I'm sure in all of the other countries there are reckless kids but because they are poor they start families earlier, take more risky jobs, etc. and so its not considered to be "risky" when it really involves a high mortality rate.
One of the things they do is play with landmines they dug up in the back yard. No, really, they do play with them, because they watch their parents dig landmines up so they can farm safely, so the kids end up playing with them. Here in America they play with BMW's. It's not really that different.
It wasn't particularly well-focussed: I wasn't right at the focal point. But I've yet to see an inexpensive diode laser sold with quality fast/slow axis collimation optics, and as a result their focus is lousy, too, so I'm guessing while you'd get burnt by this thing, it's not like there would be flames.
My creepiest exposure ever was working on an excimer laser that was running in the kilowatt range, where I found out that skin fluoresces and phosphoresces if you hit it with enough UV photons. That burn sucked, too, but at least I didn't get one in the eye like a coworker did.
A cnc router is subtractive. What I'm talking about is additive machining, which is useful if you want to build parts that have stuff inside them. Consider this object made out of sugar by a similar process -- while it may be possible to mill that out of aluminum on a good 5 axis mill, it's certainly not something you can do with a CNC router. I've built CNC milling equipment and it's awesome stuff, but additive fabrication gives you wholly different capabilities.
Unless you hold it there for a *long* time. I've been hit by a 40 watt (CO2) laser and it left me with a burn that was like a bad sunburn. I have a 400mW (red) laser that I've been using to shoot down wasps in my workshop (it's a tall building and I can't get anything up to where they want to build a nest -- but let me warn you that a flaming wasp is a fire hazard) and it takes several seconds of exposure before the wasp dies.
With that said, I might be trying to get one of these because you can do some pretty cool stuff if you mount a laser this powerful in a plotter. It gets even better if you gut the plotter and add a Z axis so you can melt the top layer of material selectively, then lower the z stage, add a bit more material, and again melt it selectively: a relatively inexpensive, relatively high-precision 3d printer.
You are forgetting Saudi Arabia, made an incredibly wealthy country by any standard due to its recently found oil minerals, yet one of the most repressive fundamentalist regimes on the planet, source of the 9/11 terrorists, and source of the extreme Wahabi sect of Islam which promotes Sharia law in Western countries including the US, and which with Saudi Arabia's wealth, is being paid for world wide. Another Saudi Arabia, under the Taliban, would be frightening.
Thomas Friedman talks about this in his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded". To sum up: when huge amounts of money are flowing into a country in pursuit of a single natural resource, A: the government has lots of money so it doesn't really have to listen to citizens very much as regards civil rights, especially insofar as it can exist with very low rates of taxation, B: the local manufacturing industries collapse because imported goods are cheap, leaving lots of people underemployed and mangling development of separate industries, and C: states that have a huge influx of money tend to suppress formation of social groups independent of the state. It's also likely that states where lots of money is coming in, tend to have their best&brightest go into that one field, rather than into other specialized fields that could develop other industries but don't have as much money flowing through them. So, you get a stagnant, stratified society. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, we're paying them to become exactly what you're talking about, and our money is flowing from there to making tens of thousands of schools across the mideast that are the only source of primary education for children, and are teaching exactly the same repressive fundamentalist values.
I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience
PARIAH!! UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!
My girlfriend uses Vista on her laptop, so I, too, have Windows friends. For SHAME.
What I think is funny is that about every three days I come home and my laptop is running with her signed in, because she needed to use the flatbed scanner (which doesn't work with Vista despite downloading drivers) or the digital camera (which does work with Vista if you don't mind reinitializing the SD card every time Vista touches it) or downloading videos onto her Creative Zen (which *occasionally* works with Vista.) Whereas my homebrew linux laptop handles all those without any complications.
Consider this a test-case for remote-controlled and later autonomous cars on roadways. The FAA and commercial carriers are going to have to figure out whose fault it is when a UAV collides with an airplane, and how to minimize that risk, and whatever they do (I suspect it's going to be a combination of onboard transponders that talk to each other mesh-style rather than relying on centralized air traffic control facilities, and liability caps on manufacturers of UAV's) will be likely to be adopted when the first fully autonomous vehicles appear.
More to the point, 'species' is an entirely human construction for classification of what we see, just like 'planet'. It's useful to us so we can discuss and learn about what's going on in the world. Nature has no concept of species whatsoever. Things that are more similar and live closer together interbreed more often; things that are less similar or live further away interbreed less often. It's all a huge continuum, and it's only us who are drawing lines and coming up with names for the stuff within the lines.
