Like a demolition charge, it's utility is pretty limited, but when the right (or wrong, depending on perspective) situation comes up, there's no substitute....

Interesting that you'd pick those names. A quick google for wealth of US Presidents (adjusted for inflation), puts Bush at 15 (the elder) or 17 (the younger).

And this is as opposed to, say, John Kennedy (1), Lyndon Johnson (7), FDR (9), Clinton (10), who all have that peculiar D after their name.

And note that Obama is #21. Hardly poor by any definition of the term....

Note that I ignored the rest of the top 10 because they served far enough back that the Party they were part of had no real similarities to the current version of the Parties of the same name (once upon a time, the Republicans were the anti-slavery Party, not the Democrats, for instance).

a good discression

I really hope you meant "an indiscretion" here, otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.

So, enquiring minds want to know: are you semiliterate, or are you trying to say something else entirely?

What I find more interesting is why stars rarely collide?

Too much empty space.

This.

Consider that for two stars to hit each other, they essentially have to pass within one stellar diameter of each other (absent gravity, but they're moving at over escape speed relative to each other, so gravity won't enlarge that distance a whole hell of a lot).

So, one stellar diameter is ~1.4 Gm for Sol. Nearest star is 40,000,000 Gm away. If that nearest star were headed toward us (it's not), it's course would have to be within 0.01 seconds of arc of our Sun in order to actually hit it.

And stars farther away have an even smaller course window to be in to smack us....

What you describe is pretty much the way the US was originally intended to be. The Feds handle standards (like weights and measures) and foreign policy, pretty much everything else handled at the level of the individual States.

Alas, the Feds have been working hard to move every decision to Washington for a long time now, whether it makes sense to do so or not....

Good idea! Tax everyone on net assets, not income.

That way the barrier to entry to middle and upper classes will be raised enormously. wouldn't want any of that riff-raff at the country club, now would we?

So, part of their case is that a FB guy mentioned modular hospitals last year, and they're the only ones who do that sort of thing?

Sounds a bit thin to me....

GenIIa reactors like the Russian VVER-1200 and the uprated French M310 designs can swing their output by 30% in fifteen minutes or so, given modern control systems and a few decades of experience in running such PWRs and BWRs.

Hmm, without mentioning numbers, I'll offer that a nuclear submarine can do larger transients faster.

Why the fuck dont they just put up a load of solar panels... $10 Billion will buy you a LOT of them.

Price per watt for solar is in the $5 range, not counting discounts for massive purchases.

But without moderately massive amounts of energy storage, a 2GW solar facility won't really do you all that much good.

Ultimately, this is about baseload as opposed to peak load. Solar can supply peak load, it doesn't do baseload nearly so well. Nuclear is the reverse.***

***caveat: it IS possible to design a nuclear power plant to handle large transients. Nuclear powered ships use such reactors. That particular type of reactor is, to say the least, uncommon for commercial plants.

Did he?

Or did he just say he was going to while hiding it better?

Note that the atomic bombs saved the lives of millions of Japanese by removing six cities from the "bomb these places into the stone age list". Apparently, the people making the bomb wanted to get a good idea of the effects without having to take into account the effects of prior bombings. This included Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were spared the years of bombings (and their attendant casualties) that other cities had to endure.

Note further that the death tolls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined were lower than that of the firebombing of Tokyo.

Note, finally, that when generals talk about saving lives, they're generally (if you'll excuse the pun) talking about the lives of their men, not their enemy's men. Saving the lives of the enemy is someone else's job....

Addendum: just curious - where in Japan would you be finding "plenty of uninhabited or low population areas"?

Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?

Not sure what good it would do to sneak up on a crowbar (they've never been particularly alert anyway), but i stocked up my crowbar collection this past week...

But perhaps the set of circumstances that would create an environment that lasted long enough for life to be created and evolve to this point are wildly, vanishingly improbable. Perhaps the only reason we think it should have happened lots of other places is that we are the ones doing the looking, and we don't realize just how rare we actually are.

Note that if the odds were one trillion to one against, then we could reasonably expect 30 BILLION civilzations in the observable Universe.

Of course, those odds only give about one chance in four of there being a technological civilization in any particular large galaxy like this one....

You're assuming that the author is being truthful about its availability and not merely lying or minimizing in order to protect his sales.

Quite a few years back, Tom Clancy wrote a book called "Sum of All Fears" about a bunch of terrorists building an H-bomb using Pu they recovered from an Israeli bomb lost during the '73 war.
Clancy's Afterward included this:

BLOCKQUOTE>It is generally known that nuclear secrets are not as secret as we would like - in fact, the situation is even worse than well-informed people appreciate. what required billions of dollars in the 1940s is much less expensive today. A modern personal computer has far more power and reliability than the first Eniac, and the "hydrocodes" which enable a computer to test and validate a weapon's design are easily duplicated. The exquisite machine tools used to fabricate parts can be had for the asking. When I asked explicitly for the specifications for the very machines used at Oak Ridge and elsewhere, they arrived Federal Express the next day. Some highly specialized items designed specifically for bomb manufacture may now be found in stereo speakers. The fact of the matter is that a sufficiently wealthy individual could, over a period of from five to ten years, produce a multistage nuclear device.

Based on what I learned about the subject as a young man, I see no particular reason to doubt him...