Do you think the US needs to maintain permanent military bases in 200+ countries including Germany, Japan, and South Korea?
Odd... and here I though there were only 193 UN-recognized countries, plus a few "somewhat recognized" ones. So the US have permanent military bases in more countries than there are on this planet ?
Which has the most wetlands set back, Which country has the most acreage for environmental preserves, which country started amassing environmental preserves first,
Easy criteria for countries with a large landmass and comparatively low population density.
Which first world countries go in and clean up their chemical messes left behind by previous generations?
Pretty much all of them. Which first world countries make sure that their future generation don't have to continue doing this at a large scale ?
And what little window puppetry they have pulled has reduced their productivity to the point that they have the largest unemployment rate in Europe, about 3 times as the US.
Germany: 8.1%, USA: 4.8%, France: 8.7%, Greece: 9.1%. Yikes. Your numbers are way off. But that doesn't matter, as long as the USA are presented in a shining light, right ? Who cares about facts.
Why was the earth video so smooth, taken from the same probe?
Because the probe was only doing a video of Earth then, and not actual science.
Why were the earth images in color?
Because someone had already spent the time and combined multiple monochrome images (taken with different filters) into nice-looking color images.
Why must all other planets out there be black and white?
Because that's how you get the best scientific data (resolution, color resolution, etc)- use a monochrome camera and apply filters for different wavelength.
Normal, modern cameras can't even take black and white photos without a post processing filter these days
"Normal" cameras are optimized to produce pictures that look good, not pictures that are actually useful for science.
It would be nice to see the different shades of color even if they were so called "false color"
The pretty false-color images you know of other planets are actually created by combining several monochrome images (with different filters). Give'em some time and you'll get your eye-candy eventually.
I really don't understand why it is so difficult to snap some high resolution color pictures for us to view. Can anyone enlighten me?
It's not difficult. It would just mean throwing out some actual scientific instruments and install a camera that can take color images with just one exposure... pretty much a waste of money when you can create pictures that look just a pretty with the imagers that are already installed.
And don't give me the loaddown that science cameras are color blind and that the infrared is more important, as I really can't accept that it would be so hard to reproduce Mercury in colors in 2008.
Well, yeah, I'm sorry for giving you that. Right now, the scientists want a map of the previously unseen parts of Mercury. Sorry that eye-candy isn't very high on their priority list, but they'll get to that eventually.
US 2-pin plugs feel "wobbly", especially the variety often found on consumer goods and things like table lamps; the mechanical connection feels very inadequate. Wall warts are the worst - the mass of the wall wart hanging off that loose-feeling 2 pin plug makes them especially easy to knock out of the socket.
Not only that, but with the US plugs it is almost infinitely easier to touch a "live" pin when it's in far enough to make contact, but not far enough to prevent it from being touched. I'm kind of afraid of these things, even though they only carry 120V.
To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content'
Well, neither of the criteria contains any mention of the transfer rate. They could limit "offending" downloads to 1 kB/s.
"Employee number 154372-D, we noticed you were feeling happy last Thursday at 11.37 am. You are clearly not working hard enough, and therefore we have no option but to terminate your employment here."
What about professional athletes? Is player number 73 about to collapse from the strain? Is he too hung over to play? Pay someone six or seven figures for their physical performance and you care about that sort of thing.
If you employ athletes in this salary range, you usually also employ a real physician, who it much better at these decisions than some algorithm (which will usually be missing parts of the big picture).
They tell me that I have an enlarged left ventricle and that I "obviously have heart disease"... Doc? Did you notice that I'm also about 5% body fat, have ripped legs, and a funny-looking tan?
Your doc's more right than you may think. You may not have any problems right now, but you're going to run into trouble with the ol' pump as soon as you can't keep up your workout (for whatever reason - lack of time, other health problems, whatever). At that point, your heart muscle mass will decrease, but your ventricular volume will stay the same or even rise. That is a fairly well-known problem with athletes, which unfortunately no one told you about in detail yet.
