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User: Spazmasta

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  1. Re:Security? on Defending The Skies Against Congress And The Elderly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're missing the point of the parent post. No one is saying that terrorists are winning any physical fight against the USA. The whole point of the post is that the terrorists have acheived their goal of "terrorizing" us, in making people fear them and spend billions on redundant defense measures. Of course, SOME kind of security is needed in airports and whatnot, but whether we have gone to far is up for argument. The point is, the whole goal of terrorism isn't to kill a few people, the goal is to use the killing of a few people to make huge (economic) impact for millions of people. It doesn't matter that there hasn't been another big terrorist attack on our land, we are still playing into their hands by making such a big deal of the terrorist attacks so long ago.

  2. Re:Reversal of Magnetic Field = No Magnetic Field? on Bad News for Earth's Magnetic Field · · Score: 3, Informative

    From what I read, it sounded like the time of "no magnetic field" was the time during the reversal process - after the reversal is over, everything will be just fine, it's the process that we're worried about, where the magnetic fields aren't quite aligned like they are now, but scattered in a way to diminish the protective effects we get from it.

  3. Re:Longevity and diet on Yoda The Mouse Turns 4 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's also important to note that often "average life expentancies" produces confusing implications, because "average life expectancy" doesn't necessarily mean how old someone will be before he/she dies of old age, but is simply the AVERAGE of people dying of old age as well as people dying of car accidents, cancer, jumping off cliffs, etc.

    Thus, such variations in life expectancies could very well be caused by cultural factors like smoking and car use instead of the source of carbohydrates (wheat vs rice).

  4. Re:Interplanetary pollution on Personalized Moon Crash · · Score: 1

    You're missing the point. "Doing something just because we can" isn't all that bad. Think of all the scientific discoveries that achieved outcomes that weren't the initial intention. Whenever someone does something, work is being achieved somewhere, somehow.

    For instance, the obvious benefit of this project is that it opens up the door to commercially sending stuff to the moon. Maybe this time it'll cost $6 million, but maybe the next time they'll charge only $3 million. Maybe the buyer will actually decide to send something useful (to some extent) to the moon, like say, a lego robot with a camera attached, in a huge ball of foam padding - or even a homemade spectrometer, to analyze the chemical makeup. Sure, maybe none of the above will literally happen, but the point is, the project opens the door to doing so.

    In the big picture, this is just another $6 million going to a corporation that will hire contractors to build the rocket, who will in turn spend their money buying other stuff, and so on and so forth. Any exchange of money signified "work" being done.

    The point is, this project really isn't the beginning of a whole dump-stuff-on-the-moon industry, but rather a transport-stuff-to-the-moon industry, for whatever useful ideas corporations can come up with.

  5. Re:Good for them on Energiya Pushes For A 6-Person Space Capsule · · Score: 1

    What's the point in reinventing the wheel?
    Reinventing the wheel, you just might accidentally build a rocket engine.

  6. Good for them on Energiya Pushes For A 6-Person Space Capsule · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe now NASA will stop dilly-dallying around and get some new technology other than the outdated space shuttle. We've really been slacking ever since we stopped going to the moon, and maybe international involvement will help us get back on track.

  7. Interesting... on How We Knew AL00667 Would Miss Earth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that most people didn't hear about the asteroid until long after the near-miss was over. Seems to bring up the old argument of whether it'd be better to inform the public and try to do something about it or keep it under wraps and possibly die in blissful ignorance...

  8. Re:Go ahead, mod me down. on Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional · · Score: 1

    They see an opportunity to demoralize Americans, and elect a democrat to the Presidency. Then of course, said democrat would pull the troops out of Iraq. That's at least their plan.

