Skye

I guess sapan soni means an engine based around a nitinol element than alternates between austenitic and martensitic forms, then this translational motion is converted into rotational motion mechanically. It would require an electrical supply to function, putting it into competition with conventional electrical motors, which I doubt it would compete with. And anyway, it would have the same existing problems electrical energy storage.

The main reason is that different engines have differing fuel efficiencies in take off/landing and cruising. Piston engines are more efficient at the former, turbofans at the latter. Turboprops are in the middle. So piston engines are used for short ranged, turboprops for medium distance and jet engines for longer distances.

I didn't see the article refer to any stats or trends going back much more than a decade so the reasoning that it's been mismanaged for decades is unsupported.

Why do conservative states perform so much better than liberal ones?

They haven't generally. Here's income in US counties in 2008:

And here's electoral college info from the 2008 Presidential election:

Kudos to Wikipedia.

Now they're couple of years old, and it's Federal election data rather than State. The problem with State governments though is that the local parties can vary in policies. By comparing State Governors, for example, you'd think that California has been a solid Republican state until recently. Anyway, there's a general correlation between voting for Obama and having rich neighbours, and you can probably stretch that to say there's a correlation between conservative states and poor economic performance. Why? It could just be a fluke. It could just be cultural differences between different states. It could be that the richer states put greater emphasis on the leftist policies like the environment because they can afford to.

Interestingly, there's also the better performance of income growth during Democrat rather than Republican Presidencies.

The Taliban, the official government of Afghanistan, harbored Al Qaeda within its borders. They refused to discontinue the practice even after Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for 9/11. This is an acceptable causus belli to me.

Bin Laden didn't actually claim responsibility until 2004.

Windjammers still carried long distance cargo during the first half of the 20th century. They could be sailed with around 20 crew at around 15 knots, which is similar to modern cargo ships. However they'd do this following the wind along certain routes, and it's still not as reliable as a powered ship. It would be interesting to see what a modern ship design could achieve though.

Rephrased: you have a rally about government spending, where the organisers were taking some inappropriate signs off people, and there's still one in twenty signs mentioning the President's race or religion.

On the flip side, there could be a small number of very visible racists who are just tagging along with the tea party movement.

Shoot, they've been doing that since 2006!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Fusion_%28Americas%29

 

I prefer their fission one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

Ford Torus

For all its problems, at least the US has finally made the fusion-powered family car a reality.

i'm aware of that

i wonder how dumb you people think i am

Ok, so you're aware that love is studied under some definition and seems to be the result of some biochemical processes?

I can't see how that's consistent with post #47.

but there's plenty of scientific research on religion and religous phenomena as well, surely you know that?

 

then again, i'm not sure if love would be considered to be "hijacking" anything when researched

 

my point was clear.

Well I'm aware of religion, like love, being studied a neurological process, but that simply supports religion as a neurological process not religion as a philosophical position.

or he could be looking for love, and since he can't see or smell or touch love, then love doesn't exist.

more importantly, there is no scientific evidence for it, so it doesn't exist. heh, i'm not sure there's even a scientific definition for it, so yup, it definitly doesn't exist.

There's plenty of research on love, particularly related to oxytocin.

Are you weightless in the dark?

In Australia medicine was traditionally a ~6 year undergraduate degree that you entered straight out of high school. Some univerisities have started adding to, or replacing, these courses with four year postgrad degrees. There are no requirements for science subjects in the undergrad courses, they do need to pass the standard test that includes organic chem and physics though. The reasons are mostly commercial, it opens up a larger number of potential students and increases the number of years they'll be paying fees to 7 or 8.

The problem here is cost. MRAPs are meant to be cheap, otherwise you'd buy a APC or AFV. A commercial truck with some steel plate and a light machine gun on the roof is reasonably cheap to build and service. Going beyond that pushes cost into APC/AFV territory, at which point you'd just buy a Stryker or Puma.

