http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle No such thing my ass. I'll grant you that it's a misused term (people refer to semi-automatic rifles as assault rifles in ignorance), but in the context of military weaponry it is a valid term with a generally accepted meaning, namely a selective fire automatic rifle with mid sized ammunition. Ask a grunt what category of weapon an M16 is and you'll get "assault rifle" in reply.
Several people could indeed have rushed the perpetrator at VT as the GP claimed if all the killer had was semi-automatic, whereas they could not have rushed him if he had a weapon capable of burst fire.
Since the GP was referring to the shooter not having a weapon capable of killing several targets at once, I assume he knew what he was talking about when he said "assault rifle". By claiming that there is "no such thing as an assault rifle" you have shown that you do not. Kindly take the time to at least Google a word or term first before speaking up.
I am sorry if this is offtopic or flamebait, but this is the exact same argument many people claim is facetious in the context of outsourcing. How is this situation any different?
The argument isn't wrong in the case of outsourcing. It's just uncomfortable. Fact of the matter is, outsourcing is one of those things that's bad from one perspective (that of the now unemployed person in the first world) and good from more than one other perspective (the perspective of the now employed person in Bangladesh, India or wherever, and the perspective of their corporate overlords). How you view outsourcing depends on where you are, and also on how you view the corporations involved.
The claim that the argument you cite is facetious when applied to outsourcing comes from different people than those who make it in the case of filesharing.
Note that outsourcing has ethical problems in other areas, unrelated to the one you cite. For example, it is unethical (but not illegal) for a company to move its business to a country where health, environmental or employment regulation are lacking, in order to get away with things they couldn't do here. This has nothing to do with a global economy, and everything to do with the imbalance of power that exists between third world governments and first world corporations.
Intrinsic scarcity isn't worth much by itself. I could name dozens of substances that are, or were, "scarce" the same way gold is, yet were never used as a medium of exchange. You have to have scarcity plus some other factor.
Gold, silver and the like were (and still are) valuable because they're shiny. I know that sounds silly, but it's nonetheless true; wealthy and powerful people, from kings to merchants, wanted gold for appearance sake. If iron pyrite were the pretty mineral of choice instead, we'd be calling fool's gold currency. Nowadays you can rightfully say gold is useful as well as aesthetic, but when it was being used as a medium of exchange the value came from appearance.
So really, the only reason gold coins were worth anything was because the people in power wanted gold, and were willing to accept it in trade. Everybody else followed suite. Gold, like paper money, was backed by the rulers of the day. The main difference between then and now is that money is minted rather than mined, meaning that the government can, whether by accident or intent, cause serious inflation.
I guess you're talking about the one species where the males keep lots of childlike mannerisms even after reaching physical maturity, like tantrums, the obsession with toys and sources of milk, and crawling, toddling and babbling (after consuming too much alcohol). Touché.
Aside from the alcohol part, that could describe any domesticated cat.:-)
Milk - check (as long as they didn't go a long time between being weaned and drinking milk as an adult).
Crawling/toddling - well, they are quadrupeds.
Tantrums - oh hell yeah, check.
Babbling - check. They don't know why they hell they're meowing, they just want you to listen to them.
Toys - toy mice count, right?
As far as that goes, I'm pretty sure I could apply these to dogs as well. I know at least one pit bull (belonging to my GF's folks) that fits all of the above except the milk part.:-)
I'm pretty sure that these countries have private ownership of businesses and personal property. This makes them only "socialistic". Naked Socialism would work out about as well as Communism did.
True, but you could say the exact same thing about the US and capitalism - the government doesn't butt out completely, ergo the US is only "capitalistic".
Taking any economic, political or social system to it's logical extreme is invariably a bad idea. All developed nations have learned that. In many cases they learned the hard way - see the industrial revolution and the backlash it spawned against laissez-faire ideas, or the opposite extreme in former Soviet states.
Instead of extremes, what we have now is moderation, with elements of various philosophies mixed together in what way seems best to the citizenry (or at least that is the case is democratic countries). All modern developed nations are somewhere in the middle.
