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Comment Re:Eventually it goes through (Score 2) 132

They will simply continue to refluff the bill and push it on us again and again until it passes.

The US government is a corrupt oligarchy and needs to be torn down.

Yep. Much like the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act", which was designed to make bankruptcy relief (used commonly by corporations to escape debt) virtually inaccessible to consumers. It was proposed in 1997 and rejected year after year until finally it passed in 2005. What the corporations and political establishment want, they will get - sooner or later.

Comment Re:Elephant in the room (Score 1) 384

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of Roman Enpire is the greatest work of classical historical scholarship on Rome - assembling and synthesizing all ancient sources available in the late 18th century - but quoting him as the final authority on "why Rome fell" is grossly misplaced reverence.

Gibbon saw things through the lens of contemporary social standards and historical concepts then current. Since then historical methods have advanced, scholars have had time to examine each aspect of the problem in much greater detail, and Gibbon of course had no access to the vast data we now have revealed by archaeology and modern science.

Comment The Nature of the Fermi Paradox (Score 5, Informative) 608

The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation that would prevent an intelligent civilization from colonizing the entire galaxy in much less than a 100 million years - yet there is no case that can yet be made that Earth is anything like a boundary case of the "earliest possible biosphere". It is not a solution to the Fermi Paradox to postulate reasons why one intelligent species or another might fail to do so, it has to apply to every one of them since one outlier would go on to colonize the galaxy.

I think part of the resolution of the paradox is the implicit notion common to us humans that our form of tool-using symbolic-communicating intelligence is some sense "inevitable" and will arise given enough time. Yet observing the evolution of the large animals on Earth does not give any reason for thinking this is some sort of normal progression. The Great Apes, very similar to hominids, have not shown any trend toward evolving larger brains since the hominid-ape split 7 million years ago. No general trend toward developing human style intelligence is evident anywhere. The emerging story of hominid development is that a long series of lucky accidents seems to have been necessary to bring it about.

Human-style intelligence may be extremely unlikely to evolve at all.

Comment Re:blame Obama care. (Score 2) 311

...The poor are working less because about every company that pays at the minimum wage level has cut there hours to part time so they don't have to pay full benefits.

Blame Obamacare?!

Only if you are a moron.

If you bothered to read TFA you would see that The Economist is using data from 2006. I don't think Obamacare is so powerful that it changed working hours for the poor 3 years before it was written, and 7 years before it went into effect.

Comment Re:I'll consider it a personal favor... (Score 1) 310

Correct, sir. This is a fully bipartisan, multi-Administration travesty of law and government. And it has been building since early in the Cold War, see United States v. Reynolds which created the "state secrets privilege" by a court ruling in 1952. It is very telling that the "facts" presented to the court in secret were, in fact, lies (learned on 48 years after the fact). In secret the government can lie to heart's content without worrying about its dishonesty being questioned or revealed.

Comment Re:not an axe (Score 1) 217

It is form of a specialized axe, known as a maul. Still an axe, but only good for splitting short logs. Still, if you are busting wood for heating you would do well to have the right tool for the job.

Comment Re:Compute Hours? (Score 2) 135

"The model uses physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale to explain how the whole planet behaves."

A 3,000 x 3,000 x 3,000 grid is considered very large for modern scientific models. Assuming they are working on a cartesian grid, and an earth diameter of 12,000 km, their model would be 12,000,000 x 12,000,000 x 12,000,000; twelve orders of magnitude larger than the biggest physical model I've ever heard of.

This cannot be the case.

Whew! Its a good thing they never claimed they were doing any such thing.

"physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale" does not mean that they were using a model grid of that same scale.

To show that the assumption that it must, or even should, is incorrect consider any engineering model that involves the effects of static friction.

The phenomena that cause static friction exist on the molecular and atomic level, and theoretical predictions of friction under arbitrary conditions need to be analyzed and calculated at that scale.

But once you have determined what the coefficient is under a given set of conditions, you only need to use the single number in a macro scale model.

That is what they did here. If you read TFA you will see that their macro model used coefficients calculated using the detailed physics.

Comment Re:I'm liking how Russia is standing up these days (Score 1) 234

Is the US vastly superior?

Globalfirepower rank them about the same, though they include a lot of factors, but shouldn't all those be included?

I would take the "Globalfirepower" rankings a tad more seriously if they revealed the model they used to combine and weight all those factors, and if they weren't a "link farm" site that lists itself as being "for entertainment only" and the people running it weren't completely anonymous. There is no reason to attach any credibility to the ranking scores they offer.

Comment Re:I'm liking how Russia is standing up these days (Score 1) 234

Obama was on Seal Team Six? I didn't know that. He was working with the CIA to track down Bin Laden in Pakistan, before he was President?...

When Obama became President, no one in the CIA was tracking down bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2005 George W. Bush shut down the CIA unit tasked with tracking bin Laden (code named Alec Station and established in 1996 by Bill Clinton). "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden".

It took an executive action by Obama to recreate an intelligence unit to pick up the hunt, and then a tough call to send the SEAL team in when the intelligence about bin Laden's presence was still uncertain. A weaker man would have temporized about the uncertainty and done nothing (GW Bush and Tora Bora?).

BTW - the right's adulation of GW Bush as a hero, strutting in front of his "Mission Accomplished" banner, when he had never fired a shot in the invasion, while pretending Obama had nothing to do with the termination of bin Laden "because he wasn't on Seal Team Six" is a double standard so glaring that it makes one stand dumb-founded at the intellectual dishonesty involved. Yeah, and Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly. Right.

Comment Re:THROUGH North Korea?! (Score 1) 234

China has the US by the balls via debt

OM F***ing G. I know this is a popular theme on Slashdot, but please STOP. It is wrong, and stems from a serious misunderstanding about what it means to say that "the US owes China money."

In addition, doesn't anyone bother to look up just how much of the U.S. "balls" China is holding? China holds just 6% of the U.S. Federal debt! ($1.1 trillion out of $17.6 trillion).

Ooh! Sc-a-r-r-y!

Comment Re:Left-Wing Propoganda (Score 1) 258

... But, at the same time, let the idiots who decide to overdose suffer the consequences of their actions. That is the point at which the liberals who want to LEGALIZE drugs fail the logic test. They want the government to allow them to use their favorite substances, and then rescue them when they have trouble...

So you are advocating that anyone showing up at an ER with the strong smell of alcohol on their breath, and no obvious injury, should be kicked out on the curb to die. Correct?

(This is 3.5% of all ER admissions, and outnumbers all illegal drug admissions combined).

Comment Re:Left-Wing Propoganda (Score 1) 258

A bit broader than "Western Europe" - you are a couple of decades out of date at least. It would be more like "the entire rest of the advanced industrialized world" since much of Eastern Europe is now included, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and a fair part of South America as well (I'm sure you have flown on Brazil-made airliners, they are very good).

I guess that is a bit elitist.

I find it very interesting that the American right is finding it necessary to point to the worst nations in the world (Middle East police states, African kleptocracies) to prove U.S. virtues.

I think that is very telling.

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