Well, if you live in Israel, Google maps doesn't have streetnames for almost half of your capital, or for your . Nor, for that matter, for the fourth and fifth largest city in your country.
And if you deny that those cities are in your country, could you kindly inform your government so that they can withdraw their troops?
You should try Vendetta Online. It's an indie space MMORPG where PvP and PK is central to gameplay. Death is cheap in most cases but if you're carrying around special equipment or cargo it can be quite a setback.
And yes, it runs linux
(actually, its development pre-dated EVE but it is a very small shop so things move a lot slower. The player base is small but very involved, and you can find the lead dev responding on the forums, making it a nice environment)
http://programming-motherfucker.com/, do you speak it?
I was there last week, not a Turkish gun in sight. But I would still advice against charging it, it is way too hot at the moment and there are too many Israeli tanks
Political Science is divided on how to define "democracy". At the minimum, it has some reasonably level of suffrage to elect the body or bodies that make generally binding decisions (aka laws). However, many scholars argue that a democracy also requires
This does *not* mean that a law is necessarily based on the (represented) consent of the majority of the population or even of the voting population, as all electoral systems have some sort of misrepresentation of the population, going from the extreme of single member first-past-the post districts (USA, UK) to the most proportional representation of single district PR systems (Netherlands)
Note that democracy is a separate concept from "rule of law", but it is hard to imagine democracy functioning without the rule of law. In essence, the rule of law means that the law also applies to the rulers (and hence to the enforcement agencies). So, the example of a ruler killing people without trial is more of a breach of rule of law than of democracy. Obviously, it is possible to make a law that allows certain people to be killed without a (civil) trial, as is not uncommon in military law or slavery systems, and apparently American citizens with foreign sounding names in the wrong place at the wrong time are also subject to this process...
*) even the Netherlands (generally regarded as the most proportional electoral system) has some misrepresentation because of the granularity of MP seats: votes for parties that don't get a single seat are 'wasted' entirely, and remainders are distributed in a complicated way that can in principle allow a majority in parliament to represent a minority of votes. However, this is nowhere near the level of misrepresentation that can occur in SMD systems (where 26% of the vote can capture 51% of seats) or even worse in multi-party SMD systems with first-past-the-post (plurality), where in theory an infinitismal small amount of votes can capture the majority given infinite contenders -- and in the UK the majority party in parliament frequently had a minority of votes cast for it.
Of course, you could also say that Athens (as most greek city states were not democracies at all but rather dictatorships or oligarchies) was not a democracy because they didn't give the vote to either women or slaves. In fact, most "western" democracies only had universal (including female) suffrage for the past 50-100 years or so, with the last swiss canton finally joining ranks in 1990 (!). Before the first world war, every democracy that I know of had various restrictions on suffrage based on race, gender, and/or property.
Gas in Israel is normal price form a european perspective, actually a bit cheaper than expensive countries like finland or the Neherlands.
http://www.brandstofprijzen.info/brandstofprijzen-europa.php
(it probably went up a bit because the shekel appreciated, but IIRC it is a bit above NIS 7, which is indeed around 1.50 euro. )
This is even more so for Israel, where the longest drive you can make is from the Golan heights all the way down to Eilat, which is just about 300 miles. The borders in the North are closed (Syria and Lebanon) and most Israeli have no intention whatsoever to drive to Jordan or Egypt, and the time to cross the border is at least two hours anyway so that is probably time enough to charge your car. As regards private transportation, Israel is practically an island with 99% of Israeli citizens only ever leaving the country by air.
So, Israel is the perfect testing ground for a charging-based electric car park, and battery swapping makes a lot less sense there.
Coupled with the strategic value of being less dependent on oil while not having relations with the biggest oil producers, and the fact that solar makes a lot of sense in the middle east, I hope that another company with a more sensible model will succeed.
I agree that no laws should be passed that force e.g. a supermarket to use specific weights or measures. If people are annoyed by the choice of a supermarket they can bring their business elsewhere.
However, the "free choice" argument does not work for monopoly players, especially the government itself. The last time I was in the US, miles were used in the interstate system to indicate both distances/exit numbers and maximum speeds. You can't choose to pick the other road that goes the same place but uses metric, because there is no real competition in the road network.
