Being armed wouldn't have done any of them the slightest bit of good. They were outnumbered, out gunned, and up against a modern fighting force. At best, they could have taken a few SS with them, which would not save them, but might fuel Nazi propaganda.
The best, and only, choice for those who the German government was rounding up and murdering was to flee. Leave occupied territory, go into hiding, or otherwise avoid capture and death. Going down fighting has never done anyone the slightest bit of good; you have to have a chance of winning to make the fight worth your life.
I know this is a troll, and I shouldn't feed it. But what the hell.
I've never met anyone under 40 who believed that banning or regulating violent entertainment would reduce real life violence. And they're quite correct to be sceptical - all the actual evidence is on their side.
Everyone who supports laws like these is generally 50+. Think of folks like Jack Thompson. They actually do believe that trying to keep young people from pretending to shoot one another will curb real life violence.
Now, there are plenty of sensible older folks who know this is BS. They just aren't a large or vocal enough group to drown out their delusional peers.
So, it's really a case of the old and reactionary crowd trying to make themselves feel safe. These laws are the illusion of safety, tailored to cater to the aged and deluded.
I've seen the "cultural glorification" argument before. I'm afraid it doesn't hold up very well.
Find me a culture that does not glorify violence, in entertainment, or values, or what parts of history are focused upon. You likely can't. Even "peaceful" countries generally place a great deal of importance upon their own military history. They glorify whatever wars they feel they fought justly.
The human instinct toward violence is universal. The outlets vary.
Conversely, if you look at the other end of things, and focus on real life violence instead of cultural depictions of it, you'll generally find it's prompted by real or imagined motives. People murder one another because they feel it just, because they have something to gain, because there is something wrong, or damaged, with them, or some combination of the above.
I know at least two people with military training who also play. I can, and routinely do, tag them both.
It isn't "combat training" of any sort. The weapons don't work the same way - paintball guns are generally pump-action, semi-auto or work via electronic "ramping" systems, which do not resemble fire selection modes on firearms in the slightest. The recoil is practically non-existent. The range is measured in feet instead of meters as would be the case with rifles.
Projectile velocity is around 240 fps, whereas actual firearm projectiles move at anywhere from 1000 fps for pistols to over 3000 for military rifles. Trying to aim a paintball gun using firearm skills or vice versa is a good way to miss. You need to lead a lot more, and correct for dip a lot sooner.
The fields at which you play paintball are generally symmetrical (for speedball), or at least balanced.
About the only combat skill relevant to real life warfare and paintball is cooperation. Both a paintball team and military squad need to communicate, coordinate and cover each other. Since the "angry, but otherwise untrained" people you're talking about commit solo acts of violence, paintball would be useless training for them.
True, but while I personally am not American, I can vouch that their system is better at avoiding censorship.
Look at all the idiot laws that Jack Thompson and his fellow crusading geriatrics tried to get passed. All of them, to the last, got struck down by the courts, or never made it out of the state legislature. That is an example of the system working as it should - the courts protect the rights that the lawmakers selectively ignore.
In Germany, those same sorts of restrictions have been, and continue to be, passed into law. There has been no restrictions upon the ability of the lawmakers to take away the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry.
I'd say the German legal system is fucked. The American one is also fucked, but batting down censorship is perhaps one of the few things it gets right. Mind you, the moment the censors in the US try to ban sex instead of violence, the whole thing falls apart.
The de-Nazification laws at least made some sense. If your former government really was that monstrous, you too would likely want to bury all traces of it. Doesn't mean they actually work, merely that they are rooted in something understandable.
The laws in Germany banning or censoring anything remotely violent make no sense whatsoever. They've done nothing up until this point to prevent real life violence, like the shooting TFA mentions. They do not provide more than the illusion of safety, and I doubt anyone under the age of 40 buys into that illusion.
All they've done is stifle the enjoyment of the citizenry in order to make the foolish and reactionary idiots feel safer.
But I will say I find this entirely in keeping with the policy of the German government. They have similarly ridiculous laws in place regarding video games and other entertainment, so while this new one seems utterly idiotic, it is at least a logical extension of what they've already done.
At this rate, they'll be banning soccer next. Wouldn't want those hooligans "lowering the threshold for violent acts", now, would we?
Yucca always struck me as pure NIMBY anyway. The location wasn't chosen because it made sense from a logistic or safety standpoint; it was chosen because it was safely out of everyone else's backyard.
Any manned spacecraft needs to be protected from ionizing radiation, as do sensitive computer parts on unmanned ones. They are not, however, exposed to radioactive material.
Radioactive contamination, which is what you're thinking of, either results from neutron bombardment, or alternatively from radioactive material "rubbing off" on the now contaminated object. It's not an issue in space. It may or may not be an issue with nuclear bombs and reactors here on earth, depending on the material(s) in question.