When comparing, for example, the US and "socialist" European countries, the comparison is between two different mixes - 70/30 vs. 50/50 say.
I just reread them. What were you referring to? All I see on the non-ionizing page is a bit about possible hazards associated with ELF. Please cite from the Wiki page the section that you believe supports your argument.
I kind of thought it was common sense that radiation is harmful. I didn't think we still needed studies to prove this.
You know what? I'm really getting tired of having to explain this over and over again to people who can't be bothered to understand it. So I'm going to let Wiki do it:
Cell phone emissions fall squarely into the latter category, and while there is some debate as to whether certain non ionizing frequencies can be harmful, the hazards of ionizing radiation are well established. If you can't tell the difference between the two types, you have no business commenting on their respective risks on/., or anywhere else.
Read up. Then get back to us. This is high school level physics.
If Christians are correct, then you, as a non-Christian, have lost everything. Are you willing to make that gamble?
s/Christian/Muslim, and that's still just as accurate. How do you know that your god is real and theirs is not? I don't see you wearing a turban though (or a burqua, though I somehow doubt you're a woman).
Since you can't join every religion (many of them won't allow it), and since you cannot know for a certainty in advance which of them is right (out of several thousand), plus you cannot rule out the possibility that the "one true faith" died out thousands of years ago (have you ensured you can get into Valhalla?)... basically you're screwed no matter what you do. The odds are against Christians as much as they are against everyone else.
Not sunburns, but burns, yes. A strong enough light source is quite capable of igniting paper, for example. There's a video on YouTube and a description on the Web.
Ah yes, but those would be thermal burns. Whereas sunburns technically are classified as a radiation burn.
That may sound pedantic, but there is a difference. Ionizing radiation is capable of inflicting burns on human tissue that have very little to do with heat. Ergo, we draw a distinction between thermal and radiation burns to distinguish the mechanism that caused them. (Another point of comparison would be chemical burns from caustic substances.)
Now, why is this relevant? Because thermal burns aren't linked the cancer the way radiation burns are. You can get a thermal burn just as easily from putting your hand on a hot burner (don't try this at home). But getting burned in such a manner, whether from visible light or hot metal, won't give you skin cancer. Radiation burns, OTOH, are a proven risk factor for cancer in later life; sunburns and skin cancer being the obvious example.
Since you mentioned skin cancer in your previous post, I assumed you were referring to radiation burns from sunlight, which are the result of UV exposure, not heat from visible light.
Don't know who was talking about voodoo, certainly wasn't me.
Nah, that was directed at the OP for equating the device in TFA with DU munitions.
The human body is designed for certain limits of heat and light. Going considerably above that is not healthy.
Oh, agreed here. I'm more than a bit iffy on the ethics of this gadget myself, I just dislike the amount of misinformation associated with the word "radiation".
Well, even going by that argument, I'd say "socialist" is entirely the wrong word.
Want another interpretation? The music industry is unabashedly greedy. They screw over their customers and their artists, all while reaping enormous profits, and remaining free from legal consequence. This tells the public that "greed is good". So the public responds in kind.
The line of thinking is more like: "You want to gouge me 20 bucks for a DRM infested piece of plastic? I'd rather just download it. Greed works for those in the music biz, why not for me, the consumer?" What you call "entitlement mentality", others call "fighting fire with fire". There's nothing socialist about it.
I don't agree with this mentality myself. I've essentially stopped buying new music, and I don't pirate it either. This has nothing to do with any nebulous "judao-christian ethics" and everything to do with my own moral compass.
But calling the public mentality on file sharing "socialist" is utterly, utterly wrong; in reality it's the old idea of two wrongs making a right. It's responding to greed with greed. If you dislike greed, then by extension you have to look at both sides as being in the wrong (and the music industry far more so than the pirates).
And too much of it will cause sunburns and skin cancer.
So, you can get sunburns from light bulbs now?
