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insane_alien

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Everything posted by insane_alien

  1. and you'll solve gun smuggling how? not to mention there will be firearms that have been kept as "souvenirs" from before, historic pieces that can be reactivated, homemades and the flat out stolen from military/police. yeah, because that always works. china has a big military but its seen its fair share of riots. sure, they're stopped quickly and brutally, but it does nothing to keep the populace happy. infact, a massacre like that has a very negative effect on morale for both the soldiers and the civilians. and look at syria, lybia etc. rioting, guerilla warfare etc. it takes very little effort to make big disruptions. a couple of IEDs going off could effectively shutdown the productivity of a city and cause panic. the exact same way it is harmful in a democracy. the corrupt people are not playing by the plan of the party in general. siphoning off money, running black markets (ie gun importation which i talked about earlier) basically profiting in unauthorised ways. they could even be plotting to overthrow the head of state! revolution from the 1st and second classes. There are many movies and stories(some true, or based on true examples) around this. corruption and civil unrest. its naive to think that these two things will not be problems.
  2. you seem to be assuming that the 'have-nots' will have no weapons. This is a false assumption. They will have the ability to manufacture IED's there will be a gun trade, especially if it is a totally free economy, black market if its not as free as you think. at the very least they'll have access to tools such as pitchforks, crow bars etc. they'll have enough to stage an effective riot. There will be revolts. There have been revolts for a lot less. even against better armed opponents. second, assuming you have a tranquil population, your government will face massive amounts of corruption. corruption is pretty much unavoidable in any government system but as this one provides a lot of power to the ruling classes and supposes a powerless underclass, the temptation will make it rife within the organisation. overall, assuming you managed to bring this in, total governmental collapse in 10-15 years.
  3. Rich, you do understand the concept of measurement error don't you? Lets take GPS as an example because that can sometimes be comically wrong. my gps on my phone currently says i'm across the street at my neighbours house because i'm only getting a few connections(i'm indoors). The program says the current accuracy is to within 30m which is pretty big (if i go outside it'll go down to about 3m). now my neighbours house is maybe about 20m away so while the actual location reported is wrong, when applying the error margin appropriately it is actually correct. if it was saying i was in bangladesh and the error was 30m then there would definitely be some cause for concern. with this result they've measured 0.1mm/year +/- some amount. if it's +/-0.2 mm/year then the earth could actually be shrinking by 0.1mm/year and still be consistent with their measurement. unless a growth of zero was explicitly ruled out by the margin of error then it is not proof that the earth is expanding at any significant rate. It would also be intellectually dishonest to claim that it is conclusive proof.
  4. its insignificant because the margin for error is larger than that. which means the actual rate could be zero. measuring zero is surprisingly difficult to do.
  5. gamma ray bursts are only 'narrow' in a cosmic sense. by the time the beam gets to us it could be as narrow as a few tens of thousands of light years across assuming it was from a nearby galaxy. larger if it was further away.
  6. this seems sufficiently explained by orders of magnitude rather than introducing a new dimension
  7. i already told you, drugs. it is well noted that some psychoactive drugs such as the ones found in his system, can cause violent outbursts. and no, these aren't top secret drugs developed by the military, just your garden variety blackmarket hallucinogens.
  8. there was no virus. therefore it wasn't created.
  9. no you didn't thats just FUD. no genetically engineered virus was found, he was drugged up to the eyeballs with psychoactive drugs.
  10. I was only asking what the criteria were. there isn't going to be a defined cutoff but a gradual divergence from the 1/r^2 relationship. you could take every satellite we have in orbit as an experiment. the non-spherical gravity of earth plays a role in orbit perturbances of LEO satellites but not much for GEO satelites. its even the mechanism of how the mapped the earths gravitational field as well as the moons. as his question was posted it was a bit like 'how far out does gravity go?' the true answer is infinity but really, the effects become practically insignificant LONG before that. I don't think any specific experiments have been done just reviews of the orbits of various satellites if anything. J.C. googling "Osculating Orbits" and variants there of might return something useful. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1934PASP...46..305K/0000305.000.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osculating_orbit But as before, the limit where you can ignore the perturbations is going to vary from application to application, planet to planet and even how close the other gravitational bodies happen to be.
