Read this:

http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed900

If you still have questions, read it again. And have a nice day.

-b

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians

Skip down to the section on mexico, probably skip the nazi stuff. There are people being dicks to each other everywhere for every reason. It's perfectly reasonable, then, for christians to be someone's whipping boy somewhere.

It doesn't make it right, it doesn't excuse retribution or martyrdom, but that's the way it is.

Things get further complicated if you look at intra-christian fighting such as protestants vs catholics in ireland...

-b

You must watch this, if you haven't already:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bar3GOzDNzg

Happy holidays! Hehe.

-b

I disagree. I know a couple of guys who play WoW: One of them plays casually, one or two hours per week (and he is in a relationship; before that he played much more). The other guy plays WoW on the order of 80+ hours per week.

After a few years of working with them, I'd estimate that the amount of shit you take as a (male) wow player is proportional to the square of the number of hours/week you spend playing. It really defines the way people think about you, not to mention that you already have little to no social life for others to get to know you better.

On the other hand, the two women who play (one plays WoW, the other one plays some game I don't know) enjoy an insult-free world when they're not playing. Maybe it's just where I live or something, but I can't see any guy giving shit to any girl for any reason outside of relationship issues. Maybe other girls secretly attack them, I don't know- All I know is that if you went so far as to question a woman's outfit or driving- let alone what she does in most of her spare time- you will be ostracized and carry a permanent black mark on your reputation.

God that seems so petty and childlike when I read it back. Welcome to the upper midwest! Minnesota Nice!

-b

I seem to recall that my older Honda had something called a 'radio condenser' or something similar linked in with the electrical system. It was supposed to stop the EMF from the spark plugs/solenoids/etc and if I recall correctly from my old haynes guide, the car wouldn't start without it.

So this is just a question for anyone who works in the field: what effect, if any, does broadcasting and drawing current from a car's electrical system have on these hotspots?

I'm just curious because the wireless things in my house seem to slow down all the time for things like my microwave, furnace, tv, etc being on.

-b

This opens up a really gray area in terms of medical ethics. Here:

There are many documented cases of people being revived after prolonged (over one hour) 'death' caused by exposure to cold with few side-effects. However, and this is a BIG however- those people were "killed" by the cold; that is, they did not fall victim to leukemia and suddenly die, falling into icy water.

So...

The obvious(?) answer is to freeze people who are *near* death. Well, that's kind of murder/euthanasia according to the laws on the books. Without that particular issue, yeah, this would work great. But we'd have to come to accept this as preservation instead of euthanasia. We could work it until the chances of coming out of it alive were the same as surviving open-heart surgery or something comparable, but I think there would still be that mental/emotional block. Not to mention that critically-ill/hospice patients are already fragile. "Gramp is still alive but we're going to freeze him," still has a funeral feel. The person is, in effect, dying until revived when whatever criteria were met. If we don't cure cancer (for example) in our lifetime, then that *is* a funeral for the patient's family and friends.

-b

These may be useful to you:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/insurgency/etc/graph.html

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/12/iraq_by_the_numbers.php

I can't speak of afghanistan, but in iraq the insurgent attacks were higher and more effective:

-when the ground was dry (moving around in iraq during the rainy season is a nightmare)
-lots of blowing dust in the air, drastically reducing visibility
-around dusk
-toward the end of ramadan

That's just a taste of all the factors that you'd have to account for to get an accurate map of insurgent behavior. Even then, I think it'd be pretty useless, since they are not a regular army and do not usually coordinate among cells. Maybe they want to attack, but the shipment from libya isn't here yet, so they wait for that but now the americans are getting suspicious so they launch all 20 of their libyan mortars at once and high-tail it out of there. Seems like a major, coordinated attack when in reality things are very different.

Guaranteed to make your brain hurt.

-b

Ehhhh... I don't think so.

A series of searches of "x insurgents killed" yields:

2= 14,700
3= 30,700
4= 164,000
5= 20,000 results
10= 160,000
15= 64,000
20= 306,000
25= 41,000
30= 58,400
31= 10
32= 75,400
33= 4,460
34= 26,400
35= 36,000
40= 57,000
41= 484
42= 28,400
43= 9
44= 1
45= 9,180

I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions about how many insurgents are killed at once. How do you decide when an incident starts and ends? Operations can last days. How close do they have to be to each other when they die? I can almost guarantee that we are taking out insurgents one by one or two by two for the most part. They don't run around in packs of 30, they sneak at night in pairs.

That's just my experience, though. Keep your fun little "23" theory.

-b

In addition:

Actinium, americium, Barium, berkelium, beryllium, bohrium, cadmium, cesium, calcium, californium, cerium, chromium, curium, darmstadtium, dubnium, dysprosium, einsteinium, erbium, europium, fermium, francium, gadolinium, gallium, germanium, hafnium, hassium, helium, holmium, indium, iridium, lawrencium, lithium, lutetium, magnesium, meitnerium, mendelevium, neodymium, neptunium, niobium, nobelium, osmium, palladium, plutonium, polonium, potassium, praseodymium, promethium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, rhodium, roentgenium, rubidium, ruthenium, rutherfordium, samarium, scandium, seaborgium, selenium, sodium, strontium, technetium, tellurium, terbium, thallium, thorium, thulium, titanium, uranium, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium, zirconium.