The USSR used peaceful nuclear explosions for a bunch of projects, including 5 explosions to seal gas flares, known as operations Cleavage, Torch, Pamuk, Urt-Bulak, and Crater.
Here's a summaryof the five. (You can get reasonable translations from google.)
In every case, these were gas flares, on dry ground with solid rock of known composition around the wellhead.
here is a pdf of the NRC's reports on the USSR peaceful blasts program.
In a similar project, the US did a peaceful blast called Project Rulison to open a crack and increase natural gas flow from an underground pocket. What they found was that while it did increase gas flow, the gas was wildly radioactive, so there's a good possibility that doing the same thing with an underground oil flow could well radioactively contaminate the oil.
Which means that it's likely the best outcome would be to stop this leak, leaving a big contaminated and useless oil source, and the worst would be that it would increase the leak *and* make it radioactive as well.
In her case, she falls under the category of Administrative Law Judge, so gets placed in "agencies and employees prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity" which means she can not "campaign for or against a candidate or slate of candidates in partisan elections" from the wikipedia article we both linked, so: not so super-secret.
But, again, it doesn't appear to me that this gives the people running the place the right to fire someone for wearing a political shirt while not at work, but I guess that sufficiently qualifies as engaging in partisan political activity that they felt they could get away with it.
My sis-in-law is a law clerk at a federal court. She doesn't have on-the-job freedom of speech, in much the same way you don't, but she also explicitly does not have off-the-job freedom of speech in many ways: as a federal employee she is not allowed to put up political signs in her yard, for instance. (As a result, neither is my brother.) People have been fired from where she works for wearing shirts with political statements when they weren't at work. This is a result of the Hatch Act of 1939 although it's not clear to me that it extends as far as her employers say it does.
It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico,
The moment gas goes up over $5/gallon in the US, the new drilling permits will start flowing like oil from a ruptured well. Americans have short memories and empty wallets, and nobody outside the gulf coast states will even remember this happened in two years.
I... I am in shock right now, truly disturbed... I have debated whether to even post this horrific discovery.. but I just found out, just now, that out of all of the world's sexy people, every single one of them was at one point a disgusting, unsexy child. I know, it's true! My buzz, it has been murdered.
You could solve this problem by becoming a pedophile, but that might cause yet more problems. Probably best to just pretend that people spring fully formed out of high school graduation ceremonies.
In contrast, an older man dating a younger woman is much more likely to end up in a relationship or marriage, and while an older man actively looking for a younger woman is clearly looking to hook up as well, he is also much more likely to be looking for something more substantial, which means he's in a position to do so - meaning, not married and not in a situation where the outcome of the services provided by [his dating site of choice] will be a threat to his family.
I have several friends who are what is euphemistically known as escorts, and who have worked with dating sites of the Sugar Daddy sort. They have met many men who are very willing to engage in the transactions such sites facilitate, and they have all been married. According to one friend, who has made a tidy high-five-figure income doing this for several years as she works her way through college, at least 80% of the men on sugardaddy sites are married and looking for multiple somethings on the side, preferably multiple somethings at the same time.
It's my understanding that drag increases as the square of velocity. This leads to fuel consumption per unit of distance increasing linearly.
Go twice as fast, use twice as much fuel getting there. Your rate of fuel consumption is four times higher, but you spend half the time getting there.
Well... okay, here's the thing. The drag rises as the square of velocity, so the force required to overcome the drag rises as the square of velocity. However, since you're going faster there's another time unit involved, meaning the *power* required rises as the *cube* of velocity. "Thus, the resultant power needed to overcome this drag will vary as the cube of velocity.". And as such your fuel costs aren't rising linearly but exponentially.
I met Theodore Maiman once, when he gave a lecture at a college, and got to talk to him afterwards since I was working as an assistant to the prof who got him to come. One of the things I thought was interesting about his talk was, as the summary sort of discusses, the basic stuff of a laser was well-known. Indeed, people had nearly made lasers when they started manufacturing Geiger-Muller tubes. So Maiman spent a lot of time talking about the progression of technical concepts, from investigating the mechanics of fluorescence and phosphorescence and why they're different, to high-voltage supplies and flash tubes, to show that the laser is amazing but clearly nothing more than a clever tweak of existing technology. I asked him about this, why he'd spent so much time talking about applicable pre-laser research and only a small amount of time talking about neat stuff like Doppler cooling, and he said he did so because he was tired of people saying lasers were UFO technology and wanted to make it very clear that they were obvious and he was just lucky enough to be the one who managed to put one together.