Exposure to most forms of ionizing radiation does not cause the exposed object to become radioactive. Exposure to neutron radiation is another matter, but that particular variety doesn't occur in space.
I really, really hope that was a joke. Because I'm sure somebody out there is going to assume it wasn't, and wonder why NASA doesn't just do that.
You can't "fission a few particles now and then". To establish the sort of chain reaction you're talking about in fissile fuel would require equipping the probe with a reactor. Ignoring the fact that people would scream bloody murder about launching such a device into orbit (it's been done before, but not recently, and not in this political climate), there are also technical limitations.
A RTG is not a reactor; it's something much lighter, with fewer moving parts. Doesn't generate as much power, but less power is needed if all you're running is a few sensor and communication systems. Even if we could make a reactor that lightweight, we couldn't make it go for decades at a time without maintenance.
So, to recap, we can't use Pu239 to power a RTG, and can't use a reactor to perform the same job. And we don't have very many isotopes that can fill the same role Pu238 does.
Plus, any fancy new solution would surely cost more than the $150 mil mentioned in TFA, making the question moot to begin with. Compared to the cost of developing, testing and building a next generation fission reactor that will run for decades sans maintainable, a few hundred million dollars is a drop in the bucket.
You're thinking of things like the ISS and Space Shuttle. That's more an issue in the inner system, and more an issue with manned spacecraft.
If a probe's electronics aren't giving off too much waste heat, and it's operating far enough from the sun, freezing becomes more of a problem than overheating. The reasons heat is a larger problem for something like the Shuttle are the large number of waste-heat generating parts (including the squishy organic parts running the thing), and the greater exposure to sunlight.
So, rule of thumb is, if an unmanned craft is far enough out to need a power source other than solar panels, it's also far enough out to need a heat source.
Incidentally, there are almost no circumstances in space where you don't have at least one of the above problems. If you radiate less heat than you produce, you'll fry; radiate more and you'll freeze. All it takes is time. Balancing heat output and input is a major engineering challenge.
Not going to happen. What might happen instead is the usual mix of embargoes, paper resolutions, backroom deals and "diplomacy", but outright war? You're kidding yourself.
Pretty much the only times a modern nation will go to war is when it thinks it can win. Meaning against an opponent who hasn't the economic or military wherewithal to stand up and make the invader hurt. Hell, even in Iraq, the actual hurt being done to the US forces is being done by civilian insurgents, not an actual military.
Name me one ground war since WWII that was fought between two developed nations that were anywhere near on equal footing. You can't. Even stuff like the Falklands war hardly qualifies as a "ground war", while 'Nam and Korea were the US against tiny nations that had bigger powers backing them by proxy. Do you really think that will change? Or that copyright will be the motive if it does?
All the countries that the US opposes on the copyright issue are either first world nations or military powers in their own right. The little backwaters that it could actually clobber haven't the economic or political capital to make a copyright war worthwhile for the corporations that would promote such a measure. You really think the US is prepared for a ground war with Russia? How about Sweden? China? Canada? Please.
If a corporation has to raise its prices to pay its fair share of the taxes, then so be it. At least then I can make a more informed purchasing decision when deciding whether or not to buy their product.
Bingo!
It's not as if the corporations of the world have the ability to "pass costs" to us directly. We have to let them do so, by continuing to buy what they sell, or work on their payroll.
You'd think more of the people who support a free market would get this. A corporation cannot abuse it's customers or employees at will, except in cases where there exists a monopoly, a cartel, or a total absence of competition. If they have any competition at all, and that competition can adapt to the changing environment, then they're toast.
The reason this doesn't happen often is that the corporations who abuse the public are, by and large, the ones who get the go-ahead from the local government(s). This can take the form of the exclusive use of government funded infrastructure, direct subsidies, the total lack of, or lack of enforcement of, antitrust laws, and... tax breaks. Take those away, let them stand or fall on their own merits.
I'd like to add that this whole "socialist vs. capitalist" nonsense is a non sequitur. You can, and almost always do, have both at once.
Socialism simply means that the tax dollars the government collects go into social programs. Capitalism has less to do with the government, and more to do with the economy (insofar as the two can be separated). You can have capitalism with no government at all (anarchy), though I doubt anyone with an ounce of sense would want to live in such a society. You could also have a government that funds no social programs whatsoever, but I can't think of a single such entity in the free world.
Even the USA has social programs, they just receive far less of the overall tax income. So to an extent, every modern capitalist state is also socialist; it's just a question of how much.
The reverse does not apply incidentally; there are plenty of historical examples of non-capitalist socialist states, but they've been dying off, or adapting, since the end of the cold war. Surprise surprise, top down management of national economies (such as in communist systems) doesn't work. Doesn't have a thing to do with socialism however.