Standard movement vector of solar wind (outward) is neglected (slides along the surface), and we're acting only in perpendicular direction, our orbital speed against "zero" component of the speed vector of the solar wind.
Solar sails do not use the solar wind (i.e. charged particles) for propulsion, but the light pressure (photons). Also, you can actually control the direction of the thrust gained from from the solar sail by changing the direction in which the photons are reflected (at the expense of absolute thrust, since the effective area of the sail drops if it does not reflect the photons straight back at the sun).
In California If you produce more electricity than your use from the solar panels on your house you not only don't get to sell your excess electricity at wholesale rates you just get credits that expire on your anniversary of having net metering. This is unlike Germany where you get to sell your excess solar generated electricity at retail prices.
Actually, in Germany you sell all of the electricity you generate with solar, because you get a subsidized rate (about twice the retail price). Then you buy all the kWh you need at the retail rate.
And while these (especially No 3) seem pretty remote possibilites,
Actually, we can be pretty sure that No 1 will happen at some point (when solar luminosity has increased enough to boil the oceans off the surface of Earth), but that's still over a billion years off. No 2 is pretty unlikely. The solar system is just too full of all kinds of rocks. No 3 is hard to predict due to the sheer number of objects in the solar system that all interact gravitationally.
Interesting, so you mean if the police find drugs wrapped in a condom and stuck in my "body cavity" they won't assume that they belong to me?
They will know that the stuff is not supposed to be there (regardless of what you claim) and try to remove it (regardless of your claims).
I'm talking about ownership, pal. And if carrying a baby inside your body, providing it with sustenance from your own cells, doesn't indicate ownership, I don't know what does.
It indicates responsibility, not ownership. Don't get the two mixed up.
Of course, that ownership ends when the baby is born.
Why ? Ever heard of breastfeeding ? Sustenance from your own cells, you know. Plus you'll have to sacrifice plenty of sleep and nerves, too. According to your argumentation, the claim of ownership of the mother over the now-born baby would only be strengthened at birth. Let the post-natal abortions begin !
Or do you just mean that as long as the placenta is still attached, the mother still has the right to kill her child (which, at that point, may well be outside the uterus) ?
If a fetus doesn't belong to the woman that's carrying it, who does it belong to?
It belongs to itself, from the moment on that it it a single entity. This happens a few days after implantation (there's still a chance for the formation of identical twins for a few days after implantation). There's no magic pixie dust happening at birth that suddenly "creates" a human being out of a fetus. Any such claims belong to the realm of mysticism and superstition. (and yes, you'll find exactly this claim in the Bible, too. Killing a fetus does not invoke the "eye for an eye" law. Look it up, it's in 2. Mose 21,22, where the loss of a fetus alone is considered "no serious injury". Funny how you don't have time to listen to yarns, but make statements that just sound like them. )
Can we agree that something that is inside your body is under your dominion?
No, we can't. Try walking through customs with drugs stuffed in various body cavities and see what happens.
Also, the body has mucuous membranes on surfaces it considers hostile outside territory (e.g. the inside of the mouth, the gastrointestinal tract, or the inside of the uterus).
Friend, the only magical thing that happens is that the fetus goes from being completely within the mother's body, with every single one of the fetus's biological processes regulated and supplied by the mother,
Whoever modded this nonsense insightful should be beaten with a biology textbook. I have a nice big expensive one from my college days which I would donate to this worthy cause.
Inside the womb, the fetus receives nutrients from the mother, and partially depends on the mothers systems for waste elimination (fetuses do urinate and defecate in utero). But guess freakin' what, delivery doesn't change that too much. The newborn still depends on the mother for pretty much every need except for oxygen.
What biological process of the fetus is regulated by the mother ? There's a little bit of hormonal interaction going on to keep the growth rate in check, but apart from that, please name the processes you're talking about. The fetus controls its own movement, has its own circulatory system, sleep/wake cycles, whatever. Your statements are pure and simple nonsense. Superstitutious, unfounded, unscientific nonsense.
to being outside the mother's body, breathing on it's own, an "individual", a "person" for the first time.
