A man on mars would do more science in 2 days than the rovers have done in 3 years.
But putting a man on Mars requires a huge infrastructure to provide food, water, habitable temperatures, earthlike atmospheric pressures, shielding from radiation, so on and soforth. Plus, it all has to have double or triple redundancy, or the risk will become too high to be acceptable to the public, which increases the complexity, mass, and expense of that stuff accordingly. And then it all has to be hauled to Mars, and back.
Robots don't need food, or water, or oxygen. Then can operate at extreme temperatures, in vacuums, and exposed to high levels of radiation. And they're expendable, which means you send lots of robots with high individual failure rates and still accomplish your mission. And if the robot fails, maybe Jay Leno makes a joke, but you don't have a national week of mourning and put the entire program on hold. At the end of it, you don't have to bring them back, so you don't have to engineer and pay for a return mission. The end result is that robots are orders of magnitude cheaper, simpler, and faster to send to Mars. Yes, that man on Mars could accomplish as much as the robots have done. But given the years of research and development time and the billions of dollars that it would take to put that man on Mars, the robotic exploration program could probably accomplish hundred times as much science, and that's where the comparison falls flat.
The other factor is technological change. Right now, robots are a better investment of your space research dollars than humans, but in the future, robots will be able to do more and more, and cost less and less. So the cost/benefit analysis will favor robots even more strongly than it currently does.
It speaks well of the net progress in the ex-USSR from the mid-eighties to now that a) these journalists weren't shot/sent to Lefortovo and shot/sent to cut down trees in Siberia until they didn't need to be shot, and b) that the rest of the world has heard about it.
On the time scale of massive societal shifts, things are still looking up. Backsliding, certainly, but it's still a far cry from the heyday of Soviet control.
Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov, or the other Russian journalists who have been assassinated in recent years. Trying to read this as somehow being good news sounds disturbingly like the Neocon concept that democracy is somehow the long-term natural outcome of the human history, Bush's "people want to be free" theory. That idea is misguided as best, and as Iraq shows, dangerously unrealistic at worst. Western democracy is no more the natural outcome for a group of people than a house is the natural outcome for a pile of plywood, nails, and two-by-fours. Like making a house, democracy takes a lot of hard work and design, and continual upkeep. The developments in Russia- along with Russia's efforts to spread fear with its polonium assassinaton, and poisoning Ukraining politician Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin- suggest a deep, broad move towards totalitarianism. The odds of Russia emerging with a free society are good, but the outcome is not certain. It is too soon to pat ourselves on the back.
Consider that the emergence of western-style democracies with individual rights and accountable heads of state is a recent development, something that has only become fully developed in the past few hundred years. Meanwhile, China has been ruled by totalitarianism of one form or another for thousands of years. So, looking at the big picture, isn't the sure money on totalitarianism to eventually take over the world, not democracy? Sure, the spread and success of democracy has been a remarkable success story... but for a while, it looked like Communism might well be the system to take over the world, and then that fell apart almost overnight. How can we be so certain that democracy won't be a similar historical anomaly? Remember how certain people were that democracy would take root in Iraq, and beat out the forces of the Baathists, radical Islamists, militias and criminals? Every time something went wrong, instead of looking at the possibility we were failing, we patted ourselves on the back and said, "Yes, but look at the big picture! It's so much better than it was under Saddam!". Democracy still may win in Iraq, but our arrogance and complacency, our certainty that it would win out over the forces of totalitarianism, religious extremism, and anarchy, have vastly reduced the chances that it will.
Don't read this the wrong way. I actually agree with the Neocons on one issue: democracies should promote democracy outside their borders. But I think we need to understand that while this fight may be winnable, fighting for freedom is a hard, uphill fight, and that we are not necessarily destined to win the fight.
Personally I don't find this development all that interesting. Now, if they can create a form of matter which melds lasers and freakin' sharks, we'd have something...
The rest will end up melted down for their materials value?
