As another poster pointed out, it's just posturing for anyone to say they are going to shoot down the drones.
Not from the ground. From another drone. Don't even need to shoot, just get above it and drop something sufficiently nasty on its rotors. Collect the wreckage and sell what's salvageable...maybe even in your Amazon store.
I have one that can carry 2kg...
They're talking 25 kg / 55lbs pound load here, so you're off by more than an order of magnitude.
The problem is where do you draw the line?
Why is there a line to be drawn?
Photographer refuses to take photographs at a non-white wedding because of "religious" beliefs. Will take photos of any white ceremony.
And? Can the couple still get married? Can they find a photographer? Pretty sure they can. The photographer's bigotry does not pick anyone's pocket or break anyone's leg. It does not interfere with anyone's rights. Let him turn down paying customers and give opportunity to his competition, it's sort of a self-limiting problem.There is no need for any action here, any more than if a Catholic music composer accepts a commission from the diocese but doesn't accept a commission from the local synagogue (or from the Westborough Baptist Church).
Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that all things except what the state have decided are proper should be forbidden.
Yes, among enlightened people race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation should not matter. That does not imply that unenlightened people should be subject to criminal prosecution or lawsuits.
You should be permitted to discriminate in some areas because you should be permitted to do anything you want that does not interfere with the fundamental rights of others. Housing is a fundamental right, so you shouldn't be legally able to discriminate in renting out a house. But hiring a specific person to take your wedding pictures is not a fundamental right, so a photographer should be legally able to turn down a paying customer for whatever reason they want, even bigotry.
Doing the math with the wrong numbers isn't informative. You've ignored the atmospheric losses suffered by ground-based systems -- clouds, dust, the opacity of air. I think you're also being much more generous in estimating the potential lifetime of ground-based systems than space-based ones, which skews your numbers.
It may be that the gains are small enough to not justify the launch costs, though that depends on how much we value land taken up by solar arrays.
The fact that no attack occured gives the talking heads leeway to claim there was no "terrorist attack."
A terrorist is a person who attempts to bring about political change by "illegitimate" (i.e., non-state) violence.
Mass murder is only terrorism if it is an attack on a political entity, or is an attempt to scare a nation's population into something.
Unless someone says, "We're going to keep crash your planes until you do such-and-such", this isn't terrorism. There's no attempt to bring about political change involved, only murder, motive unknown.
Here is what is also true: greenpeace and other "green" organizations have been found to be taking millions of dollars in money from Russian oil interests, through shell corporations
Hey, you left out your link to a reliable source for this claim.
According to the GAO, $106 billion was spent by US government on climate research by 2010.
A total over an unstated number of years is meaningless. According to Forbes -- hardly a lefty source, and this is a denialist article -- the U.S. Government spent $32.5 billion on climate studies over 20 years between 1989 and 2009. That's $1.6 billion a year. About $5 per American per year. Accoridng to the GAO (notice the hyperlink, please starting using them, thanks) federal climate change acivities in 2010 were $8.8 billion, but that includes "technology to reduce emissions, science to better understand climate change, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes" -- so climate research is only a small part of that. Figure a quarter to a third of it is climate research. So we're looking at something on the order of $2 or $3 billion a year spent by the federal government on climate change research.
For comparison, the Iraq war was is estimated to have cost $1,100 billion in total.
Exxon Mobills's profits -- not revenues, profits -- last year were $32.5 billion. And that's just one company.
The Army's R&D budget -- not the whole military, just the Army -- is around $21 - 32 billion.Climate research funding is chump change. I kind of liked this line of bullshit better when it was "those scientists telling us smoking causes cancer are just riding the research gravy train!" At least it was a fresh and audacious sort of intellectual dishonesty then. Now it's just pathetic.
No warming for nearly twenty years.
How do people still believe "no warming" bullshit? There is no pause. Please stop speading misinformation. Thank you.
Unless you are in a concentration camp, suicidal ideation and behavior is a mental health symptom.
Really? So, say, a terminal cancer patient who's in constant pain and wants to die is not of sound mental health?
Or maybe you'd like to revise that statement and say that there are other conditions besides "concentration camp" where suicide may be a rational response?
You don't need a gun at your nightstand, it's never going to be a matter of seconds that saves you.
You do realize that when you make a statement like that, it takes only a single counterexample to prove you wrong?
Or this: "Police said Henry broke into the house and began to attack Moreno until her daughter, Jayda Milsap, 11, shot Henry twice with a handgun." Now there's a story about kids and guns you probably didn't see on the news. If this mom had kept her gun locked so her daughter couldn't get to it, they both might be dead now.
So I'm sorry to inform you of this, but when it comes to violent crime the world does not work the way you think that it does. When an armed person is suddenly and without prior warning in your home, you are in a combat situation. And in a combat situation, seconds matter.
Whether the risk of being prepared for such a situation does or does not outweigh the risks of having an unlocked gun around depends on your risk of home invasion, who lives in the house, who visits the house, and so on. A universal assessment is impossible. But in making the choice you need to be aware that there is a tremendous selection bias in the stories that are covered in the media: defensive firearms use does not receive nearly the coverage that the accidental shooting of a kid does, but is orders of magnitude more common.
Why would the college have any reason to discipline the students, especially if this is a public college
A fraternity is an officially recognized campus group. On some campuses they even have special housing. Yanking that privilege when the group behaves like a bunch of assholes is not censorship. It's not the same as belonging to Joe Bob's Gaming and Bar-B-Q society which meets every Sunday in Joe Bob's garage.
Chanting about lynching could be seen as a credible threat of violence against African Americans. It is a grey area and would depend on context.
For a student to saying "I don't like black people" is asinine and ignorant...but certainly not a crime and should not be a disciplinary offense. (For a professor or a TA to express such bigotry is a different matter. Still not a crime but a bigot isn't qualified to do that job.)
As a corollary to that point, why are we not allowed to WATCH the video and judge for ourselves?
Who's stopping you? It's here.
Not all speech is protected.
Yes. It is. It amazes me that people still cite Holmes's "fire in a crowded theater" bullshit from Schenck v. United States, where the SCOTUS trampled over Amendment I to criminalize an anti-draft protest.
If you shout "fire" in a theater when there is in fact a fire, you could be a hero. If you're on stage as part of the performance and fire is part of the plot of the play, you can shout "fire!". If shouting "fire" in a theater causes people to get trampled, the fault is on the architects or operators of the theater for not providing adequate exit routes, not the speaker. The only rightful liability someone falsely crying "fire" falsely has is civil, not criminal.
Using anonymous speech to say things that are harmful to OTHERS is cowardly and generally speaking not protected by the First Amendment nor should it.
Speech can only harm a person if it is credible. (E.g., I start a credible rumor about you, your reputation is damaged.) Anonymous speech is not credible.
And there is no exception in the First Amendment for "harmful" speech. Nor should there be. Sometimes speech should be harmful to people. "John Doe broke the law!" is harmful to John Doe, but if it's true it should certainly be protected.
Liberal folks, this is your issue. The conservatives and libertarians are all over preserving the right to speech. Where is your support for the same?
Liberals are by definition "all over preserving the right to speech".
Authoritarian progressives are not.
Authoritarian progressives have taken over some of the political and social organs often associated in popular thought with "liberalism". I think this can be traced back to the 1988 Presidential campaign, when Bush attacked Dukakis as a "card carrying member of the ACLU", and rather than pushing back with "yes, I support civil liberties as enshrined in the Bill of Rights -- you don't? Shame on you!", the Democrats began a retreat from those values.
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
