I remember thinking the very same thing while reading this guy's first opinion piece on the subject. I mean.. seriously. I'm all about people being able to freely express their opinions, but history didn't begin the day you were born, dude. It's strikes me as follows:

"ZOMFG! I totally just found this thing called... the 5th amendment, or something... and it... like... doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me because it says... like... bad people don't have to tell anybody that they did something bad, you know? And it's... like... a law and stuff. So I think we ought to change it."

If this kind of tripe passes for intelligent debate these days we're in trouble.

Prat, eh? I presume you're a Brit...
I shall forgive your apparent ignorance of American politics - or perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm a conservative in the context of American politics.
There are differences - some subtle, some significant - between the meaning of liberal and conservative in American vs. British politics.

I define 'big government' by the scope and breadth of its power over its governed. A government so powerful it can record virtually ALL of its citizen's electronic communications - and even decode supposedly private communications - is decidedly 'BIG'. If you disagree with this, fine... but you and I have nothing to discuss. It's not a meaningless phrase, however...

Liberal political ideology leads directly to government having these kinds of unchecked powers - that are sometimes secret and shrouded in mystery... Powers that will eventually be abused - no matter how good the intentions were at the start. Political leaders are not angels - they are humans who, like everybody else, are fallible, imperfect, greedy and power-hungry to one extent or another. Conservatism seeks to limit the scope and power of a centralized government - and guard against too few people gathering too much power unto themselves.

They weren't spying on the entire American population's communications the last time conservatives held any significant political power either.

Um.. huh? You just contradicted yourself. Do you not realize that 'liberal' and 'conservative' - in the political sense, in the U.S. - are words used to describe one's political philosophy on how much power government should have?

You fail at reading comprehension. Nowhere in my comment did I say that.

George W Bush was not remotely conservative. Dumbass.

...is why I'm a conservative.

This is the harvest we reap by sowing the seeds of big government my liberal friends.

Not if the NSA has what is effectively a key-logger installed on your machine.

Not disputing your area * depth calculation... or even factoring in ice vs. water density. No doubt there is a LOT of water there... I just figure there's more to calculating its liquid water yield (if it melted) than this simple calculation.... air included in the volume of ice (snow) and what-not.

The order-of-magnitude difference comes into how I'm interpreting the values for ice caps, glaciers, etc. in the website I referenced... It lists roughly 24 million cubic kilometers TOTAL... for all ice caps and glaciers everywhere. Your calculation was just for Greenland and Antarctica - and was on par with what the USGS website lists for the entire globe.

Meh... who knows. The USGS figures could be old. Forgive me for being skeptical. I'm just old enough remember when 'scientists' were warning of another impending ice age that would destroy civilization as we know it.

1. I don't know where your figures for mean depth of ice are coming from, but your calculations defy logic. It's a little more complex than multiplying the thickness of the ice by the surface area of a continent to calculate the volume of liquid water stored there. Also, your values for surface area, appear to include areas of ice shelf already in the ocean for both Antarctica and Greenland.

2. I got my value for the volume of water included in the polar ice caps and glaciers from http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html. While I still don't have 100% confidence in my government's ability to put together a bullet-proof presentation on these values... I'm going to assume whomever put these together did a little more research and math than multiplying two numbers together. Your calculations would put the total ice cap, glacier, permanent snow on the Earth an order of magnitude or more out of sync with the values reported here.

3. Common sense. Think. All that ice in Antarctica is not likely to melt in anything less than geologic time-scales... When the temperature at the Antarctic interior never gets above -25C even in the middle of summer... The melting ice would be the least of our problems if the global average temperature got high enough for it to do so... In other words, a few degree rise in temperature != automatic melting of Greenland and Antarctica.

I got curious... so I calculated the numbers based on the data I've got available... This is a VERY rough calculation... definitely not something I'd put fourth in any kind of scientific study... some rounding is present that could lead to a significant margin of error... but it should be enough to get a general idea of the numbers we are talking about here... By the way AC... There's no need to get ugly. We're just talking about silly numbers and math here.

Mean radius of the earth at sea-level: 6371 kilometers
Convert to meters: 6371 * 1000 = 6371000
Volume of the earth: (4/3) 3.14 * radius cubed ~= 1083206916845753600000 cubic meters
Volume of the earth with 20 meters added to radius = 1083217118167215900000 cubic meters
Difference: 10201321462300000 cubic meters
Subtract 30% (3060396438690000) to account for land area not covered by water
= 7,140,925,023,610,000 approximate total cubic meters of water required to raise sea-level by 20 meters.

If I've done my maths correctly, this equates to nearly TWO MILLION CUBIC MILES of water (1,713,200 cubic miles | 7,140,925 cubic kilometers)... and could easily surpass two million cubic miles if land inundation were taken into account.

Now... I did a little further looking and some - apparently credible - websites cite as much as 6-7 million cubic miles of ice caps, glaciers, permanent snow, etc... so it is plausible that my previous assertion that there isn't enough water on land to pull this off is incorrect. However - even if that's true - we'd have to lose a HUGE portion of it to melting... plus... I believe that 6-7 million figure includes ice caps and glaciers already in the water - which would not contribute to sea-level rise if they melted.

So... I'm just sayin... all the hand-wringing about sea-level rise is a bit overblown IMHO. Guess what! The Earth is a dynamic system. It changes over time. Get used to it! Chances are, if this EVER becomes a problem - you and I will have been dead far too long to give a rip about our beach house.

I did a rough calculation for this sort of thing a number of years ago... In fact, I may have even posted it here on /. - but I'm too lazy to search. My recollection is that the volume of water in discussion here - 20 meters of sea-level rise - is patently absurd. There simply isn't that much water on the entire planet that isn't ALREADY at or below sea-level. Consider a simplistic way of calculating the necessary volume of water required:

-Even though the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.. one could consider it so for the purposes of calculating the volume of water required for an AVERAGE of a 20 meter rise in sea-level globally... Therefore...
-Calculate the spherical volume of the globe given the average radius of the Earth at sea-level.
-Do the same with 20 meters added to the radius
-Subtract the first from the latter
-Subtract 30% from this value to account for land-mass not covered by water
-That would get you the approximate MINIMUM volume of water required (if the shore-lines remained in place they are now.. (Imagine walking to the ocean's edge now and a 20 meter wall of water held back by an invisible force field)
-Note: Accounting for additional shore-line inundation would require lots more math and access to elevation data and averages to which I don't have... but keep in mind - to get the same level of sea rise it would require that much MORE water. But if memory serves, draining every drop of surface water on-land (including every lake, river and glacier) wouldn't even come close to the first number. Only 30% of the Earth's surface is above present sea-level... and only a small fraction of that land is covered in any type of standing water (or ice). The oceans are just sooooooooooo very vast... and that's a LOT of surface area to pile an additional 20 meters of water on top of it.

A replica? Uh... That just doesn't make any sense to me. But, then, there are a lot of laws here and there that don't make any sense.

So, does that mean a handgun with, say, the hammer spring removed (or broken) is considered a replica and therefore illegal? Seems like that's one of those laws that would be easy to circumvent and difficult or impossible to enforce.

Huh?