The fetus is an "individual" a few weeks after conception. If you divide it after that, it dies.
As someone who watched his daughter being born, I can tell you it's a very important moment. Oh, it's wonderful to see that ultrasound, but is it a person? Nunh-uh.
I feel sorry for your daughter.
In my view, the state of being completely within, enveloped by, the mother's body is very much a state of "belonging" to the mother.
Hate to tell you this, but the inside of the uterus is considered "outside" by the body. Just like the inside of your intestine or your mouth. The interface to the outside is a mucuous membrane - which you don't find anywhere on inside/inside boundaries.
For that reason, I give the mother, the vessel, the owner of that fetus the right to decide its disposition. No one else.
Hate to break it to you, but there's no legal right to control what's in your body. For a reality check, try smuggling weapons or drugs in a body cavity of your choice (or even implanted). The judge will laugh at you after you get busted.
So the answer to "when does a fetus become a person?" is: "When the mother says it does."
So we go back to legally drowning the little suckers in a bucket of ice water if they're not wanted after birth ?
As a father of a beloved child, 19 now, sleeping about 30 feet away from me, upstairs, right now, I can tell you just how insignificant the act of fatherhood is until the baby emerges from the mother's body.
You must not have been around your wife a lot during pregnancy. Were you really that busy ? As the father of two kids, I can tell you that I really pity your daughter and that you've probably missed a lot of interesting experiences during those nine months.
Do you get that? It's a woman's fetus.
It's part of no one but itself. Even the womans body would immediately attack and destroy it as it would any foreign object, if there weren't measured in place to keep the two systems as separate as possible while still allowing nutrient and waste exchange.
I can't believe that on a slashdot, unscientific crap like this gets modded insightful just because it pleases political agendas. Go ahead, mod me flamebait or whatever again, all you guys who don't have a clue about biology. Show your ignorance, I don't care.
It's not a baby until it's born. A foetus is no more alive than a tumour.
I'm sorry, the latter is a heap of superstitious nonsense (at best, otherwise it's a malicious misrepresentation). There's no magic pixie dust during birth that suddenly "transforms" the viable fetus into a newborn baby, just some changes in metabolism. Heck, and even those don't happen instantaneously when the newborn leaves the birth canal.
So, in your zeal to refute ancient tribal myths compiled into a rather large book all you come up with is even more superstitious magic crap ? No thanks. Read a frickin' biology textbook and leave the pixie dust out of the equation.
I read in Scientific American that some guy wore special glasses for several weeks that turned his field of view upside-down.
Actually, the lens in your eye projects an upside-down image on the retina. So, the special glasses actually made the image appear "right side up" on the retina.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd
England.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flue_gas_desulfurization
Which has the most wetlands set back, Which country has the most acreage for environmental preserves, which country started amassing environmental preserves first,
Easy criteria for countries with a large landmass and comparatively low population density.
Which first world countries go in and clean up their chemical messes left behind by previous generations?
Pretty much all of them. Which first world countries make sure that their future generation don't have to continue doing this at a large scale ?
And what little window puppetry they have pulled has reduced their productivity to the point that they have the largest unemployment rate in Europe, about 3 times as the US.
Germany: 8.1%, USA: 4.8%, France: 8.7%, Greece: 9.1%. Yikes. Your numbers are way off. But that doesn't matter, as long as the USA are presented in a shining light, right ? Who cares about facts.
Because the probe was only doing a video of Earth then, and not actual science.
Why were the earth images in color?
Because someone had already spent the time and combined multiple monochrome images (taken with different filters) into nice-looking color images.
Why must all other planets out there be black and white?
Because that's how you get the best scientific data (resolution, color resolution, etc)- use a monochrome camera and apply filters for different wavelength.
Normal, modern cameras can't even take black and white photos without a post processing filter these days
"Normal" cameras are optimized to produce pictures that look good, not pictures that are actually useful for science.
It would be nice to see the different shades of color even if they were so called "false color"
The pretty false-color images you know of other planets are actually created by combining several monochrome images (with different filters). Give'em some time and you'll get your eye-candy eventually.