BTW, couldn't you do this sort of thing with a differential?
Yes. That's basically what the Prius does: it uses a differential (actually an epicyclic, which is a flattened differential) as a mixer, and drives one input with a gas engine and the other with an electric motor, giving not only an infinite number of speeds but also a way to use the engine to charge the motor with excess power, or use the motor for braking. But then you need both an engine and a motor. Managing an infinite drive from a single input is pretty cool.
One interesting byproduct of this, that would be financially and legally quite significant, would be if they have found how to change the odometer. Resetting the odometer to a lower number would have a large, direct effect on the resale value of the car, so I expect that if this can be done, automated kits to do so will start showing up in the back pages of sleazy magazines. This is illegal, but so are eavesdropping and cable decoder kits (under most circumstances) that are sold in those same magazines.
My ex-girlfriend's car kept losing the screws that held the speedometer movement in the instrument panel, and it was impossible to get in there and screw them back in because the whole panel was sealed to prevent people getting to the mechanical odometer. These days, with electronic odometers that display on LCD's, they've moved the security into software so they don't have to epoxy the whole system into a solid mass, which is nice.
You have to go to Dubai to find debtors' prisons these days. Apparently the United Arab Emirates in general still have them, unlike anywhere else in the world. (And apparently these are comparatively kind ones, where they just lock you up until you either pay your debt or they get tired of trying, and they actually give you food, unlike the English debtors' prisons where you were locked up until the person to whom you owed money filed to have you released, *and* you didn't get fed while in prison so either your family had to bring food to you or you starved to death.)
We've gotten a LOT more civilized in the last 200 years.
Of course, now everyone and their dog declares bankruptcy at a moment's notice, but I think that's better for society as a whole than the State starving people to death on a regular basis.
I didn't pay much attention in math class... but would you be willing to explain this a little more? It seems to me that if you have four letters, in a string, any two random strings you look at should have about 25% of their letters match between them. The chances that there will be any *sequences* that match drop as an exponential function of the number of letters in the matching sequence, right? but, for example, caggtcatgactaa and gattacagattaca, have a roughly 20% identical sequence, insofar as they have three points in the sequence with matching bases.
The fact that the genes are identical does not mean they're of the same origin.
Actually, if the genes are identical in terms of nucleotide sequence then it is absolutely irrefutable that they are of the same origin.
It's indicative that they're the same, but not absolutely irrefutable. Any given sequence of DNA will be 25% identical to any other sequence, just because there are only four bases, while on the other end of the spectrum, even the DNA coding for something highly conserved, like cytochrome C, that exists in just about every eukaryote on the planet, isn't 100% identical across all eukaryotes.
As such, if you have a gene that's only a couple dozen bases long, it's fairly likely that if you find exactly the same sequence in another genome, they're either related or there's been horizontal gene transfer -- but only fairly likely, because a sequence of 30 bases could easily show up twice just by chance. But really massively long DNA sequences, even if they show very slight differences within them, are extremely likely to indicate ancestral relationships. For instance, while the general function of eyes has evolved 30 or 40 different times (or more, according to Ernest Mayr) the genes coding for the proteins that detect light, enabling vision, generally called opsins have probably only evolved twice, one for bacteria and once for all eukaryotes. But even then, the two gene groups are amazingly similar for having different ancestries.
My point being: extremely strong indicator, yes. But nothing in science is absolutely irrefutable, and gene similarity is significantly less irrefutable than many scientific theories, because gene content is constantly changing.
I was reading a book about metabolic biochemistry the other day (thrilling! really!) and the author went through a series of calculations to show that mitochondria produce about four orders of magnitude more power per unit volume than the sun. I guess it's not that weird, though: the sun's predicted to live for 20 billion years, so it can't be burning *that* fast. It just seems surprising.
I'll start off by saying I don't like this ruling for a couple of reasons. However, I'm in a devil's advocate mood and you tend to post a lot of well-thought-out things so I figured I'd respond.
