MigL

It has little to do with their accomplishments or failiures. It has to do with the reality that the Office brings a whole different perspective on things. While campaining, or in opposition, it is very easy to make bold claims about change. I'm sure even G.W. had a totally different vision of what his presidency would accomplish. It ended with him being hated by a majority of people ( Reps as well as Dems ) in the US. It is only now that people's opinion is starting to soften. Obama may have done much better than G.W. although I don't think he faced the same challenges, such as the first attack by a foreign aggressor on US soil since the war of 1812, so we'll never know how he would have reacted. But you certainly can't say he has lived up to expectations and campaign promises. Not for lack of trying, mind you, but even he looks disappointed in what he has been able to accomplish. I don't think of either man as evil or unAmerican. They both did the best they could when faced with differing but equally difficult circumstances. These circumstances I might add, were certainly not what they envisaged during their campains or mentioned in their speeches.

What ? Nobody watched 'WKRP in Cincinnati' back in the early 80s. One of the funniest TV shows ever made.

I don't see where a particular race is talked about as a sub-human species billiards. And maybe if someone was shooting rockets at your house you would express the wish that they die also. Whether they be the same race as you or not. I guess I don't see the racism as I'm a racist myself. I do know that you don't have a clue as to what you're talking about, and I would be calling you much worse if I didn't have respect for this forum's rules.

Whatever happened to 'America, land of opportunity, where even a poor man can aspire to be president' ? At least in Canada we have some ( relatively ) poor politicians. We also have rich politicians like Rob Ford, who has no class at all, yet is still a better choice than his opposition in the next election. I also find it amusing that, no matter whether Republican or Democrat, once they attain Office, most presidents react to crisis the same way. Do you really think Obama has done things much differently than George W. would have ? Sure he makes much better speeches, or at least his pronunciation is better, but did he close Guantanamo ? Did his bailout of the banks not effectively give a trillion dollar bailout to the rich ? All the homeowners who lost their homes got zilch. Did he not effectively say "mission accomplished' in Iraq, pull out and where are they now ? Is he not just as ineffective in his second term as G.W. was ? And Acme is absolutely right, I vote just I can complain afterwards.

I remember a study conducted in the eighties that came to the conclision that kids were insane, by adult standards of course. It actually made a lor of sense and I presume, if the study had been done by kids on adults, they would have had similar results. This study was presented on a radio station by a Doctor ( PhD ) whose name I don't recall. He had gotten his doctorate from a man named Bubba on Santa Monica beach. The host of the radio program was Dr. Johnny Fever. The radio station was WKRP in Cincinnati.

Its gotten even lower after your post, billiards . Now you can just accuse someone of being racist without backing it with facts , just to stifle opposing discussion. This is not an easy discussion. It stirs up a lot of passion because people are losing their lives. Everyone thinks they have a solution, but most will just lead to more bloodshed. The people directly involved, Israeli and Palestinian, have to want peace. Until they do, or one side exterminates the other, there will not be a lasting peace. That being said, let's call a spade a spade... Israel is expansionist and a bit of a bully state, but they don't want the palestinian people exterminated. They have similar morals to western democracies. A lot of Palestinians and certainly Hamas, however, DO want Israel exterminated

Come on now... Isn't it the mantra of the 'labelers' that it is the 'conservatives' who are intolerant of other's ideas and who call others names.. It doesn't become progressive 'liberals' such as yourselves. We've had this discussion before, not all conservatives and their ideas are bad, and not all liberals and their ideas are good, You can't generalize about race, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Why is it OK to generalize about ideology ? Its just another personal belief.

Maybe I'm not understanding you and you're not understanding me. An interpretation is a 'relating' if you will, of QM properties and effects to our everyday macroscopic experiences. Obviously the two are NOT related, as they are based on differing paradigms. I choose to accept QM at its face value, and while a cat, a macroscopic ensemble of a billion, billion, billion atoms may not be in a superposition of states when not being observed, its individual constituent atoms can be ! Spooky action at a distance, as you and Einstein call it, or entanglement, as the rest of us call it, effectively changes a property or 'reality' of a paticle at a distance from its entangled, observed particle without any information being shared between the two. It was being used as an example of a Quantum effect which has no relation to our macroscopic experience. Maybe not the best choice, but in my defence, its 5:30 in the morning, after 10.5 hrs at work.

You've gotta be kidding.. "The country most closely resembling Israel in behavior and policy in the modern age has been South Africa with its apartheid and "homeland" policy" Palestinians living in Israel enjoy benefits of citizenship, political officea nd freedom of sex and religion. They do NOT on their own soil governed by Hamas. Maybe if Hamas chose to smuggle in food and medical supplies instead of thousands of rockets through the 'walls' and 'fences' the Israeliis build they would better serve their people.

This is not about interpretation Barfbag, whether Bohr's ( Copenhagen ) or Everett's ( many worlds ) . This is about the paradigms of Quantum Mechanics where something like an electron is only 'measurable' when it is observed, and its nature entirely probabilistic. In effect, the experiment, or the way we observe it, determines the outcome as it collapses the wavefunction in a specific way. The very idea of 'the electron is here' or 'the electron has this much energy' ceases to have meaning at a certain scale. The best we can do is say there is a XX% chance of the electron being found here, but as any good weatherman will tell you a 50% chance of rain does not make rain a reality. When a photon going through a polarizer here can alter or fix the 'reality' of another entangled photon, whether 1 mile or a million miles away, as in the EPR paradox, what does that say about our notion of 'reality' ? So, at the quantum level, would the moon exist if it wasn't being observed ? We could answer yes, but then we'd have to believe that Quantum mechanics was incomplete ( hidden variables have been disproven ) or wrong ( it is the most tested and accurate modern theory )

It would be alright if everyone in the apartment complex hired a murderer to kill you. The Palestinians have 'hired' Hamas as their representatives knowing full well their intent to exterminate the Israeli Jews. Get your analogies straight ! By the way what's a Godwin ?