I think you meant to say UV radiation (which is outside of the visible spectrum) can cause sunburns and cancer. The sun emits a whole range of EM radiation, much of which is harmless, and not all of which is visible. The wavelengths of sunlight that are unhealthy and the wavelengths that are visible aren't the same.
Unless you meant to define "light" as "EM radiation" (which is a definition some people use). In which case, your statement is somewhat correct, but only because you chose a different meaning for light than the GP, since I'm reasonably sure he was using the more common definition (ie, visible light).
Grandparent is right - if this causes pain, then it does have some kind of effect upon the body.
Yep, it's called "heat". This is basically a microwave gun.
At the very least it's causing nerves to fire. It would be very unusual if this had exactly one effect, at this magnitude, without any side-effects.
Well, if you were expecting extra limbs, forget about it. However, it would be fair to say that causing painful burns on human flesh is going to cause some side effects. TFA mentions blisters, and I imagine there are other consequences as well.
But treating this like it's some sort of scary voodoo radiation isn't rational. Equating non ionizing radiation and ionizing radiation is just ignorant, and the OP in this thread seemed to be under that exact impression.
As for me, I have to snicker that an industry that has so thoroughly attacked Judao-Christian morality is finally reaping the socialist entitlement mentality whirlwind that it has sewn.
Huh?
Did we go and redefine socialist already? Because I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The most common complaints about the music biz are just the opposite. The commercialization of music, the willingness to do anything to make a buck, the aggressive marketing hype, the overpriced CDs, the glorification of bestselling multi-millionaires - none of these are notably socialist traits. These things are very much capitalism - make a product, market the hell out of it, get rich in the process. Artists who've got more money than they know what to do with are put on a pedestal. Where do you see socialism in popular music?
You could say the music industry is acting as a cartel and stifling real market competition. I'd buy that line of reasoning. But that isn't socialism, it's good old fashioned greed coupled with abuse of power.
I'll second that. My brother was home schooled (to his benefit, I think) from 4th grade to 8th (IIRC). No religious reasons, more or less the same as yours (though in our case, it was a matter of learning about the problems with the school system when I was going through it).
It isn't just the fundie loons who home school. Mind you, the mental association between the religious right and home schooling isn't entirely unfair, given how many of them are loud opponents of the "secular" public school system.
Logged vs Ac - neither lends nor removes any actual legitimacy from an argument.
In principle, I agree, but in practice, I don't. One should judge an idea by its merits, not its advocates, but that doesn't mean that ACs on/. should be taken at face value.
One of the things we have here in abundance is trolls. The karma and mod systems are in place to limit trolling, but have no lasting impact on anon postings. Ergo, all AC posts are generally suspect; you cannot tell an honest proponent of an idea from a troll pretending to take a point of view in order to start a flamewar. You can't check his posting history, and you know he can post without fear of taking a karma hit.
If someone posts a joke while AC, that I can understand. Funny mods give no karma, and getting downmodded by people with no sense of humor is a pain. Ditto offtopic posts like this one. But anonymous flaming shouldn't really be taken seriously. If an argument breaks out between a logged in poster, and an AC, I will generally take the AC less seriously, if only because I can check the logged in guy's posting history, and know he's not afraid to put some karma on the line to express his POV.
You need look no further than the other branch of this thread to see ad homs and flames, which would rapidly send logged in posters into negative karma, but which has no impact on the fighting ACs.
it takes one alpha from one atom hitting the right cell in the right way to cause a cancer.
Eh, replace "Alpha" with "photon in the UV spectrum", and the statement still holds true - both are ionizing, and both are stopped skin deep. There is a definite, proven risk associated with skin cancer from a lifetime of sunlight.
We live with the risk associated with sunlight (or at least most of us do), because it is a small risk. I don't see why alpha radiation would be any different in the eyes of an informed beholder.
Now, radon gas say, that would be a bigger risk. Not to mention way more prevalent than smoke detectors.
Which is indeed radioactive (and a gamma emitter to boot), but has a longer half life than Polonium (hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days). Remember that decay is a finite process; the longer it takes to finish, the less radiation is emitted per second. So Americium isn't as strong as Polonium.
