TL:DR I got kicked out of college for videotaping the lectures without permission.

That's been been tried before... the results usually aren't so good.

I'm guessing you meant 1800 arcseconds, unless the moon really let itself go while I wasn't looking and is now several thousand light years across. :)

Exactly... he could have done it a hundred times, in which case he would have stolen five whole dollars worth of electricity. This is super serious stuff, people.

Congratulations... by keeping a gun in your home, you've substantially increased the risk that you, your loved ones, or your neighbors will die by accidental shooting, suicide, or homicide. On the other hand, you've done virtually nothing to reduce the risk of being a victim of a crime, nor have you reduced the risk of being injured during a home break-in.

Of course, those are just the statistics... no doubt you are exceptional and much more careful than all those other guys who brought a gun home thinking it would make them safer.

Funny... I use Europe as evidence that the conservative obsession with austerity as a solution for recession is a recipe for failure. The Greeks have been implementing increasingly brutal austerity measures for years, and yet (as Keynes would have predicted) their deficit is only getting worse as revenues collapse faster than they can cut spending.

Nevertheless, despite the abysmal failure of the austerity measures in Europe, the conversation in America is all about cutting spending rather than stimulating growth. It's like conservatives "don't have the ability to learn anything that they haven't been subjected to themselves."

Who is "them"? Seriously... name one country we'd realistically need these planes to fight.

Russia and China have nukes and missiles. Just try "blowing their radars to shit", and watch as the resulting war immediately escalates way beyond the "planes dog-fighting in the air" stage. Besides, war with China simply isn't going to happen... not while they (quite literally) own our asses, and manufacture all our stuff.

So who does that leave? Iran and North Korea are decades behind our existing tech... hell, Iran's latest "stealth fighter" was an obviously fake plastic model. Mighty hard to justify an arms race when the opponent is a one-legged cripple and we've got a 30 year head start.

The only countries that have planes that could possibly dog fight against ours (Europe, Canada, etc.), also happen to be our allies. I guess we could hope one of them turns evil so that we'll finally have an excuse for needing these fancy, useless weapons.

Ever notice how in movies like Top Gun they never really identified which country they were fighting against in the climactic dog-fighting scene? Even in a fictional setting it was too difficult for the writers to identify a realistic enemy for our fighters to play with. In reality, we're much more likely to need ground-support craft like the A10, if not drones, for the kinds of air battles we actually engage in.

How did this get moderated insightful? We're not talking about "getting the world to buy" a trillion dollar coin. This isn't even about the willingness of other nations to extend credit to the US and buy American debt, which they're quite willing to do.

This whole mess is about Congress threatening to default on paying for the debts they had previously voted to accumulate via an arcane "debt ceiling" rule, and Obama potentially using a procedural loophole to raise that artificial ceiling and deprive them of that weapon. It's equivalent to moving money from my left pocket to my right... it doesn't actually change how rich or in-debt I am, but it makes a difference procedurally.

Incidentally, I agree that reducing the deficit is important in the long term... ideally we should be running surpluses during times of growth. During times of contraction and crisis, however, it's a remarkably stupid idea to reduce spending by hacking away at the safety net, as we're seeing in Greece in recent years.

I wish I had mod points... well said!

If by "growth" you mean primarily population growth, this is balderdash.

Historically speaking, the way the US became an economic giant was by increasing productivity at rates far higher than mere population growth (thereby raising living standards and income per capita.) Things like mechanization, industrialization, automation, and the information age have made it possible for an individual in each successive generation to produce more than individuals from prior generations. If the US economy only grew at the same pace as the population, then on a per capita basis that's the same as standing still, which is clearly not the case for most of US history.

In fact, I'd argue it was the lack of population that fueled American innovation since early colonial times. When confronted with vast resources and a shortage of labor, the early pioneers were forced to develop the technologies that could amplify any one individual's efforts. (At least in the North. In the South they attempted to solve the labor shortage through the importation of slaves.) Contrast this with Europe, which had the inverse problem of large population and limited land, which made increasing individual productivity less of a priority.

If the US population stopped growing today, economic growth would still be fueled by gains in productivity, just as it always has been.

We weren't in Afghanistan before 9/11, and yet Al Qaeda used it as a base of operations anyway. Furthermore, leaving Afghanistan won't make it suddenly peaceful and terrorist-free... much the opposite, in fact. Premature withdrawal gives us the worst of both worlds: all the hatred engendered by the original invasion and occupation, plus a power vacuum in the region created by leaving the work of reconstruction half-finished. Sounds like the perfect environment for incubating more terrorists. Pretending we can simply walk away without negative consequences is naive at best.

