Wild Bill

Login, your entire argument boils down to "If I wasn't with Bernardo at the time and witnessed it with my own eyes then I won't accept it as true. What's more, even if I DID witness it myself then someone else or society in general MADE him do it so he should be excused." My friend, you are raising more snakes under your hat than Bernardo. In just a few posts you have wiped out the use of all courts and a legal system. You have erased the concept of individual responsibility. You can forgive and ignore whatever you want. I suspect you have very few people who share your POV. If I were Mr. Mahafy and I met you I might go postal if I knew what you believe. I sincerely hope that something so terrible never happens to anyone in your family or circle of friends. I also think that people in general would show you more sympathy in that event than you seem to offer yourself.

I agree, right now continuous thrust engines are far too weak. Still, how quickly could something new come on stream? Even a continuous acceleration of only 1/10 g would reduce transit times to other planets by a fantastic amount. We're smiling and dreaming here, remember? As for obsolete technology like vacuum tubes, I suspect that as many obsolete technologies as possible should be adopted in the beginning, after balancing out the time involved in building something old versus something state of the art. You see Bonam, I'm not all that confident that Earth will be a reliable source for more materials like computer chips. That support depends too much on politics. Not necessarily a war that destroys support capabilities but simple budgetary changes in priorities could leave colonists screwed! I would think it only prudent for colonists to become totally self-sufficient as quickly as possible! How long would it take to develop the resources necessary to make your own computer chips and other high level solid state devices? What's more, solid state manufacturing is a high volume process. Vacuum tubes are easier to make in onesy-twosy batches. They are useless for digital applications, of course but for simple power control, radio, analog television and such they are quite useful for a small colony. The first priorities are to be able to breathe! Then comes food, water and adequate shelter. Making your own computers might never be necessary! A Mars colony could survive indefinitely on a 1940's level technology. If everything is run by a computer system with no spares available then it would be very vulnerable. I would feel more secure the sooner I didn't need not just initial devices but any replacements to come from Earth. Far better to be indefinitely self-sufficient from almost Day 1. Once that is accomplished, I'd work on developing local capabilities for newer technologies. I agree with a Martian Space Elevator. I just can't see anyone winning a political war to have it funded from this end. Martians would have to create their own capability for such a thing, at least for the lion's share of what is required. I also agree with asteroid mining being a better choice as a source for almost anything we can imagine. I merely mentioned it to apply to those things we CAN'T imagine! As for the physical effects of living on Mars, anyone becoming a colonist there had better hope that .38 g is enough, even with supplemental exercise and other techniques. Once again, if the support from Earth stops, I would like to be able to survive! If I had children there, I would be even more motivated. Or maybe I'm just too cynical! No politician would leave a colony stranded, would they?

MB, that's not the point. Some critics here have been claiming that the F-35 will never work as designed and therefore is a waste of time and money. Meanwhile, every time they have a test of some capability or other it always seems to pass! Sometimes some bugs have shown up but so far they seem to have been ironed out without too much trouble. Derek posts these things to refute the claims of those critical posters.

I think you really have no idea of Paul Bernardo's crimes. You really should do a google. It was never just sexual assault. It was a number of out and out murders! With torture! Including drilling into a poor girl's head! The man is a whack job! His crimes were horrendous. Even if you argue that he was crazy, if any treatment made him sane again you would have to wipe his memory of what he had done or those memories would drive him whacko again out of guilt! You need a better model for your point.