The toy could be a bribe -- a kid who has a choice of two meals might choose the one that includes the toy. The parents might be crappy parents who have poor control over their kids, or who think giving the kids what they want is good parenting. (By which I mean, I've heard people say they were strict when it counted, and lenient the rest of the time, which is a reasonable parenting technique *if* you are smart enough to know when strictness is needed.)
The toy isn't a necessary part of the meal, so removing it doesn't change the calories or the taste. Presumably all removing it does, is remove the bribe. (and let government get its hands into regulating something else, and interfere with a company's advertising strategy, although I'm not really against the latter if the strategy is vile: see cigarette advertising aimed at children.)
If you have a situation where parents aren't doing the best thing for their kids, and aren't going to, by, say, not feeding them, Social Services steps in and takes the kids, on behalf of society at large. There is a continuum between starving the kids and buying them happy meals because they whine effectively, and somewhere along that you lurch from being decent to being a nanny state, and I'm not sure where that line is located.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure in all of the other countries there are reckless kids but because they are poor they start families earlier, take more risky jobs, etc. and so its not considered to be "risky" when it really involves a high mortality rate.
One of the things they do is play with landmines they dug up in the back yard. No, really, they do play with them, because they watch their parents dig landmines up so they can farm safely, so the kids end up playing with them. Here in America they play with BMW's. It's not really that different.
My creepiest exposure ever was working on an excimer laser that was running in the kilowatt range, where I found out that skin fluoresces and phosphoresces if you hit it with enough UV photons. That burn sucked, too, but at least I didn't get one in the eye like a coworker did.
A cnc router is subtractive. What I'm talking about is additive machining, which is useful if you want to build parts that have stuff inside them. Consider this object made out of sugar by a similar process -- while it may be possible to mill that out of aluminum on a good 5 axis mill, it's certainly not something you can do with a CNC router. I've built CNC milling equipment and it's awesome stuff, but additive fabrication gives you wholly different capabilities.
With that said, I might be trying to get one of these because you can do some pretty cool stuff if you mount a laser this powerful in a plotter. It gets even better if you gut the plotter and add a Z axis so you can melt the top layer of material selectively, then lower the z stage, add a bit more material, and again melt it selectively: a relatively inexpensive, relatively high-precision 3d printer.
You are forgetting Saudi Arabia, made an incredibly wealthy country by any standard due to its recently found oil minerals, yet one of the most repressive fundamentalist regimes on the planet, source of the 9/11 terrorists, and source of the extreme Wahabi sect of Islam which promotes Sharia law in Western countries including the US, and which with Saudi Arabia's wealth, is being paid for world wide. Another Saudi Arabia, under the Taliban, would be frightening.
Thomas Friedman talks about this in his book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded". To sum up: when huge amounts of money are flowing into a country in pursuit of a single natural resource, A: the government has lots of money so it doesn't really have to listen to citizens very much as regards civil rights, especially insofar as it can exist with very low rates of taxation, B: the local manufacturing industries collapse because imported goods are cheap, leaving lots of people underemployed and mangling development of separate industries, and C: states that have a huge influx of money tend to suppress formation of social groups independent of the state. It's also likely that states where lots of money is coming in, tend to have their best&brightest go into that one field, rather than into other specialized fields that could develop other industries but don't have as much money flowing through them. So, you get a stagnant, stratified society. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, we're paying them to become exactly what you're talking about, and our money is flowing from there to making tens of thousands of schools across the mideast that are the only source of primary education for children, and are teaching exactly the same repressive fundamentalist values.
I anticipate my Windows friends will have a much better experience
PARIAH!! UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!
My girlfriend uses Vista on her laptop, so I, too, have Windows friends. For SHAME.
What I think is funny is that about every three days I come home and my laptop is running with her signed in, because she needed to use the flatbed scanner (which doesn't work with Vista despite downloading drivers) or the digital camera (which does work with Vista if you don't mind reinitializing the SD card every time Vista touches it) or downloading videos onto her Creative Zen (which *occasionally* works with Vista.) Whereas my homebrew linux laptop handles all those without any complications.
It doesn't, however, handle flash. Le sigh.
Consider this a test-case for remote-controlled and later autonomous cars on roadways. The FAA and commercial carriers are going to have to figure out whose fault it is when a UAV collides with an airplane, and how to minimize that risk, and whatever they do (I suspect it's going to be a combination of onboard transponders that talk to each other mesh-style rather than relying on centralized air traffic control facilities, and liability caps on manufacturers of UAV's) will be likely to be adopted when the first fully autonomous vehicles appear.