That's a great question, thanks for bringing it up. I don't know the answer, but it may be relevant to note that The Guardian (do I have that right?) and other conservative outlets in the UK are taken seriously overseas.

The Guardian is a left wing paper. The Times (now owned by News Corp) is traditionally conservative though. It is well respected and is considered a newspaper of record for the UK.

I think that news of record generally implies an excellent reputation, because the term newspapers of record originates from the use of certain newspapers as the medium through which public notices, such as product recalls or retractions of libel, were distributed, and that these were typically distinguished high brow broadsheets like the Times, the NYT and La Monde. These papers have a bias, certainly, but are still usually respected across ideological lines for good reporting. I don't think this is the case with the Fox News Channel. The same ideologically people who dislike the Times or the WSJ will of course dislike FNC, but I think FNC gets little respect from moderates, or even many conservatives.

Hmmm, we had similar problems a while ago. The number of unemployed "Brain surgeons" that could be found on a surfboard at Bondi beach was rediculous. We changed the law so that refusing a job, any job would get your unemployment benefit revoked. It is not the fault of the general populace that a lawyer cannot find a job as a lawyer and they should not be expected to pay for him to sit on his arse until his dream job opens up. He can take whatever work he can until he finds the job he wants.

Source?

This is a corner case anyway. The number of brain surgeons living in Bondi and collecting unemployment benefits would be statistically meaningless. It should also be noted that Australia is different in having a set unemployment allowance of around $250 a week as opposed to uneployment insurance that depends on previous income.

This does bring up an important point, that highly educated people in narrow fields often have high unemployment rates. There a misconception that being a brain surgeon (or whatever highly educated person) means that you should be able to find work fairly easily. In fact the converse is often true as people who have spent around 10 years in tertiary education often have limited unskilled work experience, or work experience at all. They are some of the least employable people of all in a general sense, outside of their very narrow specialisation. And narrow fields often have long periods without job vancancies so surprisingly high unemployment is often the result.

Noting also that Universities teach what they want to and not what society might actually need, there will often be surplusses of certain professions. Just because a Uni produces 200 lawyers, doesn't mean that the economy actually has jobs for them. Tough on the students, but nobody said life was going to be fair.

In the Australian context this is false on face value, and missing the real point anyway. The government subsidises a large part of most students tuition and does based on a number of places for each course that each university is entitled to. There is a minority of universities that don't get governments subsidies and there is a minority of places in other universities that aren't governments funded. However, mostly the government has ostensible control over what courses universities teach.

However the ostensible there is meaningful in that the government is limited by its own stupidity. Certain courses (such as business, some arts and law) are cheap to teach as they require little infrastucture or equipment beyond walls, floors and ceilings, while others (such as science, engineering and medicine) are more expensive as they require more infrastructure and equipment. Funding doesn't reflect costing accurately so, for example, a chemistry department I previously studied in made on a loss on teaching all subjects other than the first year ones. The underfunding of science, engineering, medicine, etc. places is made up for by the over-allocation of business, arts, law, etc. places to balance the books.

The other thing that is going to come up now that benefits are being extended is the classic "Bait and Switch". "Long Term Unemployed" people look very bad on a governments report card, so in the spirit of "retraining" and "addressing the needs" of the job market here is what happens next. People on benefits for longer than time period "X" will be provided a training/retraining course (either free of charge or subsidised through private training orgs) to give them skills "suitable" for the "changed" job market. While on those courses the people will not be on "Unemployment Benefits" but will transfer to a "Training Allowance". Once the course is over they will revert to "Unemployment" benefits, but will not longer be part of the "Long Term Unemployed" group, they are now "Short Term Unemployed".

 

So the gov can show how "Long Term Unemployment" is dropping and they can point to the "Training Programs" providing a "Skilled Workforce" for "The Future". They can spend a sh*tload of cash and except for a few extra staff for training orgs not actually achieve one, single, worthwhile effect.