As had been said before MG, the speed of light or radio is a limiting factor for using robots. Direct remote control is not very practical because of the time delay. Here's a link: http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelink/commdly.htm Circuit Distance Delay Time HF link (UK-NZ) ~20,000 km 0.07 s (67 ms) Submarine cable(UK-NZ) ~20,000 km 0.07 s (67 ms) Geosat Link (US-Aus) ~80,000 km 0.25 s Earth-Moon 384,000 km 1.3 s Earth-Mars 55 - 378 million km 3 - 21 minutes Earth-Jupiter 590 - 970 million km 33 - 53 minutes Earth-Pluto ~5800 million km 5 hours Earth-Nearest Star ~9.5 million million km 4 years Please note that Mars is a 21 minute delay, each way! As for costs and being self sustaining, most of the cost is in the initial launch. Once a craft is in space and in an orbit that will eventually intersect with its destination the cost is negligible, since the craft is coasting. Coasting is free, except for a little bit if you need any course corrections. That's also why a trip to Mars takes so damn long! If we had a constant boost drive, like an ion engine, you are under constant acceleration. This gives a bit of a sense of gravity, so that your coffee stays in your cup and your muscles have something to work against. Instead of a 2 year trip the time might be cut to a couple of months or even a few weeks! Once you are there, if you have enough energy and raw materials you can very quickly become self sustaining. Your landing craft can be your initial shelter. With solar or nuclear power you can smelt minerals and metals. Ordinary sand becomes glass to make a pressurized greenhouse. It might take years to be able to make computer chips but there are lots of more basic technologies that could do an amazing amount for the early years. Vacuum tubes, for example! People have made them in their basement workshops! Vacuum tubes worked in radios for decades before we invented solid state devices. A base on Mars would have lots of room and plenty of solar power. Why not use vacuum tubes, at least in the beginning? Along with incandescent light bulbs! And little control light electronic indicators. Hell, early fighter jets flew with vacuum tube electronics. Colonists would find building old fashioned crt monitors much easier than flat screen LED tvs. With sufficient preparation, a Mars colony could become self-sufficient in just a few years. As it grew of course more things could be sent from Earth, such as seeds for new plants and maybe even some livestock, in the form of frozen embryos. The weight of a shipment of seeds is trivial. Until Man is living there, we have no idea of what he may find that would start an economic trade back to Earth. Europe had no idea of what the New World held that was valuable until they went there. Even if there are no physical things to trade, the position of Mars as an observatory, especially with its very thin and clear atmosphere, might be valuable to someone back home. Or maybe the gravity, which is around a third of that on Earth might allow some types of manufacturing processes that would be more cost-effective than we have been doing, or even possible when it hasn't been possible on Earth at all! For all we know, valuable mineral and metal deposits may be literally lying out on the open! Or at least very easily accessible. We just can't tell until we get there. One thing is rarely mentioned. People living on worlds with lighter gravity might live more comfortably far longer than they do here. Imagine hauling 120 year old bones around on Mars, where the gravity makes a 180 lb man effectively weigh only 60 lbs. On the Moon it would be half of that! Mind you, that is weight and not Mass. It takes the same force to speed up or slow down. Still, for walking around a Mars base and sleeping in your bed the strain on your bones and heart would be a pittance in comparison. I'd go in a heartbeat! Who would want to come back?

Good point. There is also a theory that if the penalty for murder is not sufficient or the chances of being caught are not that high many armed robbers will deliberately kill any witnesses, like attendants at a gas bar, store clerks or employees at fast food outlets. I don't pretend to know all the answers. Certainly there are no perfect ones, since the actions of any criminal or even any human being are always a variable. However, it just seems common sense that if it is difficult to catch a criminal who commits a certain type of crime the only possible deterrent is a very severe punishment. The lower the chances of being caught the higher the sentence severity. What else might work? As a rule, criminals are NOT stupid! They can be incredibly smart! They just lack the same moral inhibitions as the rest of us. They are NOT all just products of poor families either. Some are but I'll bet many less than what some apologists claim. I've always thought that belief to be incredibly patronizing and demeaning to poor folks anyway. Whatever. Despite all the debate and different programs, the problem in Toronto seems to be getting worse and not better. Once again, from a 'Utilitarian' viewpoint there are no successes apparent.

I wondered about CC's premise too, Wyly. It sounds like CC is saying that all criminals are really very simple and stupid if they never think about the consequences. A cross-section of perps would show that to not be the case.

Might building most structures underground, even if only a metre or two, mitigate some of that "harsh environment" stuff?

The very last thing the Ontario NDP want is anyone mentioning Rae's win during a by-election campaign! Don't believe me? Go ahead and try it! It should provide a lot of amusement to those watching.

No, that's not disputed. Still, some better advertising and information flow could make the process easier. Plus, the two income family has been a must here for a long, long time. With one partner working families can get by. If one goes out west the other has to quit their job when they follow, hoping they too can find a job. Remember, Alberta and Saskatchewan are thousands of miles away. About the only exposure to what its like in Saskatchewan that Ontarioans have ever seen is Corner Gas! The chances of finding a decent job seem more iffy than they probably are. To a westerner, it doesn't seem like a problem. He lives there! He knows what things are like! To an easterner, it's a lot more of an unknown. Unless he has family or friends out west to tell him the score, he can't help but be wary.

Apparently, you are the guy who would leave us defenceless and trust to blind luck and the generosity of our allies. If you are wrong, my children are screwed! I don't care to take that risk. I don't appreciate those who insist that we do when they can do SFA about it if they are wrong.

Geez Topaz, he's 74 years old! You think he would last until then? Survive the strains of an election campaign? If he won stay alive through his term? Maybe. Some of us are blessed with good health when that old. Still, at his age would he WANT to?