That isn't what happened in 1918. Nothing tangible has changed since then in regards to how a flu pandemic affects us; we have a very limited capacity to vaccinate against every strain of influenza.
Every false alarm is essentially meaningless; the one time it isn't a false alarm, we really do need to react. When that happens, not acting quickly will cost lives. The 1918 outbreak infected a billion (half the population at the time) and killed upwards of a hundred million; a similar outbreak today might kill anywhere from 120-600 million. If the mortality rate does hit the double digits, and we've done nothing up until that point, we're fucked.
Also, you are badly misinformed about the nature of the casualties this time around. Most flu outbreaks only kill the old, the young and the immune compromised. This one killed healthy adults.
I believe I said "Has infected far fewer people, yet killed more of them" which should be read as "killed more of the people it infects". If that was unclear, let me reiterate; I'm referring to the percentage killed out of the total number infected, not the gross casualty rate.
Those thousands that die are among hundreds of thousands or more who get infected. This strain has infected far fewer people, yet killed more of them, so the mortality rate is much higher.
If infection became widespread, as was the case in 1918, then we could be looking at serious losses.
Honeybees are a domesticated species. Like crops, cows and cats. There is no more "natural progression of life" to interfere with here, because the life in question is that of living things we've bred, sheltered and tamed (as much as we can say an insect is "tame").
Plus, if it weren't for "filling wallets", the dying colonies wouldn't exist in the first place. Do you honestly think we go out and take honey from wild beehives? Are you that ignorant?
The colonies that are dying mostly weren't those wax and paper numbers you see hanging from tree branches, they're wood and wire mesh numbers built for the express purpose of farming the bees for honey. Wild bees were also dying, but it's the domesticated ones we noticed first.
Hell, the disease itself might not have anything to do with this moronic concept of "natural progression" you ignorantly put forth, and everything to do with us creating a situation in which the fungus can more easily infect domesticated bees than wild ones.
Your argument might make some sense if we were referring to a wild species that was dying off from a cause unrelated to human activity. As it stands, what you're saying makes about as much sense as saying we shouldn't treat bird flu in the chicken population.
Plus the concept of "natural progression" is a fools notion, put forward by idiots who'd have flunked out of bio 101 if they'd ever tried taking it. Evolution isn't about progress, nature isn't some sacred ineffable god, and mankind is only morally obligated to minimize the environmental impact of our own actions. We are not bound to do what is evolutionarily best, because the concept of one outcome being "best" for evolution is meaningless, and in any event we should not be using the principles of biology as moral grounds.
I'll avoid the obvious pitfall of pointing out that we can't conclusively prove a negative. I think that, at any arbitrary point in the future, we'll either have found non-carbon life, or we'll still be arguing over it's existence. Science fiction of the thirtieth century should be an interesting read:-)
However, we need to look for the carbon-based life first, regardless. We currently have a sample size of one for livable planets, and that tells us next to nothing about the rest of the universe. Is our world unique, is it vanishingly rare, or are worlds like it common as dirt?
Once we've addressed this, at least partially, we'll have a better handle on asking what other forms life can take. Even a single instance of extraterrestrial life would increase our sample size by 100%, a start in the right direction.
Actually, rough guess here of course (IANAPHD on the subject), I don't think that's the main problem.
Detecting light reflected from a planet at any interstellar distance is a bigger hurdle. We still mainly detect extrasolar planets indirectly, either by gravitational effects, or by occlusion. (For the curious, this is also where the bias in favour of detecting very large planets arises; the bigger they are, the easier these methods can be used to find them.)
Detecting light from a planet is a pain, since they are not inherently luminous to begin with; they reflect light only. Meaning the more luminous the star is and the closer the planet orbits it, the brighter the planet appears to be. However, as those values rise, so too does the glare of the starlight, making detection harder in the process.
A candidate world needs to be in the habitable zone, reflecting light that can be distinguished from the star it orbits, and detectable to optical astronomy at interstellar distances. There are no telescopes yet that can do this, nor have we found a planet that I know of that fits the above criteria.
If we had the equipment, somewhere to point it, and the means to analyze the image precisely enough, then we could do this. They're basically talking about spectral analysis of telescopic imagery; we've gotten halfway decent at that in the last thirty years. We might even get to use this method in my lifetime.
That doesn't really contradict what he said. The net energy is still always conserved, even if locally it appears to be violated. From a "big picture" point of view, wherein we consider local quantum effects in relation to one another, not just by themselves, conservation is as true now as when we first proposed it.
Conservation of mass/energy goes back how far? The concept of mass equivalence is Einstein's era (more or less), but the concept of conservation in the first place is nineteenth century. Certainly more than the three decades proposed in the GP.
Now, I will grant that I can't think of any other physics theories that go back that far, and have survived the times without substantial revision in light of new evidence. But I'm not sure that says anything conclusive about "scientific truth" (now there's a loaded concept) - especially when you look beyond just physics and examine the other hard sciences like chemistry, where such longstanding theories do exist.
