>> ^VoodooV:

The only problem I have with the 2nd amendment is that it says nothing about being trained or being competent with a firearm
Any insecure idiot who longs for the days of the wild west with delusions of grandeur can buy a gun, but it says nothing about whether or not they can use it well.
If everyone had the same training and skill as that cop I doubt I would have a problem with excessive gun ownership.
But the odds of those idiots actually using a gun well is actually pretty low and in such a case, they'd be more of a liability than a benefit.
It's just like that sift of the old dude who happened to have a gun when the internet cafe he was at was being robbed. He fired it indiscriminately regardless of the nearby bystanders. Fucking asshole was lucky not to have hurt the bystanders instead of the criminals.


I don't think you would have many gun enthusiasts complaining about a show of competency in safety before owning a gun, because most enthusiasts are emphatic about this themselves...the cost and red tape may become an issue for some but eh...can't please everyone.

Did you watch the video of the old man? I just rewatched it and based on the 2 main camera angles of the video it was safe to shoot within the building (you could not easily account for people on the other side of the wall/door). When he opens fire he is almost even and a couple feet to the side of a bystander, but according to the 2 views the only people in the radius of where he fired were the robbers.

Not only that, but he had decent form (2 handed grip with bent knees and squared shoulders) and paused his movements when he fired, all of which point to someone experienced with the firearm. If anything I'd say he showed great poise for an untrained person.

Oh don't hate them for their race.Hate them for their Player Class--Gangsta,where anyone who figures out how to string a dozen words together in front of a microphone feels entitled to Phat Lootz,or they blame "the Man" for their failures and consider random acts of violence and theft their Just Retribution we somehow owe them. I can appreciate Good Music of any sort,and acknowledge the Art and Craft of its creating auible sculpture with sound and voice. However,I will say I can do so without buying into a whole subculture that thinks wearing your pants half off is a fashion statement. I don't see the Enya Posse in Blue Wold on their faces and sporting designer kilts running around(although we should!). To quote a line from Animal House "Stoned Drunk and Stupid is no way to go through life,son.",and that's what the subtext of the subculture amounts to. Flashy glamour is nice,but none of it matters in the face of Real Work and the instinctual Need to get it done. This seperates the Artist from the Mob,wanting to devote time away from a constant party and to physical and emotional labour to conjure something meaningful magical and new. Stepping back to admire the fruits of your handywork is a high no mass of shiney strangers can ever hope to beat. Someone in that Flashmob has orginizational skills...300 people is quite a turn out. Wouldn't it be Nice if they had much enthusiasm for something Positive,like a neighborhood watch? twittering about crimes happening to the police can help keep their neighborhoods safe,which are crawling with drugs and shoot outs."Yo Dawg! The Bruthah from that Bodega Shooting is here on Main Street!" Maybe if the "Hood wasn't such a Scarey Place,businesses would come in. And if they didn't feel it was their right to steal,they might find good jobs from the new businesses and earn a living instead of demanding one.

But one has to have Morals for that. I see none in that video. People who don't mind rampaging in front of a sea of security cameras.Can you convince such people to Play Nice at all,or past the point when doing the right thing inconveniences you?Do people sometimes need the threat of Guns even to keep civil? Suddenly snide remarks about Evolution suddenly make SENSE. But its SOcial Evolution at play here,and at fault. WE are Rome trying to convince a native of the Province they conquered to kindly not shit in the street. Sometimes you need clubs for that. But something tells me these people need their lives managed for them. Maybe wall up a ten block radius of a poor neighborhood,move all the families out nd let them play hip Hop as a live action video game where the bullets are real and cameras everywhere record the drama Live! The ultimate Reality TV Urban Experience fully packaged and ready for heavy merchendising! They can compete for resources and earn fabulous prizes,and hopefully only shoot themslves instead of the rest of us just trying to get on with life.


The Hip Hop experience...Unrated on Pay Per View.Visit our Website and Twitter your opinion on the utterly SICK way DJ Do Wah Ditty Diddy Dum Diddy Do had his ear shot off in the fight for the corner of 134th street and Avenue F! Log in with your SmartPhone and soak up all the sleeze with the HoodieCam!

It'll happen. You'll see. It's very Roman.

When you consider the radius of the sun and time it took to leave its surface, the matter jetting out of the sun is probably at or near the speed of light. Fascinating!

There's loads; there's actually limited space available at a geosynchronous orbital radius. It's long been divvied up. Meant to be a bone of contention to developing countries.

Sullivan County, NY (home of the original Woodstock Festival)

I was born and raised here. I lived in St Louis for almost a year but have opted to move back closer to home. I'm looking for work within a 3 hour radius, excluding NYC, and will be moving accordingly.

>> ^Pring4:

According to the logo, this project has aspirations of sending these rails from the arctic circle to anywhere in the world. I support this.