Plus, the quantities used in smoke detectors is small - less than a microgram. You'd need an awful lot of smoke detectors to amass a dangerous amount of Americium. That doesn't mean you couldn't kill somebody, but it's a poor choice to slip into food or drink.
What makes Polonium an attractive poison is the lethal dose. You don't need to slip much into someone's food to kill them. Other alpha emitters aren't as good candidates in this regard. Now, as to why they used a radioactive poison in the first place, I don't know; perhaps they wanted to send a message?
Not sure exactly what you meant to ask, but here goes.
Alpha radiation can't penetrate skin. So superficial contact with an alpha emitter isn't really a concern. OTOH, if you ingest/inhale an alpha emitter (like polonium 210), then your internal organs can be exposed to it. This, obviously, is a bad thing. In polonium's case, IIRC, it's soluble in bodily tissues, and has a very short half life of 138 days, so it's quite dangerous (remember that half life and radioactivity are inversely linked).
Beta, gamma and neutron radiation are somewhat different. Those can get through skin, so superficial contact is a potential concern. Beta is blocked by aluminum foil (get out your tinfoil hats!), gamma and neutron require denser materials such as lead, or thicker, less dense materials like deep soil. Neutron radiation has the added hazard of neutron activation (it can render previously safe materials radioactive).
Additionally, ionizing radiation from sources other than radioactive decay, like X-rays and UV, can generally be bad for your health; these can be seen as less serious than gamma radiation, but more serious than alpha (UV is blocked by sunblock for example). Non ionizing radiation is de facto harmless, barring intensities severe enough to cause thermal burns.
And this shows the effectiveness of profiling how exactly? I'm sorta lost how looking for a muslim male, age 17-40, would have helped in her case. Yes, the responsible party was muslim, but what we're talking about here is the effectiveness of profiling systems, and in such a case as this, they would have failed utterly.
Remember, the GP said nothing of the root causes in each case. He merely said who was carrying the bombs - because that's who airport security is trying to catch. Your point is no refutation of his.
If you can show me a terrestrial life form that can live in the total absence of water, then I'll consider Venusian life plausible. Temperature isn't the only variable.
Humans won't be that enlightened for maybe another 3,000 years.
Humans will never be "enlightened". The term itself is meaningless - what would change? For all the variation between human cultures and eras, you still have no shortage of jerks ruining it for the rest of us.
Human nature isn't subject to fundamental change; merely the restraints upon it that have changed from time to time. Barring some sort of trans-human ascendancy (and I always thought the whole "singularity" idea was too far fetched), we'll always be that way.
That being said, you're falling into the trap of "first fix mankind's lot on Earth". This line of thinking says that things like space colonization or fundamental research should be postponed until such a time as things are alright here. Truth is, things will never be that way. People forget that the term "Utopia" literally means "no place".
We will never be perfect. We will never be without problems. That is a poor argument against space travel though; if anything it means we have even more reason not to put all our eggs in one basket. And the notion that a few dead rocks are going to be spoiled by human habitation is utter nonsense - a rock is a rock. Ecology can be damaged, geology cannot.
If humans make it to a planet, and try cowboy, expansionist diplomacy, I hope the first crossed, violated other-worlder bombs humans back to proto-protozoa. Maybe re-write the human DNA.
I seriously doubt we'll be colonizing another inhabited planet anytime soon. Not because I think intelligent life is unlikely, but rather because I seriously doubt we can get any further than our immediate neighboring systems, and it is unlikely that they house intelligent life. Barring an FTL drive, we're stuck at C or less - that makes in system travel possible, and nearby star systems eventually accessible, but rules out the galaxy at large.
As the post above me pointed out, we'll never solve our population problems with space travel. It's like trying to move a huge pile of sand with tweezers.
We can acquire more resources off-world (the asteroid belt would be a good starting point), which will help matters some. But fundamentally, space exploration and overpopulation are unrelated problems. Advancing in one will not solve the other.
