You realize Siberia wasn't above the arctic circle 160million years ago right? Also... the whole planet was a lot hotter.

Really? People wasted mod points on this?

All joking aside... Donald Rumsfeld is 82.
He's about as open minded as most other 82yr olds in this country.
Our problem is that Donald Rumsfeld is a bad guy. Or problem is we put people into positions of power who developed their sense of morality at a time when "The Nazis" were still a valid political party and we didn't generally allow African Americans into the military yet.

This is the internet... Hype = Profit

As someone that works on engines all the time... the rule is:
You need Air, Fuel and Spark
All engines have electrical systems and depending on how complex (efficient) the engine is the electronics can be as minor as a magnet and magneto all the way up to vastly complex computer controlled ignition systems.

But more importantly, neatly all the valves in those plants are controlled by electricity. So losing power would be a problem if it weren't fixed fairly soon.

This is a very complex issue and has very little to do with the topics you're probably concerned with.

I'll burn up even more Karma educating the ill-informed.

Back when Telephones were a new thing, the government wanted to push their expansion to everyone in the country. It was seen in the same light that we see the internet today. A huge economic boost that would be the most beneficial in rural areas.

First the government just mandated "If you serve here you have to serve rural areas!!!" That went over like a lead balloon. Businesses just refused to install anything. The problem is that one company would come in and do what the government wanted, install service in the profitable city centers, then raise prices for those people to offset the costs of servicing rural customers who are extremely unprofitable to serve. But, rural customers having telephone service is, in the long run, more profitable for society as a whole. But then a competitor would come in and install only for the profitable business centers and drag their feet on installing the rural customers. Able to offer the business parks a cheaper rate, they'd drive the first company out.

So an agreement was struck. The local municipality would sell the telephone company a "franchise" or whatever the term in your local area is. Often this is called a "Monopoly" by the ill informed, but it's anything but that. This agreement comes with heavy burdens for the telephone company. They agree to provide service to everyone, at the same price. (differences exist for commercial and residential) They can not charge you more based on where you live. They also agree to provide service for a period of time, and they cannot abandon this obligation without approval from the municipality. In return, they retain exclusive rights to provide twisted pair copper service in that area.

They do have competitors... LOTS of competitors. Your local cable company, other phone companies, wifi providers, and on and on. It may seem as if there is a monopoly because where you live there is only one option.

Here's the key point to all of this: If you only have one option for a phone company that's because it's unprofitable to serve the area you live in. The only reason you have a phone company option at all, is because they are forced by that franchise agreement to serve you. If the Monopoly you're complaining about did not exist, you would have no phone service at all. None. There are hundreds of phone companies in this country, if it were profitable to provide you service, you'd have a lot of options. Go to any telephone company website, find their get a quote section and put in an address for the local buisness park around you. You'll have dozens of options for service. Alternatively, the easiest way to see where its profitable to provide service is to simply look at your local cable companies footprint. Cable companies are not under the franchise obligations. They only serve areas that are profitable. That footprint is very tightly held within the profitable part of town. Outside that the phone company is losing money.

Now, recently, some municipalities have tried to start their own fiber services. The fact that they are leaving out in these projects is where they are targeted. I've seen dozens of them (I work for a telco) and in every single case the local town is trying to instal Fiber to a local business park to attract new business. A noble idea, but the fact of the matter is, that business park in almost every case is the only profitable part of the entire town. (most towns that try this are relatively small) The park is paying for everyone elses phone service! If they suddenly had virtually free fiber service, the town suddenly becomes a huge expense to the telco. They'll refuse to sign the next franchise agreement and the town will be stuck with maintaining the infrastructure themselves.

If you support this sort of thing you have to realize that what you're supporting is lower prices for businesses, poorer service for everyone else and probably a lot of rural service loosing standard pots service and internet all together.

The people that would be interested in this already have very fuel efficient cars. Therefor the effect would be negligible on the types of vehicles they're buying. Where-as the effect would have the most dramatic effect on the SUV buyers... who clearly don't give a shit about efficiency. It's a Catch-22.

God damn you!!! You just don't understand science! If we were to take those becquerels and put them into a right triangle... we divide 1 trillion by 2 for the a and b... so we get 500billion Bq... so thats 2*500,000,000,000^2 that means the hypotenuse of the radiation is 50 Quintillion becquerels! By my back of the envelope numbers by next year news stories about fukishima will have release more radiation than a small supernova. A year after that even Andromeda is going to be pissed at Japan.

Agreed. Most of the country doesn't have a problem. The people living in the Arizona desert watering their Golf courses are running out of water... well surprise surprise. Let them run out. They can move... pretty much anywhere else in the country to avoid that problem. The solution to this problem is simple... ignore it.

Because they don't have a giant fucking hole drilled strait through the middle of them?
The waters at 1 PSI and the Frack well is at 15,000 PSI.
The Fracking solution is designed to erode those very geologic structures...
Should I go on? or are you getting the idea?

I've never gotten a permit to drill a well.
There are some things the government can't regulate because they're impossible to regulate.
Granted, I'm lucky that I live in an area where I know people that will borrow me the equipment to do such things. If you're living in the middle of town the rig might become obvious...

Who says I was talking about a planar triangle? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... :-p

Ok, I was... but the oldest geometry typo since the pyramids does not invalidate relativity.

You're misinterpreting the meaning of "infinite" here.
You're assuming density measurement has an infinite value. Like "How many dollars are there?" Well, you could have any number of dollars from 1 to infinity.
That's not how density is measured.
Another type of measurement is "What angle is the corner of that triangle?"
That could be anywhere from 1 to 359 degrees (rounding to whole numbers)
It's kind of like a percentage.
Infinite density would be like saying the angle is 360 Degrees. That breaks the triangle. The angle is effectively infinite.
Mass, density, momentum, time, etc... are all treated like geometry when you get into relativistic effects.
You can't exceed the speed of light because that to would break the geometry of the system. Once you hit the speed of light, you again are doing the equivalent of making one of the angles 360 degrees.

The "Triangle" of this system is Speed, time and mass. So for speed to exceed the speed of light and therefor be the "360 degree angle" of this triangle, the other two angles... time and mass, must be 0. Therefor time stops, and the moving object must be massless. Does that make more sense?

At least thats how I've always understood it.

But that's exactly what they are saying.
You need to differentiate. Blackholes are NOT singularities. A blackhole is the collection of phenomena and objects in an area of spacetime. It is believe that at the center of the blackhole is a singularity. What this new theory suggests is that there is not a singularity there, but instead that it just behaves very similar to one.

It's actually not as mind bending as you might think.

Quantum mechanics is "Time Symmetrical" meaning that, the laws of physics work the same irrelevant of the direction of time.
This is only at the quantum scale so real world stuff doesn't work so hot.
But take a quantum particle falling into a blackhole...
If the blackhole consumed it, destroying all information about it... if you reversed time, the particle would never exist, and never be ejected back into space.
If, however, time slows as it approached the blackhole and the particle never actually crossed the event horizon... then if you reverse time, time would speed up and the particle would eventually be flung away.

This all depends on you accepting the standard model, and the current interpenetration of quantum physics. They are becoming more rock solid every day however, it would take some pretty amazing discoveries to break them.