An ounce of precious metal is going to be worth whatever the going rate for an ounce of precious metal is, plus any value it may have as an artifact. Given that being in the form of an antiquity is only going to increase the value of the metal, it generally doesn't make sense to melt down coins. In the case of silver, these days the going rate is only $13 an ounce, so the value is mostly coming from the the fact that they are old and rare, not that they are made of silver. Odyssey says they have 17 tons of coins, which sounds like a lot, but that's only 17 tons * 2200 lbs/ton *16 oz/lb * $13/oz = $7,779,200 worth of silver, which is 1.5% of what they say the haul is worth.
Supply and demand do dictate that bringing up 17 tons of colonial-era coins will decrease their rarity, which will tend to decrease their value. There are a few ways the company can offset this. First, they can control the flow of the coins onto the market so it doesn't end up flooded. If they sell just 5% of the coins per year for the next 20 years, or $25 million per year, the market will be able to absorb it much better than if they dump a half-billion on the market all at once. The other issue is, of course, that marketing. If the company can increase the demand for the coins by getting more people to look at rare coins either as a hobby or an investment, the value may not decrease that much, or could even increase.
Long term, Odyssey's biggest problem may be other wrecks. They plan on making this a business model, so they are looking at another wreck with half a billion worth of gold aboard, and looking into exploring several more wrecks, so they are going to keep bringing rare coins onto the market. And if that keeps making money, it will encourage copycat operations. Actually, Odyssey's business model isn't original either, the only difference between what they did, and the group who salvaged the Central America did, is that Odyssey had an IPO, whereas the Central America salvage company is not publicly traded. Ship of Gold and the Deep Blue Sea has a really excellent account of what went into the Central America salvage operation.
I wonder if one day the garage where Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I be treated in the same reverent manner. From what I've heard, no one even knows where it is anymore.
That old thing? Jobs had it bulldozed and replaced with a hip, stylish building made of white lucite and brushed aluminum.
Yes, it really isn't stealing, but that really doesn't mean that it shouldn't be illegal. In countries like the US where for the most part piracy is pretty low, making it illegal is almost entirely counterproductive. In countries like China making it illegal is probably the only way that there is going to be progress on getting people to actually purchase the media that they are wanting to have.
This case is just a joke. The dude is a sacrificial lamb to help convince American media interests that China is serious, nothing more. But if they were really serious about respecting copyright, they'd make a serious effort to crack down on all the people who are selling counterfeit CDs and DVDs on the streets in Beijing. This is like busting some poor schmuck who buys an illegal shot of booze, but leaving Al Capone free on the street. I'm not saying that he's in the right, but the guy's real crime is being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
The military is designed to attack and subjugate an enemy. It is trained fundamentally to kill the enemies and destroy their country. Take a machine like that use to build a country? To build friendship and cooperation? What a stupid idea.
The American military used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. Think post-WWII Japan and Germany. But I think you accurately describe the situation with the modern U.S. military. There are other nations that are better at policing and nation-building, so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
Personally, I don't really see what the fuss is all about. I go around with my thumbnails uncovered all of the time (even though they are a bit chewed-up) and I don't care if people can see my nude thumbnails on Google or not.
The problem? Too many people feel politics are corrupt. Why vote for candidate A or B when you cannot believe what A or B say is true? Maybe you believe in the Democratic or Republican mantra, but you cannot believe that the candidate for those parties reflect that feeling.
I think that ultimately we're at fault. We complain that politicians aren't honest, but when they are honest, we won't vote for them.
Politician A tells it like it is: we've got a deficit, so you need to cut spending, raise taxes, or both. Politician B gives us a fairy tale: sure we've got a deficit, but I'll spend more AND lower your taxes, and it will all work out! So who do we vote for? Politician B. We buy into his fantasy because he promises what we want: a free lunch. Then it turns out that we're faced with exactly the situation Politician A, the realist, said we faced: we have to make sacrifices, and we can't get something for nothing. There are no free lunches. And then we get all surly and say what a bunch of liars politicians are. Politicians tell the people what the people want to hear- not what the people need to hear- because that's who we elect.
As far as all the hullabaloo being raised over the firings now, it's a HUGE waste of taxpayer money with absolutely no purpose other than partisan politics on the part of the Democrats.