That said, I agree that our meddling in the Middle East has caused enormous problems, and the less meddling we do the better off we'll be. The problem is that there's no easy solution to the current predicament: occupation with troops, drone strikes, or complete withdrawal... they each have drawbacks.

Number of US soldiers killed before the courageous Americans cut and run from Vietnam: 47,000

Number of French soldiers killed before the army mutinied in WWI (refusing to engage in pointless offensives, fighting only to maintain defense): 978,000

Talk all you like about French cowardice, my dear armchair General, but when the going gets tough it is the Americans who get going... straight for the exits.

Letâ(TM)s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, using the Chevy Volt as an example. In electric mode, the Volt gets about 22 kWh / 100 km, (so it is one of the least efficient electric vehicles out there⦠the best ones get 10 kWh / 100 km). Coal power generation produces about 1 kg of CO2 per kWh, so the âoeCO2 efficiencyâ of the Volt on an entirely coal-fed diet is 22 kg CO2 / 100 km.

The closest analog for the Volt that I can find is the Chevy Cruze, which the EPA rated about 9.8 L / 100 km for inner city driving. (Please feel free to correct me if you find a gasoline car which is a closer match for the size / power of the Volt). Burning gasoline produces approximately 2.4 kg of CO2 per L, so the CO2 efficiency of the Cruze is 23 kg CO2 / 100 km. Even given our unrealistic assumption of 100% coal-derived power, the electric vehicle comes out (slightly) ahead.

Keep in mind, coal accounts for only 45% of American electricity, while cleaner-burning natural gas accounts for another 23%. (The remainder comes from nuclear, hydro, wind, etc.) Natural gas produces 0.2 kg CO2 per kWh, as opposed to 1 kg, so in a more realistic calculation the Volt gets about 10 kg CO2 / 100 km, which more than twice as efficient as the gasoline car! The comparison gets even more favorable to electric when you consider other, more efficient electric cars (the Volt is one of the worst).

I should also point out one other way my quick calculation above is biased in favor of gasoline: the CO2 number for electricity includes losses due to transmission and distribution, while the number for gasoline does not (I only counted the CO2 of the gasoline that ends up in your tank.) For a true apples-to-apples comparison, we should include the considerable CO2 emissions that come with refining and shipping petrol.

Iâ(TM)ll admit my numbers are rather simplistic, so if you can point out any errors Iâ(TM)ve made I would welcome the correction. However, it seems to me pretty clear that you have no idea what you're talking about when you say it is "obvious" that electric cars are not greener than their gasoline-burning predecessors.

They conduct their launches from a marine platform that they tow out to sea using the fully functional submarine that they built for a previous project.

Also, in reply to the surprising number of negative responses questioning why a bunch of enthusiasts should build a giant rocket...
a) because it's awesome, and
b) because they can. /. is a community of hackers (in the proper sense of the term), and building your own manned rocket qualifies as an epic hack. Technology shouldn't be just a shiny black box made by a corporation somewhere for us to consume in the approved ways... it should be something we tear apart and put back together, modify it and use it to unconventional ways that were never intended.

The world is full of black boxes, and full of people who want to tell us never to peak inside. Good on these guys for ignoring the nay-sayers and having the courage to build something awesome.

Now it's your turn to back up your assertions. While I agree that there has been a significant power difference between the genders for most (if not all) of human history, that is different from saying women had not much choice in the matter of who they ended up with. Humans are relatively unique among the primates in using pair-bonding as the dominant reproductive strategy (where almost every male has a chance to pass on his genes), rather than the alpha-male hierarchy seen in chimp, gorilla, and other ape societies. Genghis Khan is notable because he is the exception, rather than the rule, in our social organization.

Moreover, I would argue that human intelligence, and much of the culture that flows from it, is a sexually-selected trait, much like the feathers on a peacock's tail... females are generally attracted to men who can conspicuously show off their mental agility and creativity through displays such as music and dance, or through the accumulation of wealth. If women had no choice in who they mated with, these displays would be pointless from an evolutionary perspective. It is precisely because women had a choice in who they paired with that the selection pressure for intelligence far exceeded what was necessary for mere survival of the species.