I really don't understand why it is so difficult to snap some high resolution color pictures for us to view. Can anyone enlighten me?
It's not difficult. It would just mean throwing out some actual scientific instruments and install a camera that can take color images with just one exposure
And don't give me the loaddown that science cameras are color blind and that the infrared is more important, as I really can't accept that it would be so hard to reproduce Mercury in colors in 2008.
Well, yeah, I'm sorry for giving you that. Right now, the scientists want a map of the previously unseen parts of Mercury. Sorry that eye-candy isn't very high on their priority list, but they'll get to that eventually.
There are good reasons not to use pencils in microgravity. One of them is that pencils produce graphite dust.
Not only that, but with the US plugs it is almost infinitely easier to touch a "live" pin when it's in far enough to make contact, but not far enough to prevent it from being touched. I'm kind of afraid of these things, even though they only carry 120V.
where exactly is a "space tourist" supposed to go?
Well, there have already been space tourists, but right now the only destination is the ISS. However
1. it takes around 7 months to get to mars which is the closest planet-
2. what exactly are you supposed to see?
Earth. From space. I've heard it's quite a view.
3. cost- no one will be able to afford to go into space
Why
Victim: AAAAAAAAAAAGHH ! Phraselator: "Don't tase me, bro!"
Well, neither of the criteria contains any mention of the transfer rate. They could limit "offending" downloads to 1 kB/s.
All your base are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Uh
400 mHz = 0.4 Hz, which means that the period of the signal is 1/(0.4 Hz) seconds = 2.5 seconds.
Be glad we're only terminating your employment.
If you employ athletes in this salary range, you usually also employ a real physician, who it much better at these decisions than some algorithm (which will usually be missing parts of the big picture).
Your doc's more right than you may think. You may not have any problems right now, but you're going to run into trouble with the ol' pump as soon as you can't keep up your workout (for whatever reason - lack of time, other health problems, whatever). At that point, your heart muscle mass will decrease, but your ventricular volume will stay the same or even rise. That is a fairly well-known problem with athletes, which unfortunately no one told you about in detail yet.
Oh wait
Solar sails do not use the solar wind (i.e. charged particles) for propulsion, but the light pressure (photons). Also, you can actually control the direction of the thrust gained from from the solar sail by changing the direction in which the photons are reflected (at the expense of absolute thrust, since the effective area of the sail drops if it does not reflect the photons straight back at the sun).
(Just kidding. I know the probe actually has a physical sunscreen that keeps it from being toasted).
Actually, in Germany you sell all of the electricity you generate with solar, because you get a subsidized rate (about twice the retail price). Then you buy all the kWh you need at the retail rate.
Actually, we can be pretty sure that No 1 will happen at some point (when solar luminosity has increased enough to boil the oceans off the surface of Earth), but that's still over a billion years off. No 2 is pretty unlikely. The solar system is just too full of all kinds of rocks. No 3 is hard to predict due to the sheer number of objects in the solar system that all interact gravitationally.
The Sun will not go supernova. It's simply not massive enough.
... that the asteroid uses the metric system ?
They will know that the stuff is not supposed to be there (regardless of what you claim) and try to remove it (regardless of your claims).
I'm talking about ownership, pal. And if carrying a baby inside your body, providing it with sustenance from your own cells, doesn't indicate ownership, I don't know what does.
It indicates responsibility, not ownership. Don't get the two mixed up.
Of course, that ownership ends when the baby is born.
Why ? Ever heard of breastfeeding ? Sustenance from your own cells, you know. Plus you'll have to sacrifice plenty of sleep and nerves, too. According to your argumentation, the claim of ownership of the mother over the now-born baby would only be strengthened at birth. Let the post-natal abortions begin !
Or do you just mean that as long as the placenta is still attached, the mother still has the right to kill her child (which, at that point, may well be outside the uterus) ?
If a fetus doesn't belong to the woman that's carrying it, who does it belong to?