Broadly speaking, if we can cross those distances at a reasonable sublight pace, we've clearly already solved that problem.
Travelling at high speed through interstellar space exposes the spacecraft to deadly levels of radiation. Remember that space is not strictly a vacuum, and motion is relative, so at 0.5c every hydrogen atom you cross paths with is, from your frame of reference, hitting you at half the speed of light. The faster you go, the worse this problem gets, to the point where at near light speed you'll be fried before you even get halfway to anywhere. So your radiation shielding has to be pretty darn good, or you have to have a workaround in place.
Naturally, these problems are lessened if we're assuming that the spacecraft will function like those in science fiction do. If we can go faster than light, it stands to reason the mechanism involved might remove the ship from Einsteinian space, so that could work. Pretty far fetched though. If we had the technology to actively shield a craft from neutrally charged radiation, that would also do the trick, assuming it scaled up and could be kept online for long enough. These solutions however are not based on any probable future technology; they are more wishful thinking.
Assuming we can't do any of the sci-fi solutions, what sort of workaround would do the trick? One method is sending an automated ship with the passenger's minds and genetic data copied into the computer. When they arrive, clone new bodies for them, copy the stored minds, and you're set. No life support needed in transit, and your ship only needs radiation shielding good enough to protect hardened machine components from harm. Later colonists can arrive via narrowbeam transmission of their own stored minds in turn.
Or you build a ship with enough raw mass between the passengers and the incoming radiation to stop it from harming them. The mass doesn't have to just be shielding; fuel mass could also work (you're going to need a hell of a lot of that anyway), as could supplies that aren't to be used until after arrival. This method works best for either generational ships, or ships that keep their passengers on ice; you'll need a very long time to get where you're going if you've got a ship that large.
Another solution would be the harden the passengers against radiation; this could be done via cybernetics, genetic engineering or some other medical advancement not you thought of.
You'll note that with any of the above technology, we're no longer at the mercy of such stellar catastrophes as gamma ray bursts or supernovae. We could very likely prevent the extinction of the human race if we spacecraft able to take us out of our star system. We might still take heavy losses if such a catastrophe occurred (most of the us will still be here on earth, or at least in the neighbourhood), but as a species, we'd survive.
the only way to make someone do a raid 1000x is through addiction.
And this contracts what I was saying... how?
Take a step back. Maybe the designers don't want the players doing the raid nightly. That's what the players choose to do.
You're equating how the game is player with how the designers meant it to be played. That's just my point - the addicts play a certain way that is counter-productive to the designer's bottom line.
The same addiction hook that hooks gamblers.
Which makes no sense at all.
Gamblers get hooked by people who charge them for each slot pull. It's in the interest of a casino to bleed them dry.
Is this true for MMOs? You've admitted yourself that there is only one benefit to addiction - "keeping the players in the game" - and I've already preempted that one by explaining the problems it causes. Players don't play for each slot pull; they pull the metaphorical lever each and every time for free.
That does not mean MMOs aren't addictive, but it does mean that the designers didn't build them that way. The players hook themselves, much to the chagrin of the people paying attention to the bottom line.
Pretty sure I've read cases of heroin withdrawal causing cardiac arrest or some such. But I'm going from memory here, so I'll admit I might be wrong.
As for physiological versus psychological, I'd say there are a couple of important distinctions. You're right in that brain chemistry isn't an important one - an addict is an addict - but there are other factors.
For starters, while I've heard of physiological addiction ruining people's health (see: obesity, STDs), I've never heard of them actually getting worse after they quit. More stressed at first, but that doesn't last. For a point of comparison, the health deterioration that accompanies chemical addiction is followed by the damage done during withdrawal; a chemical addict gets worse before they get better. As you and I both remarked, they can die from this.
This by itself makes it that much harder to quit. Ignoring recidivism after the habit has been kicked, a physical addiction can actually be too dangerous to drop, at least from the addicts' point of view.
Apart from that, a psychological addiction is easier to cope with. I've known more high functioning psychological addicts than I've known high functioning alcoholics (and I've never known an alkie who didn't eventually hit bottom and crash).
So I'd make an easy distinction on those grounds. The difference in addiction may not matter, but the impact it has on the well being of the addict does.
I'd like to point out though that when you talk of hedonism, you generally aren't referring to impulse control (or lack thereof). Hedonism originally meant a particularly selfish personal philosophy - a choice of belief. A hedonist, modern or ancient, could still have excellent impulse control, and choose not to exercise it.
Overgrown children with poor impulse control aren't necessarily hedonists, and in fact the ones I've known tend to be more violently impulsive than anything else. Think of the idiots who road rage at the drop of a hat.