    There's a difference between "terrorists" and "Iraq". At least prior to the WTC attacks, "iraqis" and "terrorists" were considered totally different groups. Somewhere along the way, of course, we've turned them all (including north korea) into some homogeneous "axis of evil". When I talked about troops in the Middle East, I was mainly referring to the pre-9/11/01 middle east, when the region had remained very militarized by the US ever since the Gulf war. Hell, ever since we sent the CIA in to help the Ba'ath party take over iraq so they could fight the Iranians. (The same ba'ath party that Saddam soon rose to power in). Realistically, terrorists weren't expecting to acheive all their goals by a single WTC center. Perhaps they wanted to hurt the US as much as they could, but it'd seem a little too ambitious if they were to hope for the USA to squander millions, if not billions trying to equip pilots with handguns, adding extensive metal detectors to every big building or museum, and trying to find cures for countless possible "biological weapons" of terrorists. To get Bush to actually take money from his own education "no child left behind" plan, from social security, all to wage war with all these invisible enemies that are supposedly plotting against the US.

    Since when are you suppossed to let several thousand people die as two flaming towers collapse and just go on as if nothing had happened?

    I agree that we can't just not do anything either. Maybe giving pilots handguns is a necessary feature. Even though most terrorists wouldn't bother to bring bombs or any metallic weapon to a museum, perhaps the extra protection of museums is justified. It's always good to be prepared in case there's another smallpox outbreak, i suppose. Or for that case, ebola, anthrax, "SARS" or any other ailment you could think of. I'm all for that if it's a chance to increase our scientific knowledge. Then comes the patriot act. Remember, under the propoganda from the government in Soviet Russia, the people probably never "heard" of anything infringing on their rights any more than the "Patriot act". Today I can maybe put up with a random luggage search in an airport, but what happens when it becomes a random strip search? Or maybe random house searches? Where must we draw the line? Of course, the trusty judicial branch of the government should take care of all those "drawing the line" things for us, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize those infringments while they are in effect. We know something's wrong when millions rush to buy duct tape and water as "anti-terrorist" measures. Like I said before, it's not even the government that I'm talking about, it's our own irrational fear. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, how many of us remember how Afghanistan was described before we invaded? They were indeed considered a sovereign nation, and they were asked to hand over "suspected" terrorists. Now, we just killed "every one of those sons of bitches" and called them all terrorists. Even more sovereign of a nation was Iraq. I was never even totally against the war, though certainly not because I believed we were "liberating" the people, but on the off chance that the oil deals would save the US's economy enough that we would have time to research Nuclear power, Solar power, or anything else that doesn't involve fighting for the hundred-million-year-old carcasses of plants and animals. As for fighting the terrorist, it should be pretty clear that the countries we have spend hundreds of billions of dollars on so far aren't the terrorists we are looking for. We are slapping any convenient country with the label of "terrorist" and killing "every damned one of those sons of bitches". Meanwhile, as we satisfy our need of revenge, we've made far more enemies than we've eliminated.

    PS: Although I wholeheartedly would've supported the toppling of the Soviet Union during the cold war, it was in that fight that the US personally trained Osama Bin Laden AND created the means for Saddam to rise to power.

  9. Re:And??? on Part of Patriot Act Ruled Unconstitutional · · Score: 5, Insightful

    then they have, in a way, won

    More than "in a way"... they will have won, period. It's not like they expect the US to give up and remove all our military from the middle east or anything like that, terrorists have been attacking other american territory and other countries for a long time. Their goal is to cause chaos, to make people live their lives differently, by what the terrorists dictate. Exactly what they want is for the US to waste millions on extra metal detectors or anti-anthrax machines, or to give up our freedoms. By "fighting back" and installing all sorts of extra security features, we are only playing right into the terrorists' hand. Fighting back is not trying to guess their next move and save a few peoples lives, but to continue normally, not wasting our money on anti-terrorist measures, and instead spend that money to prevent the deahts of the thousands that might die from poverty, that might become victim to an underfunded education system, the thousands that will die because our great country doesn't want to provide the money for a working free health care program like even Canada has, just because we need to invade a country like iraq in case they attack us first. Terrorists aren't the real threat. Our own irrational fear is what we should be worrying about.

  10. Re:How high? on Mine The Moon For Helium-3 · · Score: 1

    I am unaware if helium with one neutron exists in nature or if it is even possible to achieve

    He-3 has 1 neutron, not 3 neutrons. "Regular" He is He-4, and He-5 indeed has 3 neutrons.