Apart from that, I'd also point out that projecting a trend indefinitely will almost always lead you to the wrong conclusion. For one thing, in the case of population growth, wealthy countries have slowed to around replacement fertility. Ergo, if we could imagine a world in which current third world nations became first world ones, the rate of population growth would level off. A well off population with access to modern medicine doesn't have as many kids as a poverty stricken one in which people die young, breed fast, and rely on their children's labor to make ends meat.
If you want practical, self interested reasons for space exploration, think survival of the species, and access to resources elsewhere in our star system. The former from moving some of our eggs to other baskets, and the latter from bringing the wealth of the system home.
Pollution? That was here long before humans, and will still be here long after we're gone. How about urbanization, paving, mining, deforestation, irradiation, damming, habitat destruction, species exploitation. There's a long list of bad things we do to this planet that goes way beyond pollution.
That statement doesn't even begin to parse. Those things you list are pollution. Or were you working from the idea that "pollution" only referred to air and water contamination?
Side note, what the hell is "irradiation" doing on that list? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
So you ran out and checked them all, and developed a meaningful scale for measuring life? Sounds like the wrong guy got the medal.
Meaningful scale is irrelevant in this case. Simply put, most of the planets and other celestial bodies in this star system cannot support life at all. This isn't a question of looking under every rock and checking for every possible variation on organic chemistry. This is a question of basic environmental conditions.
The one major exception is Mars. And here, I would agree that we should look very carefully for life before considering anything as extreme as terraforming, but that's a long way off yet.
In any case, one cannot prove a negative; it should be easy to demonstrate Mars has life if indeed it does, and impossible to prove that it is totally lifeless. Life can be very small, and planets are very large. We can however prove that it is extremely unlikely that there is life on Mars, and that's good enough for me.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
No such thing my ass. I'll grant you that it's a misused term (people refer to semi-automatic rifles as assault rifles in ignorance), but in the context of military weaponry it is a valid term with a generally accepted meaning, namely a selective fire automatic rifle with mid sized ammunition. Ask a grunt what category of weapon an M16 is and you'll get "assault rifle" in reply.
Several people could indeed have rushed the perpetrator at VT as the GP claimed if all the killer had was semi-automatic, whereas they could not have rushed him if he had a weapon capable of burst fire.
Since the GP was referring to the shooter not having a weapon capable of killing several targets at once, I assume he knew what he was talking about when he said "assault rifle". By claiming that there is "no such thing as an assault rifle" you have shown that you do not. Kindly take the time to at least Google a word or term first before speaking up.
The claim that the argument you cite is facetious when applied to outsourcing comes from different people than those who make it in the case of filesharing.
Note that outsourcing has ethical problems in other areas, unrelated to the one you cite. For example, it is unethical (but not illegal) for a company to move its business to a country where health, environmental or employment regulation are lacking, in order to get away with things they couldn't do here. This has nothing to do with a global economy, and everything to do with the imbalance of power that exists between third world governments and first world corporations.
Intrinsic scarcity isn't worth much by itself. I could name dozens of substances that are, or were, "scarce" the same way gold is, yet were never used as a medium of exchange. You have to have scarcity plus some other factor.
Gold, silver and the like were (and still are) valuable because they're shiny. I know that sounds silly, but it's nonetheless true; wealthy and powerful people, from kings to merchants, wanted gold for appearance sake. If iron pyrite were the pretty mineral of choice instead, we'd be calling fool's gold currency. Nowadays you can rightfully say gold is useful as well as aesthetic, but when it was being used as a medium of exchange the value came from appearance.
So really, the only reason gold coins were worth anything was because the people in power wanted gold, and were willing to accept it in trade. Everybody else followed suite. Gold, like paper money, was backed by the rulers of the day. The main difference between then and now is that money is minted rather than mined, meaning that the government can, whether by accident or intent, cause serious inflation.
You try reading legalise with all the vowels stripped out.
Milk - check (as long as they didn't go a long time between being weaned and drinking milk as an adult).