For what it's worth, here's a video of a LEGO car printer made of LEGO bricks. It's not an arbitrary 3d printer, it just does cars, but you can choose the color of the car.
More to the point, 'species' is an entirely human construction for classification of what we see, just like 'planet'. It's useful to us so we can discuss and learn about what's going on in the world. Nature has no concept of species whatsoever. Things that are more similar and live closer together interbreed more often; things that are less similar or live further away interbreed less often. It's all a huge continuum, and it's only us who are drawing lines and coming up with names for the stuff within the lines.
Here's a summaryof the five. (You can get reasonable translations from google.)
Here's a summary of Operation Torch, the one that didn't work.
In every case, these were gas flares, on dry ground with solid rock of known composition around the wellhead.
here is a pdf of the NRC's reports on the USSR peaceful blasts program. In a similar project, the US did a peaceful blast called Project Rulison to open a crack and increase natural gas flow from an underground pocket. What they found was that while it did increase gas flow, the gas was wildly radioactive, so there's a good possibility that doing the same thing with an underground oil flow could well radioactively contaminate the oil.
Which means that it's likely the best outcome would be to stop this leak, leaving a big contaminated and useless oil source, and the worst would be that it would increase the leak *and* make it radioactive as well.
But, again, it doesn't appear to me that this gives the people running the place the right to fire someone for wearing a political shirt while not at work, but I guess that sufficiently qualifies as engaging in partisan political activity that they felt they could get away with it.
My sis-in-law is a law clerk at a federal court. She doesn't have on-the-job freedom of speech, in much the same way you don't, but she also explicitly does not have off-the-job freedom of speech in many ways: as a federal employee she is not allowed to put up political signs in her yard, for instance. (As a result, neither is my brother.) People have been fired from where she works for wearing shirts with political statements when they weren't at work. This is a result of the Hatch Act of 1939 although it's not clear to me that it extends as far as her employers say it does.
It's going to be a long time before new drilling is permitted in the Gulf of Mexico,
The moment gas goes up over $5/gallon in the US, the new drilling permits will start flowing like oil from a ruptured well. Americans have short memories and empty wallets, and nobody outside the gulf coast states will even remember this happened in two years.
I... I am in shock right now, truly disturbed... I have debated whether to even post this horrific discovery.. but I just found out, just now, that out of all of the world's sexy people, every single one of them was at one point a disgusting, unsexy child. I know, it's true! My buzz, it has been murdered.
You could solve this problem by becoming a pedophile, but that might cause yet more problems. Probably best to just pretend that people spring fully formed out of high school graduation ceremonies.
In contrast, an older man dating a younger woman is much more likely to end up in a relationship or marriage, and while an older man actively looking for a younger woman is clearly looking to hook up as well, he is also much more likely to be looking for something more substantial, which means he's in a position to do so - meaning, not married and not in a situation where the outcome of the services provided by [his dating site of choice] will be a threat to his family.
I have several friends who are what is euphemistically known as escorts, and who have worked with dating sites of the Sugar Daddy sort. They have met many men who are very willing to engage in the transactions such sites facilitate, and they have all been married. According to one friend, who has made a tidy high-five-figure income doing this for several years as she works her way through college, at least 80% of the men on sugardaddy sites are married and looking for multiple somethings on the side, preferably multiple somethings at the same time.
It's my understanding that drag increases as the square of velocity. This leads to fuel consumption per unit of distance increasing linearly.
Go twice as fast, use twice as much fuel getting there. Your rate of fuel consumption is four times higher, but you spend half the time getting there.
Well... okay, here's the thing. The drag rises as the square of velocity, so the force required to overcome the drag rises as the square of velocity. However, since you're going faster there's another time unit involved, meaning the *power* required rises as the *cube* of velocity. "Thus, the resultant power needed to overcome this drag will vary as the cube of velocity.". And as such your fuel costs aren't rising linearly but exponentially.