Sure, if you've got stupid economists. Decent economists recognise study and training as an area of hidden unemployment, especially during recessions.

ETA: Sorry for the Australian derailment, but John started it.

I'm going to sleep soon, but I had to just answer this for a moment -

 

This was my mistake, I didn't mean you, I meant the claims that were raised in the thread in general, and I should have been clear on that since I wrote it in a post where I answered you specifically. Sorry about that.

 

I'll answer the rest when I am more awake.

That's ok, thanks for clearing it up though.

Because the risk of allowing explosives and rockets into Gaza is unacceptable.

But what is this risk?

I’d say in this particular case it’s very low.

As a slight diversion, Israel doesn't blockade Lebanon. This isn't because Hezbollah haven't launched rockets from Lebanon, or that Iran is unlikely to try to get weapons to Hezbollah by sea, but mostly because it's just not practical. The risk of Hezbollah being re-armed, and I don’t think this is all that low, is not worth the problems that this would cause. I see this situation, in isolation, as being much the same.

Merged post follows:

Israel has the lingering compassion of the world, because the Jews were a victim of a brutal bully during WWII. As a victim, one might expect that they would have more empathy, which many do. But in many ways, many have chosen the way of the bully, doing onto the underdog, what was done onto them; within the limits of international outrage.

 

For example, Nazi Germany pegged the Jews, collectively, as the demon and the source of their social ills. The Nazi's commandeered the land and property of the Jews; sound familiar.

Pioneer, are you trolling or do you really think that Nazi Germany and Israel are comparable?

You know.. Palestinians occupy two areas - Gaza and the West Bank. We talk about Gaza as if it's strictly the result of Israeli occupation, but let's take a look, for a moment, at the west bank.

 

The main differences between Gaza and the West Bank is (a) Hamas vs. Abu Masen (IE, between "eradicate Israel!" and "I dislike you but let's talk" mentalities), and (b) control of their own area.

 

The city of Ramalla is a new growing IT capital with quite a number of startup companies working with Israelis and with other companies around the arab and western world. The border between Ramalla and Israel is relatively open (I say "relatively" because it's still a border between two state-entities at the moment, and just like US and Mexico share a border that has check points, Israel shares a border with Ramalla with checkpoints).

 

So, let's try to put things in their proper proportion. The situation in Gaza is horrible, but it's not just Israel fault, and it's not just the blockade. The borders with Gaza were open for a long time allowing Gazans to pass through to Israel, and for goods to go in, and the Gazans are still poor; most of the money sent to the PLO was *stolen* by the PLO. Arafat's wife is having the time of her life with luxuries beyond the wet dreams of all of the Gazan peoples combined from the money her and her husband took while he was in power.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I was simply talking about whether Israel can still be considered an occupying power of Gaza.

However, yeah Gaza is poor and it's been poor for a long time The kind of corruption you talk about was reportedly a factor in Hamas' popularity, since they were seen as less corrupt than Fatah. Hamas is partly responsible for the lack of economic growth in Gaza, since it has a poor relationship with both Egypt and Israel, but then how much of that is also due to Egypt and Israel seeking to damage the legitimacy of Hamas as a governing power?

Blaming one entity is fun and convinient, but history is quite a bit more complicated.

I haven't actually blamed anyone for the situation. There's a difference between saying an operation is a failure and blaming them for the situation.

This is a cause of much concern in Israel, honestly, that the second part is not taken as importantly as it should be by our government. However, there's absolutely no doubt which of these comes in higher priority, and it's not how we look in the world.

My point though was that this particular shipment was unlikely to contribute to the rocket attacks so protecting against rocket attacks wouldn't be a priority to me.

Agreed, and the people of Israel are enraged about that. There are calls for an investigation into *how* this was done (not why), which is undoubtedly the wrong way, since lives were lost.

 

You still didn't give us an alternative, though. "Doing nothing" isn't a viable alternative.

Why is doing nothing in this particular case not an option?