I don't know whether other official communication of the state(s) uses metric or not, I could imagine many laws and forms that refer to land area, volumes of water, weight (e.g. of cars) that could use either non-metric or metric. They can't hide behind a "free choice" argument there, and a real "bimetric" system requires the government to provide information, like speed limits, in both systems, just like a blingual government publishes laws etc. in two languages.
As sibling says, bridges and hills are a problem. Major waterways are generally constructed so that bridges are either really high (as in 30ft+) or have some part that can be opened.
Anything that fits on a truck is easy to transport over land, but stuff that is significantly larger and can't be moved in parts is difficult over land. On the water, major ports and waterways are pretty wide. For example, the coast pilot linked a boatnerd.com [1] (who doesn't love that url) says for the mississipi - illinois waterway connection:
(10) Mississippi River-Illinois Waterway-
(11) depth, 9 feet (2.7);
(12) width, 80 feet (24.38 meters);
(13) length, 600 feet (182.88 meters);
(14) vertical clearance 17 feet (5.18 meters);
So, you can transport something that is roughly 20x150 meters. Some random internet site [2] says that "The standard barge is 195 feet long, 35 feet wide, and can be used to a 9-foot draft. Its capacity is 1500 tons. Some of the newer barges today are 290 feet by 50 feet, double the capacity of earlier barges." So, if we get one of them "newer barges', we can transport something that is 75 x 15 meters and weighs 3000 tonnes using equipment that is standard on the infrastructure.
A random wiki quote [3] says that "In the United States, 80,000 pounds (36,287 kg) is the maximum allowable legal gross vehicle weight without a permit.". So, with standard equipment you can transport something on the ground up to 36 metric tons, or about 0.1 percent of what fits on the barge*. Of course, you *can* transport something bigger than that, but then you get into serious logistic operations with special equipment, road closures, etc etc, while the barge can just be loaded up and sail away.
tl;dr: roads are made for fast and flexible transportation of relatively small amounts of cargo; shipping is made for slow transportation of bulk and large items.
[1] http://www.boatnerd.com/facts-figures/cpgreat.htm
[2] http://www.caria.org/barges_tugboats.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-trailer_truck
*) I'm totally ignoring any possible short tonne, long tonne, metric tonne etc errors here, since that won't make a dent into a 3 orders of magnitude difference...
Some interesting legal questiosn that we studied for Dutch criminal law:
Someone got shot and was paralysed from the neck down. When she also got an infection (as a complication of the wounds/operation), she decided not to seek treatment because her life wasn't worth living anymore. Is this murder or aggravated assault?
A similar one: a man is stabbed, and while he could have been saved, the medics make a mistake and he dies. Is (the stabbing) murder or assault?
Another one: a man drives too fast in a commercial street, skids, hits a lantern pole, which hits a window, the glass of which hits a man who bleeds to death. Is this manslaughter? (in other words, is there a causal chain from the driving to the glass hitting the man?)
A final one: a man finds an unexploded detonator in the woods, and takes it home as a souvenir/decoration. Years later, the next owner of the house does some remodeling and needs something to prop open a window. He uses (unknowingly) the detonator, with fatal consequences. Did the original man cause the death of the new owner?
tangible assets like precious metals, water rights, mineral rights, real estate
So, most of the tangible assets you mention have a worth that is greatly dependent on the current market whims and/or the government that backs them... just like banknotes. It might be a good insurance against inflation, but not really against anything else...
"You didn't come here to hunt, did you?"
You seem to be talking about the magnetic poles, which are indeed caused by the spin of the core and move a lot every year, in the magnitude of 50 km/year. This is so much that navigating using a compass requires compensating for the specific declination of that year. You can even observe it if you have a good bearing compass: take the bearing from a fixed position to a relatively far away object, such as a broadcast tower. A couple years later, take the bearing again, and (depending on your location) it may have changed by one or even several degrees.
TFA talks about the geographic north, e.g. the intersection of the surface and the axes around which the earth spins. This does not generally move around much, as it is affected by the distribution of mass around the earth causing the axis to shift. According to TFS, it can be measured using GPS, and moves in the magnitude of centimeters per year.
Or more elegantly in haiku form:
Top prime's divisors'
product (plus one)'s factors are?
QED, bitches!
What this country needs is a good five cent microcomputer.
