How would you feel if they registered all of the homosexuals and printed maps of where they all live? What's that, there's a difference, you say? Indeed there is - gun ownership is a specifically enumerated right in the bill of rights, while homosexuality is not.

Both being recognized as rights is good for society. If you think you can justify one, then why not the other?

Exactly. We don't know much of anything about any potential alien civilizations. All we can say for sure is that if they are advanced enough to get here, then we would be totally at their mercy. We barely understand why other human cultures on our own planet do things, or even our own culture a few decades ago. What hope do we have of guessing how some completely different species would behave? For all we know, they could want to destroy us just because we might potentially be a threat to them in the future. It would be insanely risky to assume that they must be benevolent by our definitions just because they are so advanced.

That's true. But then, it's also true that it would have been lost without the US or Britain. Without all 3 fighting together, the allies would not have been able to win. It isn't realistic to imagine any of them sitting out the war entirely, so imagine what it would have been like if any one of them switched sides.

The USSR switching sides would make the combined Nazi-Soviet empire a land-based colossus, virtually impossible to invade.

If the UK switched sides, the sea lanes between the US and the USSR would probably be closed. The USSR goes down, and the US is pretty much powerless and left out, at least until the next war.

If the US switched sides, the sea lanes would probably be closed between the UK and the rest of the world. The UK goes hungry and either makes terms or gets invaded, and with US supplies fueling the Nazis, the USSR would be toast.

More to the point, even if we had beaten them, what would we do then? There's no way we'd ever have enough manpower to effectively occupy China. All we could do would be to prop up some government we thought we would like, and tell them that we'd invade them again if they annoyed us.

So what? Every single country on the planet with a viable military force has some sort of plan for how to attack every other country, no matter how unlikely it is that they would ever want to do it. Such things are a necessary part of figuring out what your diplomatic posture should be in various situations, whether your military as a whole is too large, too small, or badly proportioned, etc. They're also good practice for the planners, and the information they get in making plans for how we could attack country X are probably also very useful if we want to figure out what happens if we want to ally with country X to attack country Y instead.

Heat may not be that big of a problem, actually. Heating energy is fairly constant proportional to temperature difference on Earth, because it all has roughly the same atmosphere. You real concern for heating is not outside temperature, but heat transfer rates. On Mars, with no atmosphere to speak of and a requirement to pressurize the living quarters, necessitating no material flow in or out and very thick walls, heat loss to the environment might actually be very low.

Space is even colder, but most of our spacecraft have to be artificially cooled, not heated, because the only heat transfer mechanism in space is radiation to the environment, which is very slow for the temperatures we are working at. Mars would add some limited conduction to the ground and probably very limited convection from the atmosphere. I haven't run any numbers for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if all of the equipment you need to live there (power generation, air handling, etc) generates enough heat that you have to artificially cool the habitat to compensate for it.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to that point of view, but if the sane Muslims want to be seen as the majority, they need to be seen to be cracking down on their extremists rather than shielding them. When at attack like 9/11 happens and the first thing out of the mouths of every major Muslim spokesperson is "Don't you dare even think about profiling Arabs/Mulims!" then people are going to look at all of them a lot more suspiciously. Why isn't the first and only thing out of their mouths after a major attack "God damn those murderous maniacs for attacking my country!"

I'm sure somebody will point out a few quotes from spokespeople saying just that. The trouble is, they never seem to be the majority or to have the loudest voices. Better fix that, or that global war between Islam and nonbelievers that the extremists are hoping for might just happen someday, and I don't think the results will be what they expect.

For all of the hoopla over it, these types of sources are actually pretty weak. I don't know the activity level of this particular one, but most likely you'd have to put it in your pocket and walk around with it for a day or three for any measurable damage to happen. I haven't read that much about this actual situation, but they probably tried that before they even bothered calling in the National Guard. It most likely bounced far enough from the road that it wasn't detectable this way. No matter how sensitive your sensor is (I do remember reading that this was an AmBe source, which is primarily a Neutron source, requiring a Neutron detector), you still have to get close enough to it for the activity level from the source to be significantly above background levels. With a 130-mile path traveled, that's a lot of ground to cover very slowly.

