So having top_secret_nuke_plans.pdf on your computer is okay, while having a binder with Top Secret Nuke Plans in your luggage is not ?
Most importantly: every piece of data on a computer can simply be copied from the internet once past, checking the computer's data then does nothing.
You can also pretty much mail every piece of luggage to your destination.
If there is anything that can be placed in the contents of a laptop that can get you refused entry, it only implies state censorship.
Customs doesn't deny you entry - you have already entered the country by the time you pass customs. Customs will stick you in jail, fine you and / or confiscate your stuff if they find things they think you shouldn't have.
... we'd have to outlaw encryption and stop cross-border Internet traffic.
Why ? You may not be able to catch the smart ones, but there's still plenty of dumb ones. Not all of them are computer-literate (or math-literate, as seen in the guy who used a Swirl filter to "obfuscate" his face).
If you can catch dumb criminals, why shouldn't you ?
Wasn't the actual "danger" in question the creation of stable negative strangelets (which would gobble up regular matter through electrostatic attraction, not through gravity like a black hole) ?
But still, if there was such a thing, cosmic rays would have created one "naturally" by now.
Because I was already emailed with the initial "job offer," which included the base information like pay rate, holiday time, etc. In previous positions, this is pretty much all I got, and it was short, sweet, and to-the-point. In this case, there was an additional "contract" which surprised me with a lot of extra conditions and details.
So you got hit with a classical case of "bait and switch" ?
Why do you assume it doesn't do that in the pay its offering?
Because it's mathematically not possible to do that, since you don't know in advance how long your employment is going to last.
What if they decide to fire you after 6 months, with an 18-month NCA ? That means your pay should be about four times of what it would be without the NCA. Not going to happen.
What about 3 months ? 12 months ? 24 months ? Or the worst case... 1 month ?
The only way to come somewhat close to an adequate compensation is something along the lines of (time of the NCA in months) * (some fraction of the last monhtly salary).
Just take the damn ice out of the freezer and look at the vapor that comes off.
Um... hate to break it to you, but that is not water vapor subliming from the ice cube, but water vapor from the surrounding air which condenses as the ice cube cools off the air.
But in order to know if that phase diagram is correct, it must first be proved by someone.
Yes. Better yet, under stringent laboratory conditions. Which means a much more controlled environment than the inside of your freezer (e.g. in an environment that contains _only_ water. Water vapor behaves somewhat different from an ideal gas, which means that your results may deviate as soon as you have other gases in the environment). If you do the freezer/ice cube tray experiment, how do you make sure that there isn't any liquid water involved when you're not looking ? (Oh, I know: You _know_ that water cannot be liquid below 0.01 Celsius... which means that you're relying on the phase diagram to be correct. Congratulations, you've just proven the correctness of the phase diagram by relying on the phase diagram to be correct.).
If the current phase diagram had fundamental errors in it, a lot of the processes that rely on water behaving exactly this way simply wouldn't work. Also, there'd probably be something on the order of a Nobel prize in for anyone who can prove the error... and experimenting with water really isn't rocket science.
1. European average consumption: 7.25km/l (no exact data but a reasonable extrapolation from [1]) = 17mpg.
2. US average consumption: 22.4mpg [2] - this is generous as it doesn't count SUV's I believe.
Your numbers fail a basic plausibility check. I believe (1) is a bit off - that'd be ~13 (l/100 km), which would qualify as a gas guzzler. Heck, when I still drove an E320, it needed that much only if I drove in city traffic, on the autobahn it was more along the lines of 10 (l/100km)
Here's the question: We are always hearing politicians promising to "Put 100,000 new police offices on our streets". Where is the program to "Put 100,000 new teachers in our classrooms"?
Even worse: Politicians will promise then 100,000 new cops when we also need 100,000 new teachers,
but then they will fire some of the existing cops and teachers instead of hiring any of the two, make a lot of dumb laws to create new criminals, and spend all the money on pork-barrel projects.
When the roads get iced up round my way, they come out and chuck a load of reddish coloured sand on it and it melts, so how can all that ice exist under all that reddish coloured sand on Mars?
That's an easy one: It's really fscking cold on Mars.
See if that load of reddish coloured sand helps when it's 50 below zero (Celsius). It won't.
H2O ice does sublimate. Here's an easy way to prove it.
There is absolutely no need to prove that.