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Being armed wouldn't have done any of them the slightest bit of good. They were outnumbered, out gunned, and up against a modern fighting force. At best, they could have taken a few SS with them, which would not save them, but might fuel Nazi propaganda.
The best, and only, choice for those who the German government was rounding up and murdering was to flee. Leave occupied territory, go into hiding, or otherwise avoid capture and death. Going down fighting has never done anyone the slightest bit of good; you have to have a chance of winning to make the fight worth your life.
I know this is a troll, and I shouldn't feed it. But what the hell.
I've never met anyone under 40 who believed that banning or regulating violent entertainment would reduce real life violence. And they're quite correct to be sceptical - all the actual evidence is on their side.
Everyone who supports laws like these is generally 50+. Think of folks like Jack Thompson. They actually do believe that trying to keep young people from pretending to shoot one another will curb real life violence.
Now, there are plenty of sensible older folks who know this is BS. They just aren't a large or vocal enough group to drown out their delusional peers.
So, it's really a case of the old and reactionary crowd trying to make themselves feel safe. These laws are the illusion of safety, tailored to cater to the aged and deluded.
I've seen the "cultural glorification" argument before. I'm afraid it doesn't hold up very well.
Find me a culture that does not glorify violence, in entertainment, or values, or what parts of history are focused upon. You likely can't. Even "peaceful" countries generally place a great deal of importance upon their own military history. They glorify whatever wars they feel they fought justly.
The human instinct toward violence is universal. The outlets vary.
Conversely, if you look at the other end of things, and focus on real life violence instead of cultural depictions of it, you'll generally find it's prompted by real or imagined motives. People murder one another because they feel it just, because they have something to gain, because there is something wrong, or damaged, with them, or some combination of the above.
I play paintball. You obviously don't.
I know at least two people with military training who also play. I can, and routinely do, tag them both.
It isn't "combat training" of any sort. The weapons don't work the same way - paintball guns are generally pump-action, semi-auto or work via electronic "ramping" systems, which do not resemble fire selection modes on firearms in the slightest. The recoil is practically non-existent. The range is measured in feet instead of meters as would be the case with rifles.
Projectile velocity is around 240 fps, whereas actual firearm projectiles move at anywhere from 1000 fps for pistols to over 3000 for military rifles. Trying to aim a paintball gun using firearm skills or vice versa is a good way to miss. You need to lead a lot more, and correct for dip a lot sooner.
The fields at which you play paintball are generally symmetrical (for speedball), or at least balanced.
About the only combat skill relevant to real life warfare and paintball is cooperation. Both a paintball team and military squad need to communicate, coordinate and cover each other. Since the "angry, but otherwise untrained" people you're talking about commit solo acts of violence, paintball would be useless training for them.
True, but while I personally am not American, I can vouch that their system is better at avoiding censorship.
Look at all the idiot laws that Jack Thompson and his fellow crusading geriatrics tried to get passed. All of them, to the last, got struck down by the courts, or never made it out of the state legislature. That is an example of the system working as it should - the courts protect the rights that the lawmakers selectively ignore.
In Germany, those same sorts of restrictions have been, and continue to be, passed into law. There has been no restrictions upon the ability of the lawmakers to take away the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry.
I'd say the German legal system is fucked. The American one is also fucked, but batting down censorship is perhaps one of the few things it gets right. Mind you, the moment the censors in the US try to ban sex instead of violence, the whole thing falls apart.
The de-Nazification laws at least made some sense. If your former government really was that monstrous, you too would likely want to bury all traces of it. Doesn't mean they actually work, merely that they are rooted in something understandable.
The laws in Germany banning or censoring anything remotely violent make no sense whatsoever. They've done nothing up until this point to prevent real life violence, like the shooting TFA mentions. They do not provide more than the illusion of safety, and I doubt anyone under the age of 40 buys into that illusion.
All they've done is stifle the enjoyment of the citizenry in order to make the foolish and reactionary idiots feel safer.
But I will say I find this entirely in keeping with the policy of the German government. They have similarly ridiculous laws in place regarding video games and other entertainment, so while this new one seems utterly idiotic, it is at least a logical extension of what they've already done.
At this rate, they'll be banning soccer next. Wouldn't want those hooligans "lowering the threshold for violent acts", now, would we?
Yucca always struck me as pure NIMBY anyway. The location wasn't chosen because it made sense from a logistic or safety standpoint; it was chosen because it was safely out of everyone else's backyard.
Simply put, you were misinformed.
Any manned spacecraft needs to be protected from ionizing radiation, as do sensitive computer parts on unmanned ones. They are not, however, exposed to radioactive material.
Radioactive contamination, which is what you're thinking of, either results from neutron bombardment, or alternatively from radioactive material "rubbing off" on the now contaminated object. It's not an issue in space. It may or may not be an issue with nuclear bombs and reactors here on earth, depending on the material(s) in question.