Obviously, it would be naive to believe that politics weren't a factor, but I think there are larger issues at stake: you'll notice that some Republicans have been grilling the hell out of Gonzalez and asking him to resign.
One issue is reining in Bush's "Imperial Presidency", which acts like it can do whatever it wants whenever it wants... and the hell with Congress, the Constitution, human rights, the rule of law and the will of the American people. That's not healthy for the country, and Congress is right to try to rein him. We need to be a country where nobody, not even the President, whether he's Democrat or Republican, is above the law.
The other issue is that the firings appear to have been motivated to help the Republican party and hurt the Democratic party. Yes, you do get to appoint whoever you want when you win the presidency. However, once you've appointed them, they need to be independent and left to do their jobs. Firing people because they've been investigating corrupt Republicans is not OK, it's putting the interests of your party ahead of the interests of your country, and the pursuit of justice, and that's deeply corrupt.
Personally I think it's all about limiting what Bush can do in his final year in office
Of course it is. But how could this possibly be a bad thing? Between his disastrous mismanagement of the war, massive deficit spending, domestic spying, and the way his administration has polarized this country, they're doing him a favor. It's like taking away the keys from the drunk at your party, or a loaded gun away from a three-year old.
I'm sure the X box is part of it, but Halo is just a great game, whatever platform we're talking about- I played it on the PC. No, Halo isn't original. The one man army against an overwhelming force has been done hundreds of times in video games, alien invasion is one of the most clichéd scenarios out there, the alien force is ripped off from Bungie's own Marathon series, the ring structure is ripped off from Ringworld, and the Flood are basically just space zombies. So it's a walking cliché... but it does a good job of setting up a believable world, telling a story, the gameplay is just fantastic, and the main character is cool. Multiplayer for the original Halo was just a blast, the weapons were really well balanced. It's not as good as Half-Life, but it's a damn fine game. It didn't set out to be a revolutionary game, just a fun first-person shooter, and it did that about as perfectly as you could ask.
Do you think state secrets, and serious talk of government "subversion", are going to happen on a 14 year old's Myspace page?
Like OMG I was on the phone with Tiffanee and I told Tiffanee that I liked Brad Hoefler and then Tiffanee was all like LOL and went and said that I liked Brad on her Myspace page even though she TOTALLY knew that like I didn't want ANYBODY to know, especially not Brad, and now Brad won't talk to me and Amber and Mandy are all like making fun of me and it's just like totally embarrassing me to death and it's just ruined my WHOLE LIFE, like even more than the time my stupid parents gave me a curfew, and I can like hardly stand to go to school anymore and I think that I told Tiffanee that I liked Brad Hoefler should be a state secret so I'm like TOTALLY in favor of this.
It's more than a bit disingenuous to say that the humvee wasn't designed as an armored fighting vehicle, so we shouldn't complain that it wasn't up to the challenges faced by the insurgency. The fact of the matter is that the military was forced to deal with urban warfare and counterinsurgency, and the vehicles sent over were not up to the task. The White House decided to plan on a best-case scenario of being greeted by flowers and instant Western democracy, and the military leadership failed the nation by going along with the White House and not planning for the realities of the occupation. And you're still an asshole.
Insightful would have done some real research and found the "scrounged" armor was a very short term issue
Oh, bullshit. The invasion began in March, 2003. The infamous interrogation of Rumsfeld over the armor issue took place in December, 2004- more than a year and a half later. That is not a "very short term issue". According to Wikipedia, the Army began up-armoring its vehicles in 2003, but the process was intended to be completed in 2005; the Marine Corps began issuing an armor kit in early 2005.
Like pretty much everything else with the Iraq War, the military command took a very long time to realize what was going on and to respond to the problems on the ground. Do some research yourself, asshole.
There could be a number of factors that are contributing, and the recent New York Times article manages to hit on several of them in the space of a paragraph:
Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees' natural forage areas.