It belongs to itself, from the moment on that it it a single entity. This happens a few days after implantation (there's still a chance for the formation of identical twins for a few days after implantation). There's no magic pixie dust happening at birth that suddenly "creates" a human being out of a fetus. Any such claims belong to the realm of mysticism and superstition. (and yes, you'll find exactly this claim in the Bible, too. Killing a fetus does not invoke the "eye for an eye" law. Look it up, it's in 2. Mose 21,22, where the loss of a fetus alone is considered "no serious injury". Funny how you don't have time to listen to yarns, but make statements that just sound like them. )
No, we can't. Try walking through customs with drugs stuffed in various body cavities and see what happens.
Also, the body has mucuous membranes on surfaces it considers hostile outside territory (e.g. the inside of the mouth, the gastrointestinal tract, or the inside of the uterus).
Whoever modded this nonsense insightful should be beaten with a biology textbook. I have a nice big expensive one from my college days which I would donate to this worthy cause.
Inside the womb, the fetus receives nutrients from the mother, and partially depends on the mothers systems for waste elimination (fetuses do urinate and defecate in utero). But guess freakin' what, delivery doesn't change that too much. The newborn still depends on the mother for pretty much every need except for oxygen.
What biological process of the fetus is regulated by the mother ? There's a little bit of hormonal interaction going on to keep the growth rate in check, but apart from that, please name the processes you're talking about. The fetus controls its own movement, has its own circulatory system, sleep/wake cycles, whatever. Your statements are pure and simple nonsense. Superstitutious, unfounded, unscientific nonsense.
to being outside the mother's body, breathing on it's own, an "individual", a "person" for the first time.
The fetus is an "individual" a few weeks after conception. If you divide it after that, it dies.
As someone who watched his daughter being born, I can tell you it's a very important moment. Oh, it's wonderful to see that ultrasound, but is it a person? Nunh-uh.
I feel sorry for your daughter.
In my view, the state of being completely within, enveloped by, the mother's body is very much a state of "belonging" to the mother.
Hate to tell you this, but the inside of the uterus is considered "outside" by the body. Just like the inside of your intestine or your mouth. The interface to the outside is a mucuous membrane - which you don't find anywhere on inside/inside boundaries.
For that reason, I give the mother, the vessel, the owner of that fetus the right to decide its disposition. No one else.
Hate to break it to you, but there's no legal right to control what's in your body. For a reality check, try smuggling weapons or drugs in a body cavity of your choice (or even implanted). The judge will laugh at you after you get busted.
So the answer to "when does a fetus become a person?" is: "When the mother says it does."
So we go back to legally drowning the little suckers in a bucket of ice water if they're not wanted after birth ?
As a father of a beloved child, 19 now, sleeping about 30 feet away from me, upstairs, right now, I can tell you just how insignificant the act of fatherhood is until the baby emerges from the mother's body.
You must not have been around your wife a lot during pregnancy. Were you really that busy ? As the father of two kids, I can tell you that I really pity your daughter and that you've probably missed a lot of interesting experiences during those nine months.
Do you get that? It's a woman's fetus.
It's part of no one but itself. Even the womans body would immediately attack and destroy it as it would any foreign object, if there weren't measured in place to keep the two systems as separate as possible while still allowing nutrient and waste exchange.
I can't believe that on a slashdot, unscientific crap like this gets modded insightful just because it pleases political agendas. Go ahead, mod me flamebait or whatever again, all you guys who don't have a clue about biology. Show your ignorance, I don't care.
I'm sorry, the latter is a heap of superstitious nonsense (at best, otherwise it's a malicious misrepresentation). There's no magic pixie dust during birth that suddenly "transforms" the viable fetus into a newborn baby, just some changes in metabolism. Heck, and even those don't happen instantaneously when the newborn leaves the birth canal.
So, in your zeal to refute ancient tribal myths compiled into a rather large book all you come up with is even more superstitious magic crap ? No thanks. Read a frickin' biology textbook and leave the pixie dust out of the equation.
Actually, the lens in your eye projects an upside-down image on the retina. So, the special glasses actually made the image appear "right side up" on the retina.