Comment Re:Advanced? (Score 1) 95
Pollution occurs wherever there is life.
Indeed, the oxygen we breath is another life-form's pollution.
Pollution occurs wherever there is life.
Indeed, the oxygen we breath is another life-form's pollution.
I used to hold an attitude very much like yours, but I took some tests on this site
Congratulations, you've just been push-polled. Those tests aren't built to discover bias, they're built to convince you that you are biased.
Every time some man acts like an ass to some woman, it counters 10 men being perfectly civil. If you don't like it, try to keep your bro's in line. It turns out they're assholes, and no one likes assholes.
It turns out I neither have power, authority, or even influence over those "bros". So, you can take your collective guilt elsewhere; I'm not buying.
The only "special" insult they make to women is rape, because they know that will piss them off.
Really? Did they stop threatening male players with buggery?
we suck at knowing things, even when those things are big enough for us to see
Welcome to the real world where imperfect knowledge has been enshrined in a very useful philosophy we call "Science".
Science is just highly refined common sense. The fact that the biblical plague of smallpox has not been seen in the wild for decades convincingly demonstrates science knows enough to control it, what more do you need to know? Sure it may pop up somewhere after all these years, but even if that very unlikely* event was to occur we have already demonstrated we know how to deal with it and stop it spreading. So even though we can never know for sure that every last smallpox bug has been killed, we do know that as long as our current knowledge is passed on to the next generation, smallpox will never again cause human miseries of biblical proportions. This scant knowledge also tells us that smallpox (alone) would be a stupid choice for a biological weapon.
very unlikely* - Without special care smallpox does not survive for very long outside of a human host, the human body is it's unique natural habitat.
But we have one side ready for peaceful coexistence and the other side who wants only the total destruction of their enemies.
If you watch it for a few decades you will see the sides alternating, when Israel makes a peaceful move in conjunction with Fatah, Hamas retaliates with rockets. When Hamas declares and keeps a 2yr ceasefire, Israel lays the boots in. Israel does want a 2 state solution but only if they can veto who's running it, in the meantime they call it an occupation territory so that it doesn't screw up the demographics of a jewish state, similar to the way S.Africa denied the black a vote to keep their "white demographic" intact. Fatah has been widely seen as Israeli puppets by people in Gaza since the death of Arafat. The Israelis came close to a resolution with Arafat in the 90's but he backed out at the last minute over the "right of return", Arafat wasn't the only one punished because of that act of political disobedience.
The situation also has similarities with the British occupation of Ireland in the early 20th century, the Brits solved that mess in the 80's and 90's by talking the high moral ground of allowing full participation on the political side while simultaneously infiltrating the IRA and bringing members of the military wing to justice via criminal courts and local police. Trust has to start somewhere and Israel are supposed to be the grown up government in this equation.
Hamas cannot defeat Israel, from a purely militarily POV Hamas is a nuisance largely of Israel's and Egypt's own making. When will Isreali soldiers follow the lead of the Brits in 1980's N. Ireland and remove their riot helmets while on street patrol. Replace the live ammo with rubber, swap real cannons for water cannons, stop shifting the border, stop evicting people and bulldozing homes that have been occupied for centuries by the same family, bring your own extremist dogs to heal to show the palestinians how it's done.
How so? What did it accomplish or change?
There's more than a touch of irony in military project that reached the ultimate high ground only to show us that the world domination game was not worth playing.
But I guess you had to be there to really grasp the significance of Apollo's role in the cold war. Personally I think the 1968 "earthrise" photo from apollo 8 was the most significant contribution, it's often credited with igniting the environmental movement (along with the book "Silent Spring").
The notion of the "pale blue dot" (google it) came out of that photo and exploded in our cultural consciousness several years before Carl Sagan gave it an eloquent voice. The Earthrise photo made it very clear in a lot of people's minds that there is nowhere else to go in the foreseeable future. It was clear that mankind had run out of territory to conquer on Earth and it asked the question at the height of the Vietnam war - why are we still squabbling over the spoils?
Earthrise and the PBDot are now popular cultural icons, they say something to us in the same way a red cross says something to a soldier on a battlefield.
I know, Occam's Razor would explain this by simply having all airline employees be psychic, but in fact, when you call and talk to someone, they note what you talked about, then when you call and talk to an entirely different person who magically knows what you talked about before, they're just reading that note. OMG!
I've never actually had this experience when dealing with an airline; I typically have to explain the situation to each employee, often more than once.
The National Geographic that came out with the wonderful moon maps and photos was a treasure of my childhood.
I still have a copy of that issue.
The "mankind" thing was just poetry for a domestic audience, read Kennedy's speech and it's crystal clear that the Apollo project was a military response to the "threat" posed by sputnik.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.