Doing something just seems like taking the bait.

Yeah, it's a very interesting discussion, but it's not exactly relevant to the particular case here.

 

We can talk about Israel's behavior in Gaza, but the thread's topic is about Israel's behavior regarding the flotilla. Shifting the argument to where Israel is more clearly in the wrong (and I do agree for the most part in the Gaza strip) is a red herring.

 

That said, Israel no longer 'occupies' the Gaza strip; it left it a few years ago, one-sidedly, as a courtesy, hoping it will cause the Gazans and their government to become more independent and talks about peace can ensue. Instead, the Hamas government started firing rockets at Israel - this is what *led* to the necessity - in Israel's eyes - of the blockade. In light of the fact that thousands of civilians are being shot at daily by Hamas rockets ("Qasam" rockets) in Sderot and southern Israel, I'm not too sure what you would suggest Israel do. Do you suggest Israel was to leave things be? Attempts to talk to Hamas has all but failed when Hamas declared they don't care to acknowledge Israel's right to exist - which means they will not discuss peace.

Ok, but Israel retained control of Gazan airspace, access to the sea and a strip of land bordering Israel. Those are all reasonable given the attacks coming from Gaza, but they do mean that there are doubts that the disengagement plan actually ended occupation.

What, then, do you offer Israel was to do? Continue to allow tons of explosives and rockets to enter the Gaza strip when these rockets are *used* against Israeli civilians?

 

About 100 trucks of Humanitarian Aid trucks enter the strip EVERY DAY. The idea that Israel blocks those is blatantly false; Israel didn't demand the flotilla be diverted away from the strip in an attempt to prevent humanitarian aid supplies, it demanded the supplies be checked - with the supervision of the flotilla organizers.

 

Instead, the flotilla declared they don't care about supplies, they care about breaching the blockade. Whether you think the blockade is legal or not (and, even if you disagree with Dershowitz, you can at least see the situation isn't as clear cut as it initially sounds) is not relevant to the case at hand; as was said in this thread many times: Either you are a peaceful activist or you intend to use violence. From the videos, the conduct of the flotilla (refusing to answer the requests to stop), and from the equipment found on the sixth ship, and from the declarations of the "activists" on the flotilla itself, it's quite clear the humanitarian aid was low priority -- making a point of "martyrdome" (their words, not mine) was the higher one, and breaching the blockade - apparently, violently - was the top.

 

 

It's easy to switch from one claim of wrongdoing to another. Israel is *far* from being perfect, and we can find many examples of that, as are the Palestinians. But this particular thread is about the flotilla, and both sides' actions in regards to that. We are all discussing how horrible Israel is, which is fine (Israelis do the same inside Israel, believe it or not, it *is* a democracy for the most part), but we seem to forget that by saying "THIS WAS WRONG!" we should come up with what would've been the RIGHT thing to do.

 

I'm not sure that I see a good alternative in this case, honestly, other than, perhaps, anticipating heavy violent resistence from the sixth ship and stopping it another way. Not sure how that's done at sea, though.. would we really all be "more satisfied" if Israeli navy rammed this ship? I think not.

 

So.. fine.. let's assume Israel was the horrific horrible bad bad evil responder here. What's your alternative? What was it to do instead?

 

 

~moo

In terms of what to do, I guess Israel has two main objectives in controlling the borders with Gaza at the moment: stopping rocket attacks and winning a propaganda war. These ships were clearly designed to win a propaganda battle, they had activists, politicians and journalists on board. I think it would have been doubtful from the outset they'd contribute much to rocket attacks. If the IDF thought they could control the situation then they obviously made an error in judgement. If the IDF felt that the number of people on board the ships could get out of control then (with the benefit of hindsight) the government made an error of judgement in proceed.

I wasn't talking strictly about you

 

Regarding the legality of the blockade, I think you should read this article in the huffington post - it makes some good points: Alan Dershowitz: Israel's Actions Were Entirely Lawful Though Probably Unwise.