Crawling/toddling - well, they are quadrupeds.
Tantrums - oh hell yeah, check.
Babbling - check. They don't know why they hell they're meowing, they just want you to listen to them.
Toys - toy mice count, right?
As far as that goes, I'm pretty sure I could apply these to dogs as well. I know at least one pit bull (belonging to my GF's folks) that fits all of the above except the milk part.
Taking any economic, political or social system to it's logical extreme is invariably a bad idea. All developed nations have learned that. In many cases they learned the hard way - see the industrial revolution and the backlash it spawned against laissez-faire ideas, or the opposite extreme in former Soviet states.
Instead of extremes, what we have now is moderation, with elements of various philosophies mixed together in what way seems best to the citizenry (or at least that is the case is democratic countries). All modern developed nations are somewhere in the middle.
When comparing, for example, the US and "socialist" European countries, the comparison is between two different mixes - 70/30 vs. 50/50 say.
Just FYI, KOTOR 2 is an Obsidian game. Bioware only made the first game in the series.
I just reread them. What were you referring to? All I see on the non-ionizing page is a bit about possible hazards associated with ELF. Please cite from the Wiki page the section that you believe supports your argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiati
Cell phone emissions fall squarely into the latter category, and while there is some debate as to whether certain non ionizing frequencies can be harmful, the hazards of ionizing radiation are well established. If you can't tell the difference between the two types, you have no business commenting on their respective risks on
Read up. Then get back to us. This is high school level physics.
Since you can't join every religion (many of them won't allow it), and since you cannot know for a certainty in advance which of them is right (out of several thousand), plus you cannot rule out the possibility that the "one true faith" died out thousands of years ago (have you ensured you can get into Valhalla?)... basically you're screwed no matter what you do. The odds are against Christians as much as they are against everyone else.
Pascal's wager is bunk, and always has been.
That may sound pedantic, but there is a difference. Ionizing radiation is capable of inflicting burns on human tissue that have very little to do with heat. Ergo, we draw a distinction between thermal and radiation burns to distinguish the mechanism that caused them. (Another point of comparison would be chemical burns from caustic substances.)
Now, why is this relevant? Because thermal burns aren't linked the cancer the way radiation burns are. You can get a thermal burn just as easily from putting your hand on a hot burner (don't try this at home). But getting burned in such a manner, whether from visible light or hot metal, won't give you skin cancer. Radiation burns, OTOH, are a proven risk factor for cancer in later life; sunburns and skin cancer being the obvious example.
Since you mentioned skin cancer in your previous post, I assumed you were referring to radiation burns from sunlight, which are the result of UV exposure, not heat from visible light.
Nah, that was directed at the OP for equating the device in TFA with DU munitions.
Oh, agreed here. I'm more than a bit iffy on the ethics of this gadget myself, I just dislike the amount of misinformation associated with the word "radiation".
Well, even going by that argument, I'd say "socialist" is entirely the wrong word.
Want another interpretation? The music industry is unabashedly greedy. They screw over their customers and their artists, all while reaping enormous profits, and remaining free from legal consequence. This tells the public that "greed is good". So the public responds in kind.
The line of thinking is more like: "You want to gouge me 20 bucks for a DRM infested piece of plastic? I'd rather just download it. Greed works for those in the music biz, why not for me, the consumer?" What you call "entitlement mentality", others call "fighting fire with fire". There's nothing socialist about it.
I don't agree with this mentality myself. I've essentially stopped buying new music, and I don't pirate it either. This has nothing to do with any nebulous "judao-christian ethics" and everything to do with my own moral compass.
But calling the public mentality on file sharing "socialist" is utterly, utterly wrong; in reality it's the old idea of two wrongs making a right. It's responding to greed with greed. If you dislike greed, then by extension you have to look at both sides as being in the wrong (and the music industry far more so than the pirates).
I think you meant to say UV radiation (which is outside of the visible spectrum) can cause sunburns and cancer. The sun emits a whole range of EM radiation, much of which is harmless, and not all of which is visible. The wavelengths of sunlight that are unhealthy and the wavelengths that are visible aren't the same.