Exposure to most forms of ionizing radiation does not cause the exposed object to become radioactive. Exposure to neutron radiation is another matter, but that particular variety doesn't occur in space.
Sigh...
I really, really hope that was a joke. Because I'm sure somebody out there is going to assume it wasn't, and wonder why NASA doesn't just do that.
You can't "fission a few particles now and then". To establish the sort of chain reaction you're talking about in fissile fuel would require equipping the probe with a reactor. Ignoring the fact that people would scream bloody murder about launching such a device into orbit (it's been done before, but not recently, and not in this political climate), there are also technical limitations.
A RTG is not a reactor; it's something much lighter, with fewer moving parts. Doesn't generate as much power, but less power is needed if all you're running is a few sensor and communication systems. Even if we could make a reactor that lightweight, we couldn't make it go for decades at a time without maintenance.
So, to recap, we can't use Pu239 to power a RTG, and can't use a reactor to perform the same job. And we don't have very many isotopes that can fill the same role Pu238 does.
Plus, any fancy new solution would surely cost more than the $150 mil mentioned in TFA, making the question moot to begin with. Compared to the cost of developing, testing and building a next generation fission reactor that will run for decades sans maintainable, a few hundred million dollars is a drop in the bucket.
You're thinking of things like the ISS and Space Shuttle. That's more an issue in the inner system, and more an issue with manned spacecraft.
If a probe's electronics aren't giving off too much waste heat, and it's operating far enough from the sun, freezing becomes more of a problem than overheating. The reasons heat is a larger problem for something like the Shuttle are the large number of waste-heat generating parts (including the squishy organic parts running the thing), and the greater exposure to sunlight.
So, rule of thumb is, if an unmanned craft is far enough out to need a power source other than solar panels, it's also far enough out to need a heat source.
Incidentally, there are almost no circumstances in space where you don't have at least one of the above problems. If you radiate less heat than you produce, you'll fry; radiate more and you'll freeze. All it takes is time. Balancing heat output and input is a major engineering challenge.
Not going to happen. What might happen instead is the usual mix of embargoes, paper resolutions, backroom deals and "diplomacy", but outright war? You're kidding yourself.
Pretty much the only times a modern nation will go to war is when it thinks it can win. Meaning against an opponent who hasn't the economic or military wherewithal to stand up and make the invader hurt. Hell, even in Iraq, the actual hurt being done to the US forces is being done by civilian insurgents, not an actual military.
Name me one ground war since WWII that was fought between two developed nations that were anywhere near on equal footing. You can't. Even stuff like the Falklands war hardly qualifies as a "ground war", while 'Nam and Korea were the US against tiny nations that had bigger powers backing them by proxy. Do you really think that will change? Or that copyright will be the motive if it does?
All the countries that the US opposes on the copyright issue are either first world nations or military powers in their own right. The little backwaters that it could actually clobber haven't the economic or political capital to make a copyright war worthwhile for the corporations that would promote such a measure. You really think the US is prepared for a ground war with Russia? How about Sweden? China? Canada? Please.
If a corporation has to raise its prices to pay its fair share of the taxes, then so be it. At least then I can make a more informed purchasing decision when deciding whether or not to buy their product.
Bingo!
It's not as if the corporations of the world have the ability to "pass costs" to us directly. We have to let them do so, by continuing to buy what they sell, or work on their payroll.
You'd think more of the people who support a free market would get this. A corporation cannot abuse it's customers or employees at will, except in cases where there exists a monopoly, a cartel, or a total absence of competition. If they have any competition at all, and that competition can adapt to the changing environment, then they're toast.
The reason this doesn't happen often is that the corporations who abuse the public are, by and large, the ones who get the go-ahead from the local government(s). This can take the form of the exclusive use of government funded infrastructure, direct subsidies, the total lack of, or lack of enforcement of, antitrust laws, and... tax breaks. Take those away, let them stand or fall on their own merits.
Agree 100%.
I'd like to add that this whole "socialist vs. capitalist" nonsense is a non sequitur. You can, and almost always do, have both at once.
Socialism simply means that the tax dollars the government collects go into social programs. Capitalism has less to do with the government, and more to do with the economy (insofar as the two can be separated). You can have capitalism with no government at all (anarchy), though I doubt anyone with an ounce of sense would want to live in such a society. You could also have a government that funds no social programs whatsoever, but I can't think of a single such entity in the free world.
Even the USA has social programs, they just receive far less of the overall tax income. So to an extent, every modern capitalist state is also socialist; it's just a question of how much.
The reverse does not apply incidentally; there are plenty of historical examples of non-capitalist socialist states, but they've been dying off, or adapting, since the end of the cold war. Surprise surprise, top down management of national economies (such as in communist systems) doesn't work. Doesn't have a thing to do with socialism however.