There are a few things Dershowitz doesn't address, such as whether Israel can still be considered to be an occupying power of Gaza because it retains some control over it and if so would that would affect the ability to blockade Gaza, and I think he is not entirely correct in stating that Israel must stop ships passing through a blockade to maintain its validity. If ships are carrying aid then they ordinarily can pass through a blockade without any effects on its legitimacy. You could also question whether it was reasonable to stop these particular ships since it was unlikely they'd be carrying weapons or materials to make them.

However the legal issues are largely irrelevent since they won't be resolved in any court. The boarding was a failure from a planning point of view. And if you think stopping and searching the ships was unecessary to prevent weapons getting into Gaza then the whole incident could have been avoided.

So is breaching a blockade.

 

 

BTW, we keep saying "Israel's Blockade" -- the blockade isn't strictly Israel's. It's a joint force blockade enforced by Israel and Egypt for the same reason of terrorist actions in Gaza against both states.

Hey I said The legality of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt is already contested but nothing will come of it back in post #27 so I'm not guilty of that. But like I said, the legality of the blockade contested, so whether breaching the blockade is illegal or not isn't something everyone is going to agree on. And there was discussion already about whether the boarding was legal anyway because of the distance from the coast.

Say SWAT team busts down your door and tells you at gun-point to get on the ground, only to discover later they had the wrong house - they don't even have a warrant for your address!

No matter how bad that mistake was it would not make them pirates or common thugs. They would be subject to legal ramifications and you would be able to sue, but trust me if you tried to repel them with lethal force, (while knowing full well they were SWAT police) on the grounds that simply "they had no right to invade your home, they were at the wrong address so it's their fault" you or some of your guests would probably get shot. You would have made a bad situation worse. When it comes to the enforcement of laws, you just can't handle disputes that way.

The problem with this analogy is that a ship is sovereign territory of the country whose flag it flies, in this case apparently Turkey. Illegally boarding a ship isn't simply a policing mistake but can be an act of war, which is why Turkey has said they'll escort further convoys.

The legality of the blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt is already contested but nothing will come of it.

Regardless, it's a cock up. They had days to plan for the operation and clearly didn't have the ability to control the number of people on board the ships.

Evolution works under the assumption that the aqueous and protein grids within cells (membranes and cytoplasm) can not tweak the DNA via cause and effect with the environment. Rather, it assumes changes in the DNA are detached from the rest of the cell and occur randomly. I tend to believe the DNA is tweaked by the rest of the cell. This allows life to keep its finger on the pulse of the environment and adapt as needed.

 

One line of reasoning that supports cause and effect, is if we assume random changes in the DNA, aren't there more things that can go wrong, than right, since random changes not only means improvements but also regressions. Random means the good genetic stuff, is also under random change into worse.

 

The parallel scenario that random creates is that selective advantage can be connected to avoiding bad random genetic changes. If the all the rest of the animals get more defects, due to random, and you get fewer, one has a selective advantage and therefore be called more evolved.

 

However, evolution is usually expressed in terms of something positive, which gives selective advantage. That can not be random, since advantage implies is a sense of direction, relative to what could happen if we randomly tweaked genes; good and bad changes are in balance.

 

Random genetic changes for evolution should imply that the first life should have circled around a stagnation point, because a crap shoot for genetic changes should go forward and backwards, with anything gained eventually balanced by it very loss. Life could never have left simple cells, since even if it gained that ability, random eventually comes around, and will do the opposite. For every heads there are equal amounts of tails, even if we get a string of heads. Then we should expect a string of tails with life back to where it was; stagnation.

Pioneer are you trolling, or are you unable to figure out how a theory of natural selection would lead to selective advantage?

Have any CIA agents actually been outed?

If the photos were of the agents that interrogated the defendants then showing a photo of them to the defendant wouldn't out them, as the defendant would already know their appearance.