Just pull up a phase diagram of water (google is your friend), look at the lower-left corner (i.e. low pressure and low temperature), and what do you see ?
A line where the solid phase borders on the vapor phase.
And what's a phase transition from solid phase to vapor phase called ?
Well, that wasn't an option for me, also once a smart kid, but also physically handicapped _and_, due to an earlier operation, at a larger risk for serious injury than a healthy person.
I plan to stick my kids in some sort of martial arts class, though. Even if it's only for getting them tired.:P
IIRC, heating oil is a an oil fraction which could not easily be converted into petroleum for cars.
Heating oil is basically the same as diesel fuel. Hence the red dye in places where the two are taxed differently, in order to catch tax evaders who run their diesel car on heating oil.
Most plants here use river or lake water in their secondary loop. Hardly demineralized, barely de-fished!
Well, anything that happens in the secondary loop shouldn't really affect reactor safety (unless the reactor design is truly moronic). And the liquid-sodium type reactor probably will also use water in the secondary loop.
Most of America is like this. Very few of us actually live in the city.
And it's all by choice. That's the nice thing about freedom in the US. You could have had it another way, but you chose not to. And it was clear, from the start, that this choice was going to become expensive when the supply of cheap gas dries up. (But anyone who predicted this to happen was an elitist alarmist eco-nut tree-hugging hippie communist.)
So quit whining about your bad choices, since that's essentially just self-pity. It's in your hand to remedy the situation.
Spending resources on those who don't give a rip or are clueless is money down a rat hole.
On the other hand, not spending enough money to keep these types out of prison produces people who don't pay any taxes and have to be locked up and guarded at the government's expense.
This is an expected consequence of the one-size-fits-all government education we have.
And yet, Americans like to bash countries with tiered school systems, because "OMIGOSH your job/income in life is determined at the age of 10 and you can never ever change it, which is so un-American". (exaggerated, but that's the prevalent sentiment I've seen, which mostly stems from ignorance about the possibility to change the tier of school you're in and/or get any kind of diploma/degree later in life, even after finishing school).
The manual is probably for situation where the world (and the press) might be watching you. If that isn't the case, you can whip out the really effective counterinsurgency measures (purges, ethnic cleansing, random killings to keep people afraid, retribution quotas, death camps, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
But a computer is more like your documents.
So having top_secret_nuke_plans.pdf on your computer is okay, while having a binder with Top Secret Nuke Plans in your luggage is not ?
Most importantly: every piece of data on a computer can simply be copied from the internet once past, checking the computer's data then does nothing.
You can also pretty much mail every piece of luggage to your destination.
If there is anything that can be placed in the contents of a laptop that can get you refused entry, it only implies state censorship.
Customs doesn't deny you entry - you have already entered the country by the time you pass customs. Customs will stick you in jail, fine you and / or confiscate your stuff if they find things they think you shouldn't have.
Of course they'll do that, right after they've made a couple of backups of the copy.
... we'd have to outlaw encryption and stop cross-border Internet traffic.
Why ? You may not be able to catch the smart ones, but there's still plenty of dumb ones.
Not all of them are computer-literate (or math-literate, as seen in the guy who used
a Swirl filter to "obfuscate" his face).
If you can catch dumb criminals, why shouldn't you ?
Wasn't the actual "danger" in question the creation of stable negative strangelets (which would gobble up regular matter through electrostatic attraction, not through gravity like a black hole) ?
But still, if there was such a thing, cosmic rays would have created one "naturally" by now.
So you got hit with a classical case of "bait and switch" ?
Why do you assume it doesn't do that in the pay its offering?
Because it's mathematically not possible to do that, since you don't know in advance how long your employment is going to last.
What if they decide to fire you after 6 months, with an 18-month NCA ? That means your pay should be about four times of what it would be without the NCA. Not going to happen.
What about 3 months ? 12 months ? 24 months ? Or the worst case
The only way to come somewhat close to an adequate compensation is something along the lines of (time of the NCA in months) * (some fraction of the last monhtly salary).
Um ... hate to break it to you, but that is not water vapor subliming from the ice cube, but water vapor from the surrounding air which condenses as the ice cube cools off the air.
But in order to know if that phase diagram is correct, it must first be proved by someone.