So we have a number of possible factors implicated here: (1) the bees aren't properly nourished, which will make them more vulnerable to infection, (2) lots of hives are being crammed into tight quarters, which makes it easy for disease to spread from hive to hive, (3) bees are being moved from place to place, so the infection is being spread all across the country, rather than being localized.
It actually seems remarkably similar to the kinds of issues that are thought to have led to the emergence of epidemic diseases among humans after the rise of civilization: you started cramming lots of people together into cities so transmission was easier, lots of them were poor and malnourished, so they were easier to infect, and then they were able to travel very long distances (boats, horses, roads, etc.)and spread the infection much faster.
It doesn't really say anything about the K-T extinction one way or the other, just that two other extinctions- the end-Ordivician and the end-Permian event- do fit into this supposed cycle.
The problem I see, however, is that the end-Permian event is too sudden to be explained by this process. The end-Permian extinction, which wiped out about 95% of all marine genera, is thought to have occurred in under 200,000 years. However, if the Earth slowly traveled into a region of increased cosmic rays, you should see a gradual decline in diversity, not a catastrophic, near-total collapse of the ecosystem, which is what actually happens at the Permo-Triassic boundary. The end-Permian extinction isn't a "fluctuation", it's the near-annihilation of complex life. And given that water does a reasonable job of stopping cosmic rays and other forms of radiation, why would the marine ecosystem be expected to show such a dramatic decline?
Well, When Townshed claims he was doing research on the subject as his first initial defense, I can see how everyone jumped on that band wagon.
Does anyone know what's up with this? Live at Leeds is an awesome album, and I would really like to be able to listen to it without getting the heebie-jeebies like I do every time Michael Jackson comes on the radio.
I'm a centrist Democrat, but I was cautiously in favor of the Iraq war. I didn't believe that Saddam was a threat, or that he was linked to Al Qaeda, but I believed that, where possible, American military power should be used to make the world a better place. I figured, if invading resulted in fewer Iraqi deaths than not invading, then even if the reasons for going to war were bullshit, it was arguably the right thing to do. I don't buy into the knee-jerk liberal sentiment that war is always wrong: intervening in Kosovo, for instance, killed a lot of people, but otherwise it probably would have been a bloodbath. There was even a term for people like me: "liberal hawk", leftists who were in favor of using American military power abroad, where it had the potential to make things better.
But Bush and his hacks have basically discredited that idea. They've given ammunition to the far left, who maintain that war is always the wrong option (war is always a bad option, but sometimes not going to war is worse). They've given ammunition to the isolationists to the right, who say that even though we have the power to change the world for the better, we shouldn't try. He's destroyed the U.S. army, such that even if we wanted to intervene in places like Darfur, we'd have a much harder time. And for the next generation, any time the U.S. tries to apply pressure to human rights violators, they'll look back at us and say, "what about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo? Who are you Americans to lecture us about human rights and due process?"
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Rathaus sounds like a good name for a metal band. Maybe with a couple umlauts, like Räthaüs.
As Bob Dylan sang: "anything is legal, as long as you don't get caught."
But putting a man on Mars requires a huge infrastructure to provide food, water, habitable temperatures, earthlike atmospheric pressures, shielding from radiation, so on and soforth. Plus, it all has to have double or triple redundancy, or the risk will become too high to be acceptable to the public, which increases the complexity, mass, and expense of that stuff accordingly. And then it all has to be hauled to Mars, and back.
Robots don't need food, or water, or oxygen. Then can operate at extreme temperatures, in vacuums, and exposed to high levels of radiation. And they're expendable, which means you send lots of robots with high individual failure rates and still accomplish your mission. And if the robot fails, maybe Jay Leno makes a joke, but you don't have a national week of mourning and put the entire program on hold. At the end of it, you don't have to bring them back, so you don't have to engineer and pay for a return mission. The end result is that robots are orders of magnitude cheaper, simpler, and faster to send to Mars. Yes, that man on Mars could accomplish as much as the robots have done. But given the years of research and development time and the billions of dollars that it would take to put that man on Mars, the robotic exploration program could probably accomplish hundred times as much science, and that's where the comparison falls flat.
