliber handgun fires a 230 grain bullet at about 830 feet per second. Converting those numbers into metric yields the following:
Weight of the projectile: 0.0149037493 kilos
Velocity of the projectile: 252.984 m/s
The kinetic energy formula is 0.5 * mass * velocity squared. For our .45 caliber handgun with the numbers above that works out to 476.93 joules. A joule is equivalent to a watt-second. That means that the energy in that handgun round isn't even sufficient to power a 60 watt light bulb for ten seconds (60 * 10 = 600). It's certainly no where near 'megawatt' class. Hell, even the .50 BMG only works out to ~17,000 joules, which would run your 60 watt light bulb for about five minutes.
For shits and giggles, here's that same calculation as applied to the 16" gun of the Iowa Class Battleship:
Weight of projectile: 1,224.6994 kilos (2,700 pounds for the armor piercing round)
Speed of projectile: 819.91200 m/s (2,690 feet per second)
Kinetic energy of projectile at the muzzle: 411,655,568.71 joules.
There's your megawatt class gun. You'll note that it's slightly larger than a handgun ;)
What country sheltered those hijackers and allowed them to train on it's soil, again?
Fixed that for you.
Applying the methods used to win WW2 to the operations in Afghanistan or Iraq wouldn't end the insurgency in either place.
It wouldn't hurt. In WW2 we subjected enemies who declined to follow the laws of war to summary execution on the battlefield. Read what happened to the German soldiers who fought behind the line under a false flag during the Battle of the Bulge. It was even worse in the Pacific theater -- the Japanese committed so many war crimes under the cover of white flags (perfidy) that our troops stopped attempting to take prisoners and just shot "surrendering" Japanese troops on the spot.
The tactics of WW2 (mass bombardment, armored warfare, submarine warfare, etc) aren't very relevant here but we could certainly learn a thing or two from the way the Greatest Generation behaved on the battlefield. Tying one hand behind our backs and following the rules when our enemies refuse to do the same is extremely foolhardy. You don't fight fair -- you fight to win. We used to understand that. Our enemies still do.
Carpet bombing industrial (ie, population) centers. The fact that we don't anymore has more to do with the availability of precision bombs than development of new ethics.
What industrial centers? Afghanistan is probably the poorest country on Earth. If it's not #1 then it's certainly in the top ten. I don't think mass bombardment of "industrial centers" is going to have much effect on an enemy whose primary weapons are AK-47s and homemade bombs.
Oh come on mods, this wasn't trolling. Grow a sense of humor or at least use the correct (offtopic) mod if you insist on being a spoil sport.
That's a very profitable idea but you might want to consult with IBM [ibmandtheholocaust.com] about how history views those who comply with fascism for monetary return.
Interesting that you mention a historical example but fail to note the modern-day examples. Yes, I'm looking at you Google, Yahoo, and Cisco.
But developing a game that pushes Socialist values and limits various gameplay could essentially RUIN your sales in every country BUT China.
Game? Sales? China? They pay for games in China? Who'd of thunk it....
"Gun nerds"? I love it!
Interestingly enough there seems to a disproportionate number of IT people involved in the shooting sports. At my local shooting range virtually all of the shooters under the age of 40 are involved in IT in one way or another.
I guess a firearm is nothing more than technology once you strip away the mystique and fear surrounding them. Maybe that explains why so many IT geeks seem to get a kick out of playing around with them.
What other state has a Governor that refuses to live it its capital city
New York. Our Governor resides in NYC and rarely heads to Albany unless he wants to do a joint press conference with other state officials.
Why is his AC on when he's not in the house?
Maybe he has pets? Maybe he doesn't want to come home to a hot house and force the A/C to work non-stop to catch up? At my old apartment it would take the A/C three hours to make the house comfortable if I waited until coming home from work to turn it on. Thanks, but no thanks.
I don't live in a part of the world where it's required, but I don't heat my house when I'm not there.
There are parts of the world that require that? What a joke. Reminds me of my last trip to Europe. I had to pay extra money (5 euros a day) to have the A/C activated in my room. Despite the fact that I was paying for (paying way more than it actually costs I might add) they still went into my room every single time I left and turned it off. Pissed me off royally.
I am not so sure having extra occupants in an apartment with free electricity is a no harm situation.
Yeah, because at $0.12/KwH having an extra person spend the night might wind up costing the landlord a dime or something. That totally justifies a $10/day (the fee from my lease, I just checked) charge. Seriously, how much power do you think one guest is going to use? Even if they engage in energy intensive activities (shower, clothes washing) it's not going to amount to hardly anything.
Assuming global warming is caused by California's use of hydroelectric power - which seems unlikely.
Actually there's an argument to be made that hydro contributes significantly to global warming. Rotting vegetation from the land that was flooded creates methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
a hair dryer? a clothes dryer? an oven? all of these and more draw more than 2 kW.
What kind of hair dryer are you using? Most 120V appliances in the United States/Canada max out at 1,500 watts. Most outlets won't put out more than 1,875 (15 amps * 120 volts), although a few will go up to 2,400 (20 amps * 120 volts).
The part where their kid gets shot by someone bearing arms.
Lock up the people who commit those crimes and we wouldn't have to worry about them occurring as often as they do. Depending on whose numbers you believe anywhere between 60% to 80% of first-time murderers already have violent criminal histories. That seems to beg the question of why are they getting out of jail in the first place?
I have no problem with rehabilitation for non-violent offenders but once you demonstrate that your moral compass is so fucked up that you are willing to use violence against your fellow human beings then I don't think we owe you anything more than an 8'x10' and the chance to break big rocks into small rocks.