Yes, these sources are supposed to be locked up tight under lock and key while in transit, and this was a fuckup of tremendous level. I fully expect that the people directly responsible and managers several levels up from them will be looking for new jobs, if they aren't already, and their license to handle nuclear material in the US may be in doubt for a while.

Agreed and, well this is a bit of a hijack but, this is what makes me the most worried about all of the Government health insurance/Single Payer/Socialized Medicine stuff. Give the Government control of the healthcare system, and they suddenly have a great new reason to legislate against anything that might possibly affect your health. Wanna ban something? Bribe a few scientists and journal types to dummy up a study showing that it's unhealthy, then use that to claim that people who are using/doing whatever you want to ban are increasing healthcare costs, buy some ads to scare the public, then sponsor some legislation against it. Think it sounds paranoid? It's already happened a bunch of times, and more Government control of healthcare makes it easier.

Not sure if GP was serious or not, but looks to me like the modern US Army and other armed forces go to an unbelievable and completely unprecedented amount of effort to avoid collateral damage compared to every other military force that has ever existed. Those who seriously complain about it either have no idea what they're talking about, or are pursuing an anti-American agenda and don't have the courage to be straightforward about it.

I'm on the no new taxes bandwagon for now, as I think that the size of the Federal Government and deficit is way too big and needs to be cut back. In theory, we should raise taxes and cut spending to do that, but it seems that every time we let them raise taxes, they just raise spending even more and you're left with an even bigger Government and debt. I'd vote for raising taxes, but only after I see some serious budget cutting, like over 10%. We've got to cut spending to cut the deficit, and that seems to be the really hard part.

Their whole theoretical plan, assuming the part about the phone taking pictures of its surroundings and uploading them without the user noticing actually works, still sounds like nonsense to me, because there is likely to be little connection between the types of criminals who hack phones and the ones who break into houses and steal things.

If you are the type to break into houses and steal things, then you are probably focused on a relatively small geographical area - you need a connection to the type of criminals who can actually move your stolen property, which is the sort of thing that only really works in person. You probably have little interest in hacking phones like this because such a scheme would generate data for places all over the world, 99% of which are completely impractical for you to exploit.

If you are the type to hack phones and computers, then the only way for your work to be practical is if you have a way to turn your hacks into money remotely, without ever actually travelling to the place where the hackee is, since each one is probably not worth anywhere near the cost of travelling there. Only by combining a lot of them without ever actually travelling anywhere can you make money.

Getting these two types of criminals together doesn't seem very practical - how does a hacker get in touch with a break-in man in a city far away? How could they come to trust each other enough to actually pull a directed robbery? Any break-in man would probably think he was either being screwed with by someone trying to get him to pay money for nonsense info, or being set up for an ambush by police or some other group of criminals. And any hacker would probably also think he was being set up in some way by police or some other criminal group. And you'd have to establish a lot of these relationships for the whole scheme to start to make any sense. Yeah, it's not happening. Let hackers stick to stealing credit card info and bank account login info, and let break-in men stick to conventional, local methods of figuring out who is worth the effort of robbing.

Reminds me of another one I heard

Some guys stole my wife's credit card. I let them keep it, because they spend less on it than she did.

Wait a second, I thought Democrats/Liberals were constantly ripping Republicans for voting in lockstep every time against whatever thing they wanted to do. And now some of you guys are pissed that some Republicans are against a bill that some other Republicans passed and signed into law. So which is it that you want them to do?

Seems reasonable to me... Though I'm a longtime Android user, I have no problem with the idea of Apple trying to do their own thing and create a separate system. A little competition is good for everyone and all that. I know that Apple has a hard problem on their hands in creating a new mapping system - there's just an insane amount of data and tedious labor in creating really good global maps, and it takes years and many millions of dollars to get it right. But I'd still be pissed if I was an iPhone user who just lost a bunch of functionality because of the Apple-Google pissing match. Perhaps they should have at least spent a little more time and money on it, maybe had some sort of open beta phase for a year or two. Oh well, I'll just be glad that I'm on Android for now.