The other factor is technological change. Right now, robots are a better investment of your space research dollars than humans, but in the future, robots will be able to do more and more, and cost less and less. So the cost/benefit analysis will favor robots even more strongly than it currently does.
Tell that to Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov, or the other Russian journalists who have been assassinated in recent years. Trying to read this as somehow being good news sounds disturbingly like the Neocon concept that democracy is somehow the long-term natural outcome of the human history, Bush's "people want to be free" theory. That idea is misguided as best, and as Iraq shows, dangerously unrealistic at worst. Western democracy is no more the natural outcome for a group of people than a house is the natural outcome for a pile of plywood, nails, and two-by-fours. Like making a house, democracy takes a lot of hard work and design, and continual upkeep. The developments in Russia- along with Russia's efforts to spread fear with its polonium assassinaton, and poisoning Ukraining politician Viktor Yushchenko with dioxin- suggest a deep, broad move towards totalitarianism. The odds of Russia emerging with a free society are good, but the outcome is not certain. It is too soon to pat ourselves on the back.
Consider that the emergence of western-style democracies with individual rights and accountable heads of state is a recent development, something that has only become fully developed in the past few hundred years. Meanwhile, China has been ruled by totalitarianism of one form or another for thousands of years. So, looking at the big picture, isn't the sure money on totalitarianism to eventually take over the world, not democracy? Sure, the spread and success of democracy has been a remarkable success story... but for a while, it looked like Communism might well be the system to take over the world, and then that fell apart almost overnight. How can we be so certain that democracy won't be a similar historical anomaly? Remember how certain people were that democracy would take root in Iraq, and beat out the forces of the Baathists, radical Islamists, militias and criminals? Every time something went wrong, instead of looking at the possibility we were failing, we patted ourselves on the back and said, "Yes, but look at the big picture! It's so much better than it was under Saddam!". Democracy still may win in Iraq, but our arrogance and complacency, our certainty that it would win out over the forces of totalitarianism, religious extremism, and anarchy, have vastly reduced the chances that it will.
Don't read this the wrong way. I actually agree with the Neocons on one issue: democracies should promote democracy outside their borders. But I think we need to understand that while this fight may be winnable, fighting for freedom is a hard, uphill fight, and that we are not necessarily destined to win the fight.
Personally I don't find this development all that interesting. Now, if they can create a form of matter which melds lasers and freakin' sharks, we'd have something...
An ounce of precious metal is going to be worth whatever the going rate for an ounce of precious metal is, plus any value it may have as an artifact. Given that being in the form of an antiquity is only going to increase the value of the metal, it generally doesn't make sense to melt down coins. In the case of silver, these days the going rate is only $13 an ounce, so the value is mostly coming from the the fact that they are old and rare, not that they are made of silver. Odyssey says they have 17 tons of coins, which sounds like a lot, but that's only 17 tons * 2200 lbs/ton *16 oz/lb * $13/oz = $7,779,200 worth of silver, which is 1.5% of what they say the haul is worth.
Supply and demand do dictate that bringing up 17 tons of colonial-era coins will decrease their rarity, which will tend to decrease their value. There are a few ways the company can offset this. First, they can control the flow of the coins onto the market so it doesn't end up flooded. If they sell just 5% of the coins per year for the next 20 years, or $25 million per year, the market will be able to absorb it much better than if they dump a half-billion on the market all at once. The other issue is, of course, that marketing. If the company can increase the demand for the coins by getting more people to look at rare coins either as a hobby or an investment, the value may not decrease that much, or could even increase.
Long term, Odyssey's biggest problem may be other wrecks. They plan on making this a business model, so they are looking at another wreck with half a billion worth of gold aboard, and looking into exploring several more wrecks, so they are going to keep bringing rare coins onto the market. And if that keeps making money, it will encourage copycat operations. Actually, Odyssey's business model isn't original either, the only difference between what they did, and the group who salvaged the Central America did, is that Odyssey had an IPO, whereas the Central America salvage company is not publicly traded. Ship of Gold and the Deep Blue Sea has a really excellent account of what went into the Central America salvage operation.