Unless you meant to define "light" as "EM radiation" (which is a definition some people use). In which case, your statement is somewhat correct, but only because you chose a different meaning for light than the GP, since I'm reasonably sure he was using the more common definition (ie, visible light).
Yep, it's called "heat". This is basically a microwave gun.
Well, if you were expecting extra limbs, forget about it. However, it would be fair to say that causing painful burns on human flesh is going to cause some side effects. TFA mentions blisters, and I imagine there are other consequences as well.
But treating this like it's some sort of scary voodoo radiation isn't rational. Equating non ionizing radiation and ionizing radiation is just ignorant, and the OP in this thread seemed to be under that exact impression.
Did we go and redefine socialist already? Because I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The most common complaints about the music biz are just the opposite. The commercialization of music, the willingness to do anything to make a buck, the aggressive marketing hype, the overpriced CDs, the glorification of bestselling multi-millionaires - none of these are notably socialist traits. These things are very much capitalism - make a product, market the hell out of it, get rich in the process. Artists who've got more money than they know what to do with are put on a pedestal. Where do you see socialism in popular music?
You could say the music industry is acting as a cartel and stifling real market competition. I'd buy that line of reasoning. But that isn't socialism, it's good old fashioned greed coupled with abuse of power.
I'll second that. My brother was home schooled (to his benefit, I think) from 4th grade to 8th (IIRC). No religious reasons, more or less the same as yours (though in our case, it was a matter of learning about the problems with the school system when I was going through it).
It isn't just the fundie loons who home school. Mind you, the mental association between the religious right and home schooling isn't entirely unfair, given how many of them are loud opponents of the "secular" public school system.
One of the things we have here in abundance is trolls. The karma and mod systems are in place to limit trolling, but have no lasting impact on anon postings. Ergo, all AC posts are generally suspect; you cannot tell an honest proponent of an idea from a troll pretending to take a point of view in order to start a flamewar. You can't check his posting history, and you know he can post without fear of taking a karma hit.
If someone posts a joke while AC, that I can understand. Funny mods give no karma, and getting downmodded by people with no sense of humor is a pain. Ditto offtopic posts like this one. But anonymous flaming shouldn't really be taken seriously. If an argument breaks out between a logged in poster, and an AC, I will generally take the AC less seriously, if only because I can check the logged in guy's posting history, and know he's not afraid to put some karma on the line to express his POV.
You need look no further than the other branch of this thread to see ad homs and flames, which would rapidly send logged in posters into negative karma, but which has no impact on the fighting ACs.
We live with the risk associated with sunlight (or at least most of us do), because it is a small risk. I don't see why alpha radiation would be any different in the eyes of an informed beholder.
Now, radon gas say, that would be a bigger risk. Not to mention way more prevalent than smoke detectors.
Ah, well smoke detectors use Americium:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium
Which is indeed radioactive (and a gamma emitter to boot), but has a longer half life than Polonium (hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days). Remember that decay is a finite process; the longer it takes to finish, the less radiation is emitted per second. So Americium isn't as strong as Polonium.
Plus, the quantities used in smoke detectors is small - less than a microgram. You'd need an awful lot of smoke detectors to amass a dangerous amount of Americium. That doesn't mean you couldn't kill somebody, but it's a poor choice to slip into food or drink.
What makes Polonium an attractive poison is the lethal dose. You don't need to slip much into someone's food to kill them. Other alpha emitters aren't as good candidates in this regard. Now, as to why they used a radioactive poison in the first place, I don't know; perhaps they wanted to send a message?
Not sure exactly what you meant to ask, but here goes.
Alpha radiation can't penetrate skin. So superficial contact with an alpha emitter isn't really a concern. OTOH, if you ingest/inhale an alpha emitter (like polonium 210), then your internal organs can be exposed to it. This, obviously, is a bad thing. In polonium's case, IIRC, it's soluble in bodily tissues, and has a very short half life of 138 days, so it's quite dangerous (remember that half life and radioactivity are inversely linked).