Yes. Better yet, under stringent laboratory conditions. Which means a much more controlled environment than the inside of your freezer (e.g. in an environment that contains _only_ water. Water vapor behaves somewhat different from an ideal gas, which means that your results may deviate as soon as you have other gases in the environment). If you do the freezer/ice cube tray experiment, how do you make sure that there isn't any liquid water involved when you're not looking ? (Oh, I know: You _know_ that water cannot be liquid below 0.01 Celsius ... which means that you're relying on the phase diagram to be correct. Congratulations, you've just proven the correctness of the phase diagram by relying on the phase diagram to be correct.).
If the current phase diagram had fundamental errors in it, a lot of the processes that rely on water behaving exactly this way simply wouldn't work. Also, there'd probably be something on the order of a Nobel prize in for anyone who can prove the error ... and experimenting with water really isn't rocket science.
1. European average consumption: 7.25km/l (no exact data but a reasonable extrapolation from [1]) = 17mpg.
2. US average consumption: 22.4mpg [2] - this is generous as it doesn't count SUV's I believe.
Your numbers fail a basic plausibility check. I believe (1) is a bit off - that'd be ~13 (l/100 km), which would qualify as a gas guzzler. Heck, when I still drove an E320, it needed that much only if I drove in city traffic, on the autobahn it was more along the lines of 10 (l/100km)
Even worse: Politicians will promise then 100,000 new cops when we also need 100,000 new teachers, but then they will fire some of the existing cops and teachers instead of hiring any of the two, make a lot of dumb laws to create new criminals, and spend all the money on pork-barrel projects.
That's an easy one: It's really fscking cold on Mars.
See if that load of reddish coloured sand helps when it's 50 below zero (Celsius). It won't.
H2O ice does sublimate. Here's an easy way to prove it.
There is absolutely no need to prove that.
Just pull up a phase diagram of water (google is your friend), look at the lower-left
corner (i.e. low pressure and low temperature), and what do you see ?
A line where the solid phase borders on the vapor phase.
And what's a phase transition from solid phase to vapor phase called ?
Bingo. Sublimation.
Well, that wasn't an option for me, also once a smart kid, but also physically handicapped _and_, due to an earlier operation, at a larger risk for serious injury than a healthy person.
I plan to stick my kids in some sort of martial arts class, though. Even if it's only for getting them tired. :P
Heating oil is basically the same as diesel fuel. Hence the red dye in places where the two are taxed differently, in order to catch tax evaders who run their diesel car on heating oil.
Well, anything that happens in the secondary loop shouldn't really affect reactor safety (unless the reactor design is truly moronic). And the liquid-sodium type reactor probably will also use water in the secondary loop.
And it's all by choice. That's the nice thing about freedom in the US. You could have had it another way, but you chose not to. And it was clear, from the start, that this choice was going to become expensive when the supply of cheap gas dries up. (But anyone who predicted this to happen was an elitist alarmist eco-nut tree-hugging hippie communist.)
So quit whining about your bad choices, since that's essentially just self-pity. It's in your hand to remedy the situation.
Anyone putting "liquid sodium" and "safe" in the same sentence seriously needs to read a book on basic chemistry.
Also, sodium is not corrosive like water is.
I'm curious, what substances does demineralized water (that's what they use as coolants) corrode ?
I can't imagine such a conflict staying non-nuclear. And if it doesn't, oil will be the least of the world's worries.
On the other hand, not spending enough money to keep these types out of prison produces people who don't pay any taxes and have to be locked up and guarded at the government's expense.
As long as they don't get constantly mobbed/beaten up/terrorized by their "inferior" peers.
And yet, Americans like to bash countries with tiered school systems, because "OMIGOSH your job/income in life is determined at the age of 10 and you can never ever change it, which is so un-American". (exaggerated, but that's the prevalent sentiment I've seen, which mostly stems from ignorance about the possibility to change the tier of school you're in and/or get any kind of diploma/degree later in life, even after finishing school).
The last two _are_ the ones that are going to turn you into road pizza when you drive too far below the speed limit.
Remember, back then retribution quotas were considered a valid means for fighting partisans.
"We're now invading, so let the suspension begin. Hey, the consitution never said that someone needs to invade _us_ for that to happen, right ?"
The manual is probably for situation where the world (and the press) might be watching you. If that isn't the case, you can whip out the really effective counterinsurgency measures (purges, ethnic cleansing, random killings to keep people afraid, retribution quotas, death camps, etc).