I met Theodore Maiman once, when he gave a lecture at a college, and got to talk to him afterwards since I was working as an assistant to the prof who got him to come. One of the things I thought was interesting about his talk was, as the summary sort of discusses, the basic stuff of a laser was well-known. Indeed, people had nearly made lasers when they started manufacturing Geiger-Muller tubes. So Maiman spent a lot of time talking about the progression of technical concepts, from investigating the mechanics of fluorescence and phosphorescence and why they're different, to high-voltage supplies and flash tubes, to show that the laser is amazing but clearly nothing more than a clever tweak of existing technology. I asked him about this, why he'd spent so much time talking about applicable pre-laser research and only a small amount of time talking about neat stuff like Doppler cooling, and he said he did so because he was tired of people saying lasers were UFO technology and wanted to make it very clear that they were obvious and he was just lucky enough to be the one who managed to put one together.
BTW, couldn't you do this sort of thing with a differential?
Yes. That's basically what the Prius does: it uses a differential (actually an epicyclic, which is a flattened differential) as a mixer, and drives one input with a gas engine and the other with an electric motor, giving not only an infinite number of speeds but also a way to use the engine to charge the motor with excess power, or use the motor for braking. But then you need both an engine and a motor. Managing an infinite drive from a single input is pretty cool.
My ex-girlfriend's car kept losing the screws that held the speedometer movement in the instrument panel, and it was impossible to get in there and screw them back in because the whole panel was sealed to prevent people getting to the mechanical odometer. These days, with electronic odometers that display on LCD's, they've moved the security into software so they don't have to epoxy the whole system into a solid mass, which is nice.
Of course, now everyone and their dog declares bankruptcy at a moment's notice, but I think that's better for society as a whole than the State starving people to death on a regular basis.
I didn't pay much attention in math class... but would you be willing to explain this a little more? It seems to me that if you have four letters, in a string, any two random strings you look at should have about 25% of their letters match between them. The chances that there will be any *sequences* that match drop as an exponential function of the number of letters in the matching sequence, right? but, for example, caggtcatgactaa and gattacagattaca, have a roughly 20% identical sequence, insofar as they have three points in the sequence with matching bases.
The fact that the genes are identical does not mean they're of the same origin.
Actually, if the genes are identical in terms of nucleotide sequence then it is absolutely irrefutable that they are of the same origin.
It's indicative that they're the same, but not absolutely irrefutable. Any given sequence of DNA will be 25% identical to any other sequence, just because there are only four bases, while on the other end of the spectrum, even the DNA coding for something highly conserved, like cytochrome C, that exists in just about every eukaryote on the planet, isn't 100% identical across all eukaryotes.
As such, if you have a gene that's only a couple dozen bases long, it's fairly likely that if you find exactly the same sequence in another genome, they're either related or there's been horizontal gene transfer -- but only fairly likely, because a sequence of 30 bases could easily show up twice just by chance. But really massively long DNA sequences, even if they show very slight differences within them, are extremely likely to indicate ancestral relationships. For instance, while the general function of eyes has evolved 30 or 40 different times (or more, according to Ernest Mayr) the genes coding for the proteins that detect light, enabling vision, generally called opsins have probably only evolved twice, one for bacteria and once for all eukaryotes. But even then, the two gene groups are amazingly similar for having different ancestries.
My point being: extremely strong indicator, yes. But nothing in science is absolutely irrefutable, and gene similarity is significantly less irrefutable than many scientific theories, because gene content is constantly changing.
I was reading a book about metabolic biochemistry the other day (thrilling! really!) and the author went through a series of calculations to show that mitochondria produce about four orders of magnitude more power per unit volume than the sun. I guess it's not that weird, though: the sun's predicted to live for 20 billion years, so it can't be burning *that* fast. It just seems surprising.
The toy could be a bribe -- a kid who has a choice of two meals might choose the one that includes the toy. The parents might be crappy parents who have poor control over their kids, or who think giving the kids what they want is good parenting. (By which I mean, I've heard people say they were strict when it counted, and lenient the rest of the time, which is a reasonable parenting technique *if* you are smart enough to know when strictness is needed.)
The toy isn't a necessary part of the meal, so removing it doesn't change the calories or the taste. Presumably all removing it does, is remove the bribe. (and let government get its hands into regulating something else, and interfere with a company's advertising strategy, although I'm not really against the latter if the strategy is vile: see cigarette advertising aimed at children.)
If you have a situation where parents aren't doing the best thing for their kids, and aren't going to, by, say, not feeding them, Social Services steps in and takes the kids, on behalf of society at large. There is a continuum between starving the kids and buying them happy meals because they whine effectively, and somewhere along that you lurch from being decent to being a nanny state, and I'm not sure where that line is located.
Or is CNN too liberal for you?