Beta, gamma and neutron radiation are somewhat different. Those can get through skin, so superficial contact is a potential concern. Beta is blocked by aluminum foil (get out your tinfoil hats!), gamma and neutron require denser materials such as lead, or thicker, less dense materials like deep soil. Neutron radiation has the added hazard of neutron activation (it can render previously safe materials radioactive).
Additionally, ionizing radiation from sources other than radioactive decay, like X-rays and UV, can generally be bad for your health; these can be seen as less serious than gamma radiation, but more serious than alpha (UV is blocked by sunblock for example). Non ionizing radiation is de facto harmless, barring intensities severe enough to cause thermal burns.
And this shows the effectiveness of profiling how exactly? I'm sorta lost how looking for a muslim male, age 17-40, would have helped in her case. Yes, the responsible party was muslim, but what we're talking about here is the effectiveness of profiling systems, and in such a case as this, they would have failed utterly.
Remember, the GP said nothing of the root causes in each case. He merely said who was carrying the bombs - because that's who airport security is trying to catch. Your point is no refutation of his.
If you can show me a terrestrial life form that can live in the total absence of water, then I'll consider Venusian life plausible. Temperature isn't the only variable.
Human nature isn't subject to fundamental change; merely the restraints upon it that have changed from time to time. Barring some sort of trans-human ascendancy (and I always thought the whole "singularity" idea was too far fetched), we'll always be that way.
That being said, you're falling into the trap of "first fix mankind's lot on Earth". This line of thinking says that things like space colonization or fundamental research should be postponed until such a time as things are alright here. Truth is, things will never be that way. People forget that the term "Utopia" literally means "no place".
We will never be perfect. We will never be without problems. That is a poor argument against space travel though; if anything it means we have even more reason not to put all our eggs in one basket. And the notion that a few dead rocks are going to be spoiled by human habitation is utter nonsense - a rock is a rock. Ecology can be damaged, geology cannot.
I seriously doubt we'll be colonizing another inhabited planet anytime soon. Not because I think intelligent life is unlikely, but rather because I seriously doubt we can get any further than our immediate neighboring systems, and it is unlikely that they house intelligent life. Barring an FTL drive, we're stuck at C or less - that makes in system travel possible, and nearby star systems eventually accessible, but rules out the galaxy at large.
As the post above me pointed out, we'll never solve our population problems with space travel. It's like trying to move a huge pile of sand with tweezers.
We can acquire more resources off-world (the asteroid belt would be a good starting point), which will help matters some. But fundamentally, space exploration and overpopulation are unrelated problems. Advancing in one will not solve the other.
Apart from that, I'd also point out that projecting a trend indefinitely will almost always lead you to the wrong conclusion. For one thing, in the case of population growth, wealthy countries have slowed to around replacement fertility. Ergo, if we could imagine a world in which current third world nations became first world ones, the rate of population growth would level off. A well off population with access to modern medicine doesn't have as many kids as a poverty stricken one in which people die young, breed fast, and rely on their children's labor to make ends meat.
If you want practical, self interested reasons for space exploration, think survival of the species, and access to resources elsewhere in our star system. The former from moving some of our eggs to other baskets, and the latter from bringing the wealth of the system home.
Side note, what the hell is "irradiation" doing on that list? I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Meaningful scale is irrelevant in this case. Simply put, most of the planets and other celestial bodies in this star system cannot support life at all. This isn't a question of looking under every rock and checking for every possible variation on organic chemistry. This is a question of basic environmental conditions.
The one major exception is Mars. And here, I would agree that we should look very carefully for life before considering anything as extreme as terraforming, but that's a long way off yet.
In any case, one cannot prove a negative; it should be easy to demonstrate Mars has life if indeed it does, and impossible to prove that it is totally lifeless. Life can be very small, and planets are very large. We can however prove that it is extremely unlikely that there is life on Mars, and that's good enough for me.