VS:

Aluminum, lanthanum, molybdenum, platinum, tantalum.

I can see why some people would assume that a -ium suffix would be proper.

Aluminum should rightly be called aluminum not for reasons of 'sounding latin' but by way of the standard of using an element's oxide name to determine the pure element's suffix.

From Wikipedia:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology)

List of element name etymologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_etymologies

Also of note: The Art of Chemistry: Myths, Medicines, and Materials by Arthur Greenberg

-b

Not to mention that we could do much better using modern materials, computers, and manufacturing. If you sifted through the blueprints, updating everything with modern techniques, you'd end up with an entirely new spacecraft that only superficially resembled the original.

Another reason we don't build another cutty sark today is that we can fill the Cutty Sark's intended role with much better replacements.

I don't see the problem with viewing lift vehicles as commodities. We can purchase a range of lift capacity vehicles from the russians, french, japanese, etc.

-b

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willingness_to_pay

If you willing to dish out $500+ per night for a double queen room, then you're probably ok with $13 per night wifi and $32 cheeseburgers (Actual prices from a hilton I stayed at).

I was sent on a short-notice (36 hours) emergency deployment to hawaii a while back; base housing was under construction so we had to stay downtown. I wound up living in the Waikiki Beach Hilton for about 2 months. That sounds great, and for the most part it was, but I was an E-5 living in an environment designed for the very rich. I had a nice view of the beach, yes, but like I said earlier the internet prices were outrageous. It turned out to be much cheaper to find a local t-mobile store and buy a usb wireless internet dongle. A month later I returned it and ultimately wound up paying only for the one month of service with no termination fee (under 30 days trial period).

-b

Yikes- I can't imagine what the screen of my phone would look like after I tried to use it in a mcdonalds.

It'd smell like fries for a month.

-b

Here is something most people don't know about gender equality in the military. To get a perfect score on the air force pt test, an 18-year-old would have to perform according to these stats:

Female:
1.5 mile run in under 11:06
42 pushups in one minute
51 situps in one minute
(and have a 29.5 inch abdominal circumference, but we'll ignore that)

Male:
1.5 mile run in under 9:36
62 pushups in one minute
55 situps in one minute
(32.5 inch waist)

An 18-25 year old woman has to run 1.5 miles at the same speed as a 50-54 year old man and perform the pushups and situps that a 40-44 year old man has to perform. The 50-54 year old woman has to run the 1.5 miles in 14:24 (a light jog) and is required to do 16 pushups and 30 situps. A man of the same age has to perform 39 pushups and 43 situps.

These are the official standards taken from http://www.airforce-pt.com/ although they can be found elsewhere.

This is a test that we have to take twice each year in order to keep our jobs, whether we are in security forces or administration or maintenance. It's not an especially difficult test to pass if you keep in decent shape, however each test results in quite a few failures and marginals. It affects your promotions (pay) and eligibility for airman of the year boards or other decorations. So it's a big deal.

I fix jets. The air force has determined in its wisdom that in order to do my job, I need to ideally be able to do 57 pushups in one minute. If I was a woman, my goal would be 40.

Now, this is either a slap in the face to me (making me work harder for my money) or a slap in the face to women (claiming that they are unable to meet the same fitness goals as men).

One option is to say, "Well, women ARE physically different. They have a right to different fitness standard." And I'd say well then why are they getting paid as much as me or even being allowed to do my job if you are going to state outright that women aren't as strong as men? I'm supposed to be able to carry my wounded buddy; There is no way in hell 90% of the women I work with could carry me, let alone drag me. I have to be this strong to accomplish this task, yet it magically becomes 30% easier when a woman tries to do it? Give me a break.

The other option is to say, "If you make the standards universal, you shut out a majority of the women trying to join the military, which is somehow bad." My response would be, "Good." Not because I don't want women in the military. That's not the issue here. Again, let me say: This is not about whether women deserve to be in the military. They undoubtedly do. However, I would like the woman working beside me to be tough. If that cuts down 50% of the women in the military, so be it. I would have nothing against those women working out, getting in better shape, and reapplying and being accepted.

It goes without saying that this standard should apply to men as well (and it already is).

And in the real world, many women totally smoke the official fitness goals. I watched a woman knock out nearly 100 pushups in a minute. Make the standards universal and let women compete with men as equals. I think it's disrespectful for a woman to have to say, "I get paid as much as my male coworker, and I get equal rank and privileges- and I got them by achieving lower standards than my own father would be held to."

-b

The most efficient solution would be to speed it up at its aphelion or perihelion; you'll get the most bang for your buck in terms of orbital mechanics.

from wikipedia:

You only need to nudge an asteroid a tiny bit (depending on how far away it is) to produce effective course changes.

-b

Your lack of confidence in the nuclear option is... misguided.

http://www.aere.iastate.edu/no_cache/events-seminars/article/article/2806/2506.html

When scientists talk about using nukes to move asteroids, they are usually talking about using the enormous heat and other radiation from the blast to ablate one side of the asteroid; this will cause the asteroid to move in the opposite direction (per newton's third law).

-b