That isn't what happened in 1918. Nothing tangible has changed since then in regards to how a flu pandemic affects us; we have a very limited capacity to vaccinate against every strain of influenza.
Every false alarm is essentially meaningless; the one time it isn't a false alarm, we really do need to react. When that happens, not acting quickly will cost lives. The 1918 outbreak infected a billion (half the population at the time) and killed upwards of a hundred million; a similar outbreak today might kill anywhere from 120-600 million. If the mortality rate does hit the double digits, and we've done nothing up until that point, we're fucked.
Also, you are badly misinformed about the nature of the casualties this time around. Most flu outbreaks only kill the old, the young and the immune compromised. This one killed healthy adults.
I believe I said "Has infected far fewer people, yet killed more of them" which should be read as "killed more of the people it infects". If that was unclear, let me reiterate; I'm referring to the percentage killed out of the total number infected, not the gross casualty rate.
Those thousands that die are among hundreds of thousands or more who get infected. This strain has infected far fewer people, yet killed more of them, so the mortality rate is much higher.
If infection became widespread, as was the case in 1918, then we could be looking at serious losses.
Don't be an idiot.
Honeybees are a domesticated species. Like crops, cows and cats. There is no more "natural progression of life" to interfere with here, because the life in question is that of living things we've bred, sheltered and tamed (as much as we can say an insect is "tame").
Plus, if it weren't for "filling wallets", the dying colonies wouldn't exist in the first place. Do you honestly think we go out and take honey from wild beehives? Are you that ignorant?
The colonies that are dying mostly weren't those wax and paper numbers you see hanging from tree branches, they're wood and wire mesh numbers built for the express purpose of farming the bees for honey. Wild bees were also dying, but it's the domesticated ones we noticed first.
Hell, the disease itself might not have anything to do with this moronic concept of "natural progression" you ignorantly put forth, and everything to do with us creating a situation in which the fungus can more easily infect domesticated bees than wild ones.
Your argument might make some sense if we were referring to a wild species that was dying off from a cause unrelated to human activity. As it stands, what you're saying makes about as much sense as saying we shouldn't treat bird flu in the chicken population.
Plus the concept of "natural progression" is a fools notion, put forward by idiots who'd have flunked out of bio 101 if they'd ever tried taking it. Evolution isn't about progress, nature isn't some sacred ineffable god, and mankind is only morally obligated to minimize the environmental impact of our own actions. We are not bound to do what is evolutionarily best, because the concept of one outcome being "best" for evolution is meaningless, and in any event we should not be using the principles of biology as moral grounds.
I'll avoid the obvious pitfall of pointing out that we can't conclusively prove a negative. I think that, at any arbitrary point in the future, we'll either have found non-carbon life, or we'll still be arguing over it's existence. Science fiction of the thirtieth century should be an interesting read :-)
However, we need to look for the carbon-based life first, regardless. We currently have a sample size of one for livable planets, and that tells us next to nothing about the rest of the universe. Is our world unique, is it vanishingly rare, or are worlds like it common as dirt?
Once we've addressed this, at least partially, we'll have a better handle on asking what other forms life can take. Even a single instance of extraterrestrial life would increase our sample size by 100%, a start in the right direction.
Actually, rough guess here of course (IANAPHD on the subject), I don't think that's the main problem.
Detecting light reflected from a planet at any interstellar distance is a bigger hurdle. We still mainly detect extrasolar planets indirectly, either by gravitational effects, or by occlusion. (For the curious, this is also where the bias in favour of detecting very large planets arises; the bigger they are, the easier these methods can be used to find them.)
Detecting light from a planet is a pain, since they are not inherently luminous to begin with; they reflect light only. Meaning the more luminous the star is and the closer the planet orbits it, the brighter the planet appears to be. However, as those values rise, so too does the glare of the starlight, making detection harder in the process.
A candidate world needs to be in the habitable zone, reflecting light that can be distinguished from the star it orbits, and detectable to optical astronomy at interstellar distances. There are no telescopes yet that can do this, nor have we found a planet that I know of that fits the above criteria.
If we had the equipment, somewhere to point it, and the means to analyze the image precisely enough, then we could do this. They're basically talking about spectral analysis of telescopic imagery; we've gotten halfway decent at that in the last thirty years. We might even get to use this method in my lifetime.
That doesn't really contradict what he said. The net energy is still always conserved, even if locally it appears to be violated. From a "big picture" point of view, wherein we consider local quantum effects in relation to one another, not just by themselves, conservation is as true now as when we first proposed it.
Conservation of mass/energy goes back how far? The concept of mass equivalence is Einstein's era (more or less), but the concept of conservation in the first place is nineteenth century. Certainly more than the three decades proposed in the GP.
Now, I will grant that I can't think of any other physics theories that go back that far, and have survived the times without substantial revision in light of new evidence. But I'm not sure that says anything conclusive about "scientific truth" (now there's a loaded concept) - especially when you look beyond just physics and examine the other hard sciences like chemistry, where such longstanding theories do exist.