That old thing? Jobs had it bulldozed and replaced with a hip, stylish building made of white lucite and brushed aluminum.
This case is just a joke. The dude is a sacrificial lamb to help convince American media interests that China is serious, nothing more. But if they were really serious about respecting copyright, they'd make a serious effort to crack down on all the people who are selling counterfeit CDs and DVDs on the streets in Beijing. This is like busting some poor schmuck who buys an illegal shot of booze, but leaving Al Capone free on the street. I'm not saying that he's in the right, but the guy's real crime is being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Or maybe they don't want to communicate with us because they read slashdot.
The American military used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. Think post-WWII Japan and Germany. But I think you accurately describe the situation with the modern U.S. military. There are other nations that are better at policing and nation-building, so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
Personally, I don't really see what the fuss is all about. I go around with my thumbnails uncovered all of the time (even though they are a bit chewed-up) and I don't care if people can see my nude thumbnails on Google or not.
If people really have free will, why do they keep automatically making that "I for one welcome our new overlords" joke?
I think that ultimately we're at fault. We complain that politicians aren't honest, but when they are honest, we won't vote for them.
Politician A tells it like it is: we've got a deficit, so you need to cut spending, raise taxes, or both. Politician B gives us a fairy tale: sure we've got a deficit, but I'll spend more AND lower your taxes, and it will all work out! So who do we vote for? Politician B. We buy into his fantasy because he promises what we want: a free lunch. Then it turns out that we're faced with exactly the situation Politician A, the realist, said we faced: we have to make sacrifices, and we can't get something for nothing. There are no free lunches. And then we get all surly and say what a bunch of liars politicians are. Politicians tell the people what the people want to hear- not what the people need to hear- because that's who we elect.
Obviously, it would be naive to believe that politics weren't a factor, but I think there are larger issues at stake: you'll notice that some Republicans have been grilling the hell out of Gonzalez and asking him to resign.
One issue is reining in Bush's "Imperial Presidency", which acts like it can do whatever it wants whenever it wants... and the hell with Congress, the Constitution, human rights, the rule of law and the will of the American people. That's not healthy for the country, and Congress is right to try to rein him. We need to be a country where nobody, not even the President, whether he's Democrat or Republican, is above the law.
The other issue is that the firings appear to have been motivated to help the Republican party and hurt the Democratic party. Yes, you do get to appoint whoever you want when you win the presidency. However, once you've appointed them, they need to be independent and left to do their jobs. Firing people because they've been investigating corrupt Republicans is not OK, it's putting the interests of your party ahead of the interests of your country, and the pursuit of justice, and that's deeply corrupt.
Of course it is. But how could this possibly be a bad thing? Between his disastrous mismanagement of the war, massive deficit spending, domestic spying, and the way his administration has polarized this country, they're doing him a favor. It's like taking away the keys from the drunk at your party, or a loaded gun away from a three-year old.
I'm sure the X box is part of it, but Halo is just a great game, whatever platform we're talking about- I played it on the PC. No, Halo isn't original. The one man army against an overwhelming force has been done hundreds of times in video games, alien invasion is one of the most clichéd scenarios out there, the alien force is ripped off from Bungie's own Marathon series, the ring structure is ripped off from Ringworld, and the Flood are basically just space zombies. So it's a walking cliché... but it does a good job of setting up a believable world, telling a story, the gameplay is just fantastic, and the main character is cool. Multiplayer for the original Halo was just a blast, the weapons were really well balanced. It's not as good as Half-Life, but it's a damn fine game. It didn't set out to be a revolutionary game, just a fun first-person shooter, and it did that about as perfectly as you could ask.
Actually, I need the horsepower of a large car to drag along my jaw-droppingly huge penis. That, or a powerful motorcycle with a sidecar.