I wonder if CC and others here have ever read "Atlas Shrugged". It doesn't matter if you agree with Ayn Rand's philosophy. The book is a great portrayal of what happens when the capitalists and the people of ability go on strike. It brings home how dangerous it is to take them for granted.

A lot of young people in Ontario have gone out West. The problem is that much if not most of the unemployed here are older factory workers. Who wants a 50 year old who has done nothing but put bumpers on cars all his career? The median age in factory jobs has been steadily creeping up for decades. With hiring freezes your work force just gets older. Younger people are far more mobile. The idea of taking a few weeks or months to go out west and look for a job is not such a big deal For older folks with family responsibilities it is more of a logistics challenge.Plus there is a natural human tendency to think things will recover if you wait it out. Of course, things haven't recovered. The government makes it worse with retraining programs when there are no jobs available in those fields anyway. Again, there is the problem of age. So there is a lot of false hope going on. A big problem is also the image of what jobs are available out west. People here think all the jobs are in the oil fields. We see tv clips of husky oil field workers flipping huge lengths of heavy drill casing around. To a 50 year old laid off auto worker, it looks like the jobs are only for younger lads. He thinks he is just too old to handle a job out west! In all the years I've lived in Ontario, I have never seen a tv commercial for jobs out west, or any sort of Job Fair aimed at the typical unemployed worker here in the East. It's like a big ship that needs deck hands complaining it can't get workers, while they are 10 miles out from shore and expect workers on land to not only hear about their needs by some sort of esp and also to have job applicants swim out to them, because there is no other way to get to their ship! It is expensive for a laid off older factory worker to make a trip out west to look for a job. What if he can't get hired? He has spent money on lodging while he was looking and lost time in trying to find a job at home. If he gets a job he has to worry about how secure it will be. He will have to sell his house in Ontario,buy something out west and then move his family. He will have to do a lot of research about the real estate market differences. A google shows that in many areas out west house prices are much higher than in Ontario. Can he afford to cover the difference? What if the job he finds out west doesn't work out? He has spent a lot of time and money and is now even further in the hole! I don't mean to sound totally negative but I think that many westerners have no idea about the challenges many unemployed in Ontario would face in moving out west. As I said, the bulk of Ontario's unemployed are in their 40's and 50's, not their 20's. It always looks easy when you don't have to do it yourself!

Yep. I never post actual ideas for solutions. That must be it. Nearly 6000 posts so far and that's all I've ever done. Right!

You must be built low. Things seem to go right over you! The pony was a metaphor. You made a post with nothing but wants - wishes and dreams. What's more, they were "mom and apple pie" wishes, that everyone has. My point is that anyone with hair in their ears can express wishes, like wanting a pony. It takes more skull sweat to come up with practical ideas that might work to ACHIEVE such results! You remind me of Dilbert in the newspaper comic strip. His bosses, who know nothing about anything practical or technical, are always coming up with projects to give to their engineers. The projects are always impractical wishes and impossible to deliver. The managers of course blame the failure on their engineers!

When I am channel surfing I try to avoid them. Much rather watch the latest lander onto Martian soil! Feed my brain! Don't bore my ass!

Well duh! Who doesn't want such a thing? We all have wishes! I'd like a pony, myself. What we need is ideas that will work! We have more than enough wishes and dreams. More techies! Get the artsies and poli-sci majors the hell out of the way! They have the wrong skill sets to be useful for such things.

So what we don't know can't hurt us? Man, it's that kind of thinking that could get my kids killed...

I only mentioned it to show that as one of your examples it had a lot of baggage that could make it a non-viable one.

I'm surprised the link wasn't to rense.com

"Hey guys! We saw you! Now stop whatever you're doing!" Yeah, that would work.

And after they saw a boat, just what would they do? Wave?

You do realize that ethanol has been causing more and more hunger and starvation, as land and crops like corn are used for ethanol production instead of food? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch! Everything interconnects with everything else.

Okay! I give! I guess I'm wrong. Still, they have alternated between anglophones and francophones. Since they can classify Rae's caretaker leadership anyway they want I guess they can pick either one for a serious run at an election. I still think they should go with young Trudeau! I know many feel he's too young to be a winner but that's not the point. The Liberals know (or should know) they haven't got a chance in the next election. What they desperately need to do is stop sliding into the abyss! No matter what, Justin's last name has charisma by the boatload! Likely he can not only stop the slide but regain some lost ground. That would buy the Liberals a breathing spell for the next term. This would be an invaluable aid in rebuilding their party into a contender once again. Of course, most political parties make these decisions internally. It is more important to be impressive to the party members than to the electorate at large. We will see soon enough what the Liberals will do.