Hell, geneticists won't even accept that a FLOOD of hormones throughout our development from blastocyst onward that spur dimorphism, change the development of significant parts of the human anatomy, the voice, musculature, hell even the very skeletal structure itself has *any* impact on mental abilities, strengths, weaknesses etc in any way.

If they won't admit something so fundamental because it's taboo, how could they possibly admit that ethnicities have different strengths and weaknesses?

This merely pushes engagement ranges out once again. WWI riflemen were trained to shoot at hundreds of yards, in fact the sight-system on the old WWI bolt-action rifles is often stepped out to crazy ranges like 1200 yards. (Not that they'd actually hit anything.) It's only with the advent of general-issue personal weapons with rapid fire capability that aimed-fire ranges have shrunk in the modern era. (Some would say that they shrunk to what typical engagement ranges were ANYWAY.)

Now, the conventional wisdom of shooting from 500 yards instead of 100 yards is shooter safety, as it gives the advantage to the shooter - the reply-fire (even if it's of large volume) is likely to be reflexive, hasty and (normally) unlikely to hit anything 500y away.

This is no longer necessarily true. Counter-sniper systems are getting better every day - more sophisticated, quicker, and more accurate - meaning .50 cal or heavier suppressive fire can land on the shooter's position as quickly as 0.75 seconds from registering the incoming shot.

What this means only is that infantry combat is truly entering the computer age.

Human reflexes have been recognized to be largely too slow to perform any but the grossest weapons-release functions for air and (some) naval combat, this now means that even for infantry combat we're going to have automated rifles firing on targets, and automated systems firing back - both quicker, and better than people could do it.

The existing canal has been widened, and there are alternative plans for the next step of increase, but nobody has moved forward because the economics just don't make sense.

Further, despite the breathless headline, this is likely to be about as realistic as cold fusion. There are HUGE engineering problems with the plan for the Nicaragua canal, not to mention massive ecological ones. The Chinese group allegedly signing up for this has NO history in mega-engineering projects, and is apparently little more than a boutique venture-cap agency. Finally, there's no REASON for the canal - US East Coast ports are nowhere near being able to handle such ships as would require that scale of canal....which is expected by actual experts in the field to cost north of $100 bn, not the $40bn mentioned.

There is, quite literally nothing of substance to this plan, nor even any plans of substance expected. Sure, if China just wants to buy a canal, they have the cash. Then again, unless they care to ignore the international community, there are a host of other decade+ hurdles that would need to be crossed for it not to be an environmental catastrophe.

Let's look at an INDUSTRY trade publication, instead of a "rah rah China" periodical:
http://www.joc.com/maritime-ne...

It *would * be amusing to see how the US Navy would literally shit themselves to have a massive Pacific/Atlantic canal controlled politically by China.

Nonsense, an editorial screed by the New Yorker is meaningless. And if you want to bring context into it, you'll lose even harder.

Firstly, judicial review wasn't even a principle until Marbury v Madison in 1803. So we're talking about the 19th century only.

In cases in the 19th Century, the Supreme Court ruled pretty much only that the Second Amendment does not bar state regulation of firearms. (For example, in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 553 (1875), the Court stated that the Second Amendment âoehas no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government,â and in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886), the Court reiterated that the Second Amendment âoeis a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States.â )

Although most of the rights in the Bill of Rights have been selectively incorporated into the rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and thus cannot be impaired by state governments, the Second Amendment has never been so incorporated.

It's only since 1939 United States v Miller, that federal court decisions considering the Second Amendment have largely interpreted it as preserving the authority of the states to maintain militias - not the '150 year history' stated in the deliberately-misleading text of the quoted article.

(much of the above is clipped verbatim from http://www.loc.gov/law/help/se...)

In fact, it's ONLY in the latter 20th Century that we've even HAD this debate, as all constitutional commentary and understanding previous to that was universal in its understanding of the 2nd Amendment as an individual right, *not* dependent on being in a militia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Of course, you further disregard that according to the US code, all males from 17-44 *are* by default in the militia. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311)

Isn't this just the anthropic principle at work?

Yes, the action of these worms kept oxygen levels at "just the right level" for animals and other species to evolve...but isn't it simpler to expect that (lacking these worms, and with I suppose the much-higher oxygen levels) some other feedback mechanism would have eventually kicked in and THEN life would have evolved around that norm instead?

Obviously, with a sample size of precisely one, it's hard to say.

The US Constitution is only about 4 pages, 4400 words (and the bulk of that is structural & procedural minutiae about the US government).
The role of the USSC is simply resolving if a law does or does not conform to the US Constitution.

Given those relatively limited boundaries, it shouldn't be that complex of an issue to predict algorithmically the results of a given judicial ruling, one would think. (The devil's in the details about parsing meaning and context.)

Of course, I believe phrases like "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" are indisputably clear, and I'm astonished that people can find convoluted ways to try to tear it apart syntactically.and semantically.

Not to trivialize the little buggers' reflexes, but this can't have been entirely unpredicted?
Human quick-fire nerve channels transmit signals at 100m/s, so, considering it's nearly 1m from my fingertip to my brain, that's 20 milliseconds right there from finger to brain back to finger for the reaction. That same distance in a fly is what, perhaps 0.2mm? That means his signal-time is 0.004 milliseconds unless I've misplaced a 0 in there somewhere.
Not to mention, I'd expect that there's something to be said for the efficiency of function in the CPU, as it were. A brain evolved for perhaps 8 'tasks' in total (walk, fly, seek food, eat, seek mate, reproduce, recognize danger, flee danger?) would likely be intrinsically quicker-processing at any of those tasks than one that is (one hopes) substantially more complex?

"...you'll get more or less the same results..."
You won't be $60,000/year poorer, however.

That quote is nonsensical.
"Solar power is the winner!"....at being environmentally friendly, not cheap or efficient.
"Solar power provides up to 20 years of power for a single carbon investment" what an absurd metric? So if I built a power plant, and "in one investment" dumped 50 years worth of coal piles around it, it would be better than solar, by this measure?
"(a feat which) cannot be duplicated by any other commonly used type of energy production"....other than wind. You might want to check what the phrase 'cannot be duplicated by any other' means.

It's "secret" in the same sense that Zimmerman was a "white man" ...because race-baiting is a surefire way to gin up an audience.

To hell with the facts. And consequences. Nobody pays us to pay attention to those.

I believe that the phrase "The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions" has always been applicable.

Or Thomas Moore's (apocryphal) dialogue from A Man For All Seasons:
"Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

Google too tough for you?
http://nypost.com/2011/04/17/h...
"US Attorney General Eric Holder and his brother failed to pay the property taxes on their childhood home in Queens, which they inherited last August after their mother died, The Post has learned.
And because their ailing mom, Miriam, was already behind on two quarterly tax bills when she succumbed to illness on Aug. 13, the charges went unpaid for more than a year â" growing to $4,146.
It wasnâ(TM)t until The Post confronted Holder last week about the delinquency that he and younger brother William Holder finally paid up Friday..."

And as for Geithner, one might expect the man appointed TREASURY SECRETARY to be fairly careful about his taxes? Don't we kinda hope those guys are obsessive about numbers and details?

1963 called, wondered where the imminent apocalypse was?

The media doesn't bat an eye when the president's treasury secretary or attorney general are found guilty of tax evasion. Why would we expect that they conform to any other standard for other members of the administration?

Tell me that this doesn't scream for implementation with porn?