Hate to burst your bubble, but at earth's surface escape velocity the kinetic energy of a projectile is only 32 times its weight in TNT. With suborbital flights and resistance on reentry the effect would be considerably less than that. Wind during the ascent would throw it off farther than the destruction radius unless the slug was really huge (multiple tons) or they put in some internal guidance system that can survive the biggest EMP ever.

Europa has a thick layer of ice, maybe a few or several miles thick, under which is a very deep liquid ocean, but "its bulk density suggests that it is similar in composition to the terrestrial planets, being primarily composed of silicate rock." According to the researchers, "GJ1214b’s radius could be explained by a bulk composition consisting of an ice-rock core surrounded by a H/He/H₂O envelope that has a water mass fraction of 50-85%."

GJ1214b is a giant ball of water 2.7 times the Earth's diameter (Uranus is about 4 times, Saturn about 9). The water must be (tens of) thousands of miles deep. There's nothing like it in our system. I can't even begin to imagine what happens to water at that kind of depth and pressure. What bizarre properties it must have. They mention superfluids and hot ice in the article, but I suspect it's even weirder.
>> ^gwiz665:
Isn't Europa actually made almost entirely of ice? Europa the moon around Jupiter, I believe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_%28moon%29

Old nuclear power plants produce deadly, cancer causing, bone deforming, face-melting radioactive sludge that will constantly be a threat to every human in a 50 mile radius for 10,000 lifetimes, so obviously nuclear power has one extremely large and worrisome drawback in its current iteration.

>> ^Kreegath:

Old nuclear power plants aren't impervious to tsunamis and powerful earth quakes simultaneously, so obviously nuclear power is bad.

"Roughly the size of Earth" is a bit misleading. It's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth. That means its gravity will be 2.4 times that of Earth's if it has a comparable density (putting it in the super-Earth category) or 0.43 if it has the density of water. It could be more dense, less dense, or somewhere in-between (which would be the most desirable). What's significant is that if its atmosphere provides a Greenhouse effect similar to that on Earth, then it should have a surface temperature of 22C/72F.

>> ^nock:

Aren't these things protected by the Marine Mammal and Endangered Species Acts? Pretty sure you aren't supposed to get within a certain radius. I'm also pretty sure he's within that radius.


I don't know the specific law in the US, but in other countries the rule has been that you are not allowed approach the animal, but once it approaches you, you're fine.

Aren't these things protected by the Marine Mammal and Endangered Species Acts? Pretty sure you aren't supposed to get within a certain radius. I'm also pretty sure he's within that radius.

The only "sock puppets" I see here are those who resort to name calling (instead of rational arguments) to defend this millionaire rockstar physicist.

He carried on banging hot chicks and writing best-selling books long after he murdered those people. Obviously that guilt really put a cramp in his style.



em>>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^The_Ham:
I dont like how smug he is about murdering 246,000 people.

246,000 people.

This one's for you The_Ham
<div id="widget_765087041"><script src="http://videosift.com/widget.js?video=204823&width=500&comments=15&minimized=1" type="text/javascript"></script><div style="display: none; margin: 0pt; padding: 5px; width: 510px; height: 562px; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(79, 179, 226); -moz-border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px; border: 1px solid rgb(31, 146, 199);" id="vsvid_659173547"><embed style="display: block; margin: 5px;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gOmlkeLuEZg?version=3&controls=1&autoplay=0&cc_load_policy=0&loop=0&egm=0&modestbranding=0&a
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Sock Puppets on Videosift?
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<div style="font-size: 10px; text-align: right; margin-bottom: 5px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
written by <strong style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Boise_Lib
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A name for a sock puppet?

@votedem
@progressivevideo
@CaptainObvious
@Keanu_

Any other nominations?
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<div style="font-size: 10px; text-align: right; margin-bottom: 5px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
written by <strong style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">bareboards2
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<div style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(239, 239, 239); border: 1px solid rgb(153, 153, 153); padding: 3px; font-size: 11px;">
promote the creativity, planning abilities, and tech savvy of our resident puppets.
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<div style="font-size: 10px; text-align: right; margin-bottom: 5px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">
written by <strong style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">bareboards2
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I'm going to name mine choggie.
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written by <strong style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Zifnab
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This video was seriously horrible but I up-voted for the description. Nicely done.
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written by <strong style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">CelebrateApathy
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Hmm. A lot of people seem to get *very* different reads on Feynman from watching this than I do.

I don't read him as "smug" at all. The smiling? Defense mechanism, I say. He felt regret for his part in developing the bomb, hopeful pleasure in the idea that perhaps dropping the two bombs on Japan represented a net savings in lives both among the Japanese and allied forces (an invasion would have been catastrophic), and the mish-mash of conflicting emotions makes even his incredibly gifted mind go into meltdown.