You're right Hamas doesn't pose a threat to the whole world and isn't killing millions of people, but then again, neither was Germany. They were only a threat to Austria, Chekoslovakia and Poland before the Allies developed the 'nads to declare war. And sure the Germans were allowed back to the 'table', and so will the Palestinians be. Nazis, however, will never be and neither should Hamas. Being more powerful doesn't automatically make you wrong, unless, it seems, if you're Israeli.

Come on Strange, cut him some slack. I know that you know that a strict interpretation of quantum mechanics raises questions about the validity of the 'concept' of reality.

If the physicists were 'good' physicists, they would immediately recognize the problem and do the appropriate tranforms to relize they are both 'accurate'.

So this is how 'proportional response' works. If I choose to commit a crime, like stealing $500, then the punishment has to be proportional, i.e. I can only be fined $500. This doesn't seem like much of a deterrent at all, does it ? It seems to me that if we replace Gaza Palestinians with German people and Hamas with Nazi, no-one would have any problem with the killing of a disproportionate number of German 'innocents' during WW2 to stop the Nazis. Or was that OK because the Allies weren't Jewish.

While true that Israel was 'founded' after WW2 by the British on Palestinian soil, don't forget that Palestine was founded after WW1 ( along with other middle eastern countries ) on the lands of the broken up Ottomann Empire. As others have already stated trying to go back the several thousand years to find the original cause is futile. If people really want peace they need to forget the past and learn to live together. That being said... The life expectancy of people living in the Gaza strip means that there are very few people left alive from before Israel annexed their lands, so while it may be their ancestral land it is not their land. I may as well claim most of europe, middle east and north africa since my ancestors were roman. If the people of Gaza elect Hamas they are responsible for Hamas' policy of extermination of all Israelis. The germans after all, elected Hitler and even though democratically elected, the rest of the world saw no need to support him/them. The people of Gaza maintain that the Israeli blockade deprives them of basic human rights to food and medicine. Then how did they get the more than 4000 missiles shot at Israel ? Is this not an argument for a stricter blockade ? And why no complaints about the blockade on the Sinai ( Egypt ) side ? Any country has the right to defend its people. If missiles were raining down on your city you would expect your government to put a stop to it, even if some of their innocents were killed in the process. Why are the Palistinians not governed by Hamas relatively peaceful ? It seems Hamas is the instigator and are perfectly willing to use their own people as pawns in their battle with Israel. Proportional response is nonsense. Just because only a few Israelis are dead doesn't mean the response has to avoid killing any mor than a few Palistinians. It is called deterrence for a reason. The consequences of your actions are terrible enough to dissuade you from performing those actions. Israel is far from innocent, but in this case, at least, I feel they are justified. The Palistinians of Gaza need to elect a government that cares enough about the people to want less death and more peace.

Isn't that always the problem with these 'surveys' or 'studies'. Failiure to isolate extraneous variables leads to results which are dubious or inconclusive at best. If I remove my 'politically correct blinders', I can see barfbag's point of view and maintain that the best parents are the ones who provide an environment where their kids feel loved, are nurtured and helped in their intellectual and emotional developement. This is of course independant of their sexual orientation. By the way, I consider myself conservative ( fiscally, not so much socially ) and am therefore 'right wing' ( who comes up with these labels ? )

The mathematical model used for the calculation of the vacuum, zero point energy uses harmonic oscillators ( doesn't everything in physics ? ) at all points and then considers boundary conditions to obtain a cut-off energy. Like you said Mordred, this gives a value over a hundred orders of magnitude higher than expected. This is the only model I've ever come across. Can you explain or point out a source for info on Higgs field metastability and its connection to false or real zero point vacuum energy and the cosmological constant.

At Planck scales/energies all four forces are expected to be equivalent in strength, ie unified. At this scale even gravity, or more appropriately, space-time, is thought to be 'discontinuous or 'granular'.

OK I see what you're saying. I guess I' just used to thinking in terms of the satellite following the space-time curvature and not accelerating.

OK Imatfaal, I'll bite. In your force pairings, where the earth and the satellite are both attracted to the barycentre, what is the balancing force which pushes the earh and satellite outward to balance the inward gravitational pull and keep the orbit stable ?

So say you had a bucket of water, Delta1212, and you started rotating it, you would see the water rise up along the edges until it overflowed the lip of the pail. Now what if you kept the pail stationary and spun the universe around it. Would the water aong the edge still rise ? I think this is known as Newton's bucket and Ernest Mach had some interesting things to say about it and rotating systems WRT the universe.

A fall is an orbit and an orbit is an extended fall. Anything in orbit is weightless. If your argument is that an object isn't just following a spacetime path, but the force of gravity is keeping it orbiting then what is the balancing force ? Remember that there is no centrifugal force unless you are in the frame of the orbiting object. To an external observer there is no balancing force. The problem with using a scale to measure the force is are you measuring the force exerted on the scale by the cup or on the cup by the scale ? Or are we misunderstanding each other ?

Let me re-state my previous position... An object in free fall is weightless, while an object like a cup sitting on a table has a weight. We measure this weight in Newtons, a unit of force. An object which has a weight of x Newtons feels a force while one of 0 Newtons feels none. Ergo an object in freefall feels no force while one at rest, on a table, does.

Sorry studiot, I wasn't trying to be critical of your explanation. I was offering an example of the 'strange' consequences of QM and a historical footnote. Don't read more than I wrote into it.