  11. there is only a minimum distance for non-pointsource objects. and it depends on how rigorously you define it as holding. for instance, the earth has a slightly lumpy gravitational field. in theory this would show deviations from a point source up to infinity meters away but they wouldn't really matter much closer than that. it does have a slight effect on LEO orbits but nothing spectacular. we'd need some definitions of what counts and what doesn't to answer.
  12. something a lot of people seem to fail to recognise in these arguements (well, those on the 'gay marriage is an abomination' side) is that if gay marriage is legalised, it doesn't mean that your religion has to start performing gay marriage, especially if it is against that particular religion. All it means is that anyone with the power to marry a couple who isn't against gay marriage can declare the couple married. its not only priests that can marry a couple, plenty of non-religious people can as well. And then the other side of marriage is the status under the law. you get a crapload of legal and financial benefits from being married. some that aren't covered under 'civil partnerships'. i really don't see the fuss. nobodies religion is being hurt, nobody is being forced to do something they don't want to do, just people who love each other are being allowed to say 'we're married' and get the same benefits as others who say the same.
  13. the only difference is the source of the magnetic field. both sources are well understood. the use of a current carrying coil results in a much better field for scientific study as it can be replicated around the world and can be controlled much better than a permanent magnets field. ie. it is much better for performing experiments on. this is like arguing the difference between full serum and chemically defined growth media. both can grow cell cultures but your chemically defined medium will produce better reproducibility because it has less variation in its source components. in short, it doesn't matter what the origin of the field is, magnetism is magnetism.
  14. the orion nebula is an area of star formation. it's only 1000 or so light years away. definitely not near the center of the galaxy. so thats evidence of starbirth outside of the galactic core. the sun likely formed in its current orbit around the galaxy.
  15. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/untestable comes from the root 'test' with modifier '-able' to mean have tests performed upon it and the modifier 'un-' to mean the negative. untestable: unable to have tests performed upon it. If you couldn't figure that out, either english is not your first language or you are being deliberately difficult. either way it is not really an arguement against my point. I have read the new testament a few times along with a number of other holy books. some good stories in there but also a lot of bad ones. none of the holy books are great pieces of literature and none of them would make me believe in a god(s). just because it can, doesn't mean it is. Look at all the holy wars started in the name of christianity. bugger all good about that. it wasn't a question, it was a statement.
  16. clearly i was indicating that the people should accept it as true because the liklihood of it being a lie is very low and the truthfulness can be easily determined. This is unlike the new testament which is not easily verifiable and untestable. It can also be used for nefarious purposes unlike a hurricane warning which would only harm the government itself rather than giving it more power. It is naive to think that every question you can ask is a yes or know. the world is composed of shades of grey.
  17. also, why would a government lie about it? It would cause a fairly large chunk of its economy (hurricanes are big) to slow down as people seek shelter and even more, hurricanes are easily independantly verifiable. more than 1 agency produces weather reports. it'd just make that government look like a laughing stock. and again why? what would the benefit be?
  18. insane_alien

    pH5

    the hydronium ion concentration is 10-5 mol L-1
  19. looking at the photo, it's lens flare. nothing but an artifact of the lenses in the camera.
  20. is it supposed to be realistic or not? because trippy squares don't appear out of nowhere. the fact they start off blue and go to red indicates that maybe your trying to show redshift/blueshift but the shift happens far to the aft of the observer which isn't realistic. also, there wouldn't be a bright light ahead of you. (your view of the univers would compress in front of you though.
  21. it IS evolution. The only bit that makes it stand out is that the selection pressures do not come from the environment but from humans.
  22. no more at risk than if it was going at 10000mph. large objects are (counter-intuitively) not the largest hazard. they can be easily seen and a small burst from the attitude control thrusters(or manouvering thrusters) would be sufficient to avoid them. The big problems with near luminal travel come from dust. you won't see the dust and if you go fast enough each grain will be as destructive as a hiroshima bomb. of course, if you've managed to get the technology to get up to those speeds then you're likely going to be able to have a lser or something to nudge them out of your way.
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