Like OMG I was on the phone with Tiffanee and I told Tiffanee that I liked Brad Hoefler and then Tiffanee was all like LOL and went and said that I liked Brad on her Myspace page even though she TOTALLY knew that like I didn't want ANYBODY to know, especially not Brad, and now Brad won't talk to me and Amber and Mandy are all like making fun of me and it's just like totally embarrassing me to death and it's just ruined my WHOLE LIFE, like even more than the time my stupid parents gave me a curfew, and I can like hardly stand to go to school anymore and I think that I told Tiffanee that I liked Brad Hoefler should be a state secret so I'm like TOTALLY in favor of this.
It's more than a bit disingenuous to say that the humvee wasn't designed as an armored fighting vehicle, so we shouldn't complain that it wasn't up to the challenges faced by the insurgency. The fact of the matter is that the military was forced to deal with urban warfare and counterinsurgency, and the vehicles sent over were not up to the task. The White House decided to plan on a best-case scenario of being greeted by flowers and instant Western democracy, and the military leadership failed the nation by going along with the White House and not planning for the realities of the occupation. And you're still an asshole.
Oh, bullshit. The invasion began in March, 2003. The infamous interrogation of Rumsfeld over the armor issue took place in December, 2004- more than a year and a half later. That is not a "very short term issue". According to Wikipedia, the Army began up-armoring its vehicles in 2003, but the process was intended to be completed in 2005; the Marine Corps began issuing an armor kit in early 2005.
Like pretty much everything else with the Iraq War, the military command took a very long time to realize what was going on and to respond to the problems on the ground. Do some research yourself, asshole.
Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees' natural forage areas.
So we have a number of possible factors implicated here: (1) the bees aren't properly nourished, which will make them more vulnerable to infection, (2) lots of hives are being crammed into tight quarters, which makes it easy for disease to spread from hive to hive, (3) bees are being moved from place to place, so the infection is being spread all across the country, rather than being localized.
It actually seems remarkably similar to the kinds of issues that are thought to have led to the emergence of epidemic diseases among humans after the rise of civilization: you started cramming lots of people together into cities so transmission was easier, lots of them were poor and malnourished, so they were easier to infect, and then they were able to travel very long distances (boats, horses, roads, etc.)and spread the infection much faster.
Yes, but this move will allow the government to increase the chocolate ration to 20 grams per week.
The problem I see, however, is that the end-Permian event is too sudden to be explained by this process. The end-Permian extinction, which wiped out about 95% of all marine genera, is thought to have occurred in under 200,000 years. However, if the Earth slowly traveled into a region of increased cosmic rays, you should see a gradual decline in diversity, not a catastrophic, near-total collapse of the ecosystem, which is what actually happens at the Permo-Triassic boundary. The end-Permian extinction isn't a "fluctuation", it's the near-annihilation of complex life. And given that water does a reasonable job of stopping cosmic rays and other forms of radiation, why would the marine ecosystem be expected to show such a dramatic decline?
Does anyone know what's up with this? Live at Leeds is an awesome album, and I would really like to be able to listen to it without getting the heebie-jeebies like I do every time Michael Jackson comes on the radio.
I'm a centrist Democrat, but I was cautiously in favor of the Iraq war. I didn't believe that Saddam was a threat, or that he was linked to Al Qaeda, but I believed that, where possible, American military power should be used to make the world a better place. I figured, if invading resulted in fewer Iraqi deaths than not invading, then even if the reasons for going to war were bullshit, it was arguably the right thing to do. I don't buy into the knee-jerk liberal sentiment that war is always wrong: intervening in Kosovo, for instance, killed a lot of people, but otherwise it probably would have been a bloodbath. There was even a term for people like me: "liberal hawk", leftists who were in favor of using American military power abroad, where it had the potential to make things better.
But Bush and his hacks have basically discredited that idea. They've given ammunition to the far left, who maintain that war is always the wrong option (war is always a bad option, but sometimes not going to war is worse). They've given ammunition to the isolationists to the right, who say that even though we have the power to change the world for the better, we shouldn't try. He's destroyed the U.S. army, such that even if we wanted to intervene in places like Darfur, we'd have a much harder time. And for the next generation, any time the U.S. tries to apply pressure to human rights violators, they'll look back at us and say, "what about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo? Who are you Americans to lecture us about human rights and due process?"