I personally don't think that any of the Manhattan Project scientists "deserved" to be blamed for deaths caused by the two bombs that were actually dropped "in anger", nor for the near-disasters of the Cold War, etc. etc. I don't think they should even have lost any sleep over their involvement in developing the weapons, but I expect that all of them did in spades.

I think a better (bit still rather unfair) place to start second-guessing things is either with President Truman for giving the executive orders, or the committee that suggested the targets of the bombs (which did include Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists along with military leaders). I have always wanted to think along the lines of:

What if we had dropped the first bomb in a remote forest, where there would have been hopefully little to no loss of human life but still plenty of evidence as to the destructive power and effective radius of the weapon? We could then have communicated with the Japanese, told them the area to inspect, and said "surrender or next time we drop the same thing somewhere that you're really not going to want us to."

Maybe that would have worked, but it is a dicey way to play the cards we had in our hand. The Japanese might have read it as a sign of weakness, it would have made for another delay before we could develop more bombs and hopefully end the war (although we already had to bluff that we had plenty to use if it came down to it), etc. So basically, now I am just glad that I have never had to and hopefully never will have to make a decision that has anywhere near the magnitude of those made by the people in charge of that whole situation. Second guessing them decades after the fact and with the benefit of hindsight and information that they didn't have access to seems rather crass.

An excellent question. The answer is, Japan has a religion, and that religion is Japan itself (nationalism). Yes, Shinto is there, but AFAIK, it's mostly ceremonial.

The Japanese have a very strong family-oriented culture with clearly defined roles and a nearly homogenous society. They also have a concept of honor unheard of in the West. Disgracing one's family name by stealing or rioting would be inexcusable.

Unfortunately, the Japanese are, IMO, still too trusting of authority in times of crisis.

I never claimed that Christianity is the only way to instill values, but because a tenet of generic Christianity is that it's the "ONLY" way, I can see why one might think so.

When God is "killed" the State becomes God, and a murderous one at that. The only majority atheist countries spared mass slaughter have traditionally religious cultures or strict cultural values. Right now England has neither, and because the population is unarmed, they are subjects of the crown, not citizens.


>> ^SDGundamX:

>> ^quantumushroom:
I agree with this guy 99%. He is not a cock. Of course, watching an atheist angered by a lack of morality in the populace is hilarious. People didn't regularly act this way 40 years ago. What changed?
Not everyone proclaiming to be a Christian follows Thou shalt not steal all the time, but more of them have values than the ones raised with....NOTHING.
Sorry Atheists, without those funny Bible stories/sermons/morality plays, you have no vehicle to deliver your values, which oddly mirror Christian values in so many ways.

Riots don't happen in Japan, either--a country where less than 1% of the population is Christian. Don't you think the Japanese have 1000 times more reasons to riot than these guys? Many people in the tsunami hit areas are still living in school gyms, without air conditioning in 90+ degree weather. They have no work, no homes, and not a whole lot of hope. Meanwhile, a 20km radius in Fukushima is uninhabitable and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. The people who used to live there are basically homeless--they can't claim insurance on their homes because technically their homes haven't been destroyed. And it's not just people in northern Japan that are being affected--radioactive food is "accidentally" getting through inspections and being consumed by the general populace.
Most have never heard of the ten commandments here. 80% of the population are atheist. Yet there are no riots, no looting, no violent demonstrations. People are angry, but they are working peacefully towards solutions to the problems through grassroots campaigns. So my question for you is, how do you reconcile these facts with your belief that only Christianity can instill morality in people?

>> ^quantumushroom:

I agree with this guy 99%. He is not a cock. Of course, watching an atheist angered by a lack of morality in the populace is hilarious. People didn't regularly act this way 40 years ago. What changed?
Not everyone proclaiming to be a Christian follows Thou shalt not steal all the time, but more of them have values than the ones raised with....NOTHING.
Sorry Atheists, without those funny Bible stories/sermons/morality plays, you have no vehicle to deliver your values, which oddly mirror Christian values in so many ways.


Riots don't happen in Japan, either--a country where less than 1% of the population is Christian. Don't you think the Japanese have 1000 times more reasons to riot than these guys? Many people in the tsunami hit areas are still living in school gyms, without air conditioning in 90+ degree weather. They have no work, no homes, and not a whole lot of hope. Meanwhile, a 20km radius in Fukushima is uninhabitable and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. The people who used to live there are basically homeless--they can't claim insurance on their homes because technically their homes haven't been destroyed. And it's not just people in northern Japan that are being affected--radioactive food is "accidentally" getting through inspections and being consumed by the general populace.

Most have never heard of the ten commandments here. 80% of the population are atheist. Yet there are no riots, no looting, no violent demonstrations. People are angry, but they are working peacefully towards solutions to the problems through grassroots campaigns. So my question for you is, how do you reconcile these facts with your belief that only Christianity can instill morality in people?