Broadly speaking, if we can cross those distances at a reasonable sublight pace, we've clearly already solved that problem.
Travelling at high speed through interstellar space exposes the spacecraft to deadly levels of radiation. Remember that space is not strictly a vacuum, and motion is relative, so at 0.5c every hydrogen atom you cross paths with is, from your frame of reference, hitting you at half the speed of light. The faster you go, the worse this problem gets, to the point where at near light speed you'll be fried before you even get halfway to anywhere. So your radiation shielding has to be pretty darn good, or you have to have a workaround in place.
Naturally, these problems are lessened if we're assuming that the spacecraft will function like those in science fiction do. If we can go faster than light, it stands to reason the mechanism involved might remove the ship from Einsteinian space, so that could work. Pretty far fetched though. If we had the technology to actively shield a craft from neutrally charged radiation, that would also do the trick, assuming it scaled up and could be kept online for long enough. These solutions however are not based on any probable future technology; they are more wishful thinking.
Assuming we can't do any of the sci-fi solutions, what sort of workaround would do the trick? One method is sending an automated ship with the passenger's minds and genetic data copied into the computer. When they arrive, clone new bodies for them, copy the stored minds, and you're set. No life support needed in transit, and your ship only needs radiation shielding good enough to protect hardened machine components from harm. Later colonists can arrive via narrowbeam transmission of their own stored minds in turn.
Or you build a ship with enough raw mass between the passengers and the incoming radiation to stop it from harming them. The mass doesn't have to just be shielding; fuel mass could also work (you're going to need a hell of a lot of that anyway), as could supplies that aren't to be used until after arrival. This method works best for either generational ships, or ships that keep their passengers on ice; you'll need a very long time to get where you're going if you've got a ship that large.
Another solution would be the harden the passengers against radiation; this could be done via cybernetics, genetic engineering or some other medical advancement not you thought of.
You'll note that with any of the above technology, we're no longer at the mercy of such stellar catastrophes as gamma ray bursts or supernovae. We could very likely prevent the extinction of the human race if we spacecraft able to take us out of our star system. We might still take heavy losses if such a catastrophe occurred (most of the us will still be here on earth, or at least in the neighbourhood), but as a species, we'd survive.
the only way to make someone do a raid 1000x is through addiction.
And this contracts what I was saying... how?
Take a step back. Maybe the designers don't want the players doing the raid nightly. That's what the players choose to do.
You're equating how the game is player with how the designers meant it to be played. That's just my point - the addicts play a certain way that is counter-productive to the designer's bottom line.
The same addiction hook that hooks gamblers.
Which makes no sense at all.
Gamblers get hooked by people who charge them for each slot pull. It's in the interest of a casino to bleed them dry.
Is this true for MMOs? You've admitted yourself that there is only one benefit to addiction - "keeping the players in the game" - and I've already preempted that one by explaining the problems it causes. Players don't play for each slot pull; they pull the metaphorical lever each and every time for free.
That does not mean MMOs aren't addictive, but it does mean that the designers didn't build them that way. The players hook themselves, much to the chagrin of the people paying attention to the bottom line.
Pretty sure I've read cases of heroin withdrawal causing cardiac arrest or some such. But I'm going from memory here, so I'll admit I might be wrong.
As for physiological versus psychological, I'd say there are a couple of important distinctions. You're right in that brain chemistry isn't an important one - an addict is an addict - but there are other factors.
For starters, while I've heard of physiological addiction ruining people's health (see: obesity, STDs), I've never heard of them actually getting worse after they quit. More stressed at first, but that doesn't last. For a point of comparison, the health deterioration that accompanies chemical addiction is followed by the damage done during withdrawal; a chemical addict gets worse before they get better. As you and I both remarked, they can die from this.
This by itself makes it that much harder to quit. Ignoring recidivism after the habit has been kicked, a physical addiction can actually be too dangerous to drop, at least from the addicts' point of view.
Apart from that, a psychological addiction is easier to cope with. I've known more high functioning psychological addicts than I've known high functioning alcoholics (and I've never known an alkie who didn't eventually hit bottom and crash).
So I'd make an easy distinction on those grounds. The difference in addiction may not matter, but the impact it has on the well being of the addict does.
Agreed 100%.
I'd like to point out though that when you talk of hedonism, you generally aren't referring to impulse control (or lack thereof). Hedonism originally meant a particularly selfish personal philosophy - a choice of belief. A hedonist, modern or ancient, could still have excellent impulse control, and choose not to exercise it.
Overgrown children with poor impulse control aren't necessarily hedonists, and in fact the ones I've known tend to be more violently impulsive than anything else. Think of the idiots who road rage at the drop of a hat.