...also, I'm pretty sure the "free from every form of slavery" bit just translates to "I am incapable of holding down a job".

What that phrase usually means is "I want to be in charge".

It's a bunch of cells. It's not murder!

To take the other side of the argument for grins...

YOU are a bunch of cells. So it wouldn't be murder to kill you....

Note my position on abortion is horribly pragmatic - we're going to dispose of excess and/or unwanted children one way or another. Might as well be abortion, which at least keeps it out of sight....

As far as I know Memorial day is only observed in the US of A.

True.

On the other hand, only the USA had the US Civil War, which is what Memorial Day commemorated, back in the day.

It only later became a generic "all our war dead" sort of holiday.

And, of course, we also observe Veteran's Day (11 NOV)....

Interesting how they pay attention to pollution they can't control but ignore pollution they can control [thegrio.com]

Interesting link.

So, they've had an "epidemic of cancer since the early '80s".

The nuclear power plant they're blaming it on didn't exist until 1987.

The nuclear weapons facility they mention has been there since 1952.

So, they started getting cancer from a nuclear plant before it was built, while at the same time living next to another nuclear plant for 30 years without a cancer problem.

Wow. Just, wow....

I read that modern US subs use convection cooling for the reactor at lower power settings, to keep noise down. Would this sub be too old for that to be the case?

The phrase I was taught to use when someone asked questions like that started with "I can neither confirm nor deny..."

As children they belonged to their father to be sold (for a dowry) to another man.

Umm, no.

What you're no doubt thinking of is a "bride price". Which wasn't all that common, historically.

"Dowry", on the other hand, was the goods and money that the bride brought to the marriage. Her share of their joint assets, essentially.

Note that, more often than not, the dowry was NOT the property of her husband, but something that she took with her in case of divorce/whatever (which was also more common historically than most modern Americans think it was).

Check out some of the lawsuits mentioned in various Norse sagas sometime, to get an idea of the amount of bickering over dowries that went on when a husband wanted to dump his wife, or a woman wanted to dump her husband....

If they received a government contract to build the plane specifically for that purpose, its misleading to call the plane a commercial craft.

Luckily Dragon wasn't designed to fulfill a government-specified purpose.

Other than the docking adapter, of course.

Neither was Falcon 9. Or Falcon 1.

The ship has breathing masks spread out in places and standard air type valves to plug them into all around the ship and you are trained how and where to find them in the dark. It is very scary when you have to unplug your mask, hold your breath and walk 10-20 feet in complete blinding smoke hoping you can find the next place to plug in your mask.

As I recall, one of the things I had to be able to do on the boat was to go from the forward end of the engineering spaces to the stern, wearing an EAB, with black plastic taped over the faceplate so I couldn't see anything.

Yes, remembering exactly how many steps it is to the next air connection is really tough when you're holding your breath and can't see....

Note, by the way, that a hull insulation fire means the entire compartment is completely full of opaque black smoke. If you can't fight the fire blindfolded with your head tethered to the nearest air connector, then you're screwed....

Very few people need 4TB, the current largest hard drive. I'd argue most people are happy with 500gb.

Where HAVE I heard this before?

Oh, yeah, now I remember!

Me: We should go ahead and buy the 85MB HD for the new comp - we'd fill up a 40MB too fast..

the Wife: No, it'll be YEARS before we could fill up 40MB - why pay the extra couple hundred for space we'll never use?

We had a similar discussion a few years later, with the players swapped, when we were debating 300MB and 500 MB.

And again when we debated 2GB v. 3GB.

And 20GB v 50GB

And 500GB and 1TB....

Former Navy Nuke

3 - There's this thing called a nuclear reactor. It's shut-down while in dry-dock but still requires power to keep it safe.

Not necessarily. Once the reactor has been shutdown long enough, it no longer requires power to cooling pumps to maintain temperature.

6 - If the reactor has a problem, you'll basically have Fukushima on your hands.

Umm, no.

If you're underway, and things go so completely south that every failsafe in the system fails unsafe, then your boat is going to sink.

If, on the other hand, you're in a drydock for an extended maintenance cycle, then the reactor has been shutdown long enough to be cold, and you won't even need the Main Cooling Pumps to keep things stable and safe.

Note that, whatever other problems they may have, Navy nuclear powerplants don't keep spent fuel rods laying around to cause problems...