doG

That would be the result of what I laid out since the electors for each legislative district would go to the winner of that district. Those electors would represent the people of the United States and not the people of the states individually. I would not advocate that the Constitution direct what the states must do with their two electors, that should be up to the state governments to decide. Let them award both or split them however they want. If a state legislature decides that their states electors shall be selected by drawing straws then they should be allowed to do that.

I would also leave the Electoral College intact but would apportion each legislative district with one elector and each state with two. I think the Presidential elector for each legislative district should vote as the result of the popular vote for that district and the State's electors should vote as directed by their state legislatures. This would also bring our current system in line with the 14th Amendment.

Would you claim that the 14th Amendment undermines the sovereignty of the States by making the citizens of the states citizens of the U.S. as well? Wouldn't an application of the 14th to the citizen's representation strengthen the people's political power proportionately? Part of the reason the representation is limited now is because Congress repeatedly tried changing the formula of apportionment to fairly enumerate the inevitable fractional districts that resulted from dividing the national population by the 50 states. Resetting the districts to sizes of 30,000 as originally stated in the Constitution and allowing those districts to bridge state lines would eliminate the fractional districts and bring the people's representation and power in line with the federal citizenship given by the 14th Amendment. BTW, the States would do well by themselves to repeal the 17th Amendment so that they again will be the constituents of the Senators.

Another question for the mix. The House of Representatives is the house intended to represent the people while the Senate is the house intended to represent the states. What reasons are there to keep the people's districts from crossing state lines?

A representation of 1 for every 30,000 was the intent of the founders. Their reasoning for this is explained in Federalist Papers 55 and 56. Having refreshed my own memory of these texts I must say that I agree with them.

Thanks. That'll be a handy link for referrals

It's not something hardware deigners or file systems programmers could necessarily have any control of. If the operating system is halted before it finishes its tasks of writing data to hardware and cleaning up the mess you could have a number of problems. You could in fact have partial entries in the filesystem that could cause troubles with your harddrive. Data in RAM that isn't written yet would be lost. In an age of apparent multitasking you think many things are happening at once when they really aren't. The processor can really only process one instruction at a time, it just bounces to and fro among all of the running threads of instructions so fast it gives the appearance of multitasking. The operating system and the user could have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of concurrent processes open at once with the CPU bouncing among them. Halting the CPU instantly could leave any number of these processes in an indeterminate state and any hardware dependent on them in a similar indeterminate state.

Fire probably got into the mixture the first time cavemen tasted meat from some of the creatures killed by a forest fire...

Yes

Evolution comes to mind. Consider your question in the context of the entirety of human history. Consider the IQs of our ancient ancestors compared to modern man. Can you imagine a trend? You wouldn't notice this much in a hundred years but you can see that in the long haul our IQ is increasing.

Yes, a perfect vacuum will not absorb any light. Anything else will absorb, scatter or otherwise disperse the photons of the light beam. As swansont mentioned, fiber optics are an ideal carrier. Some type of laser would make an ideal source.

But you might want scattering events when they're used for a light show or something similar so sometimes visible is a good thing....

I've always been a pocket watch person myself. Humorously though, like yourself I carry around a cell phone in my pocket now and yet, I still carry my pocket watch which I usually defer to for the time when my cell phone is actually more likely to be correct since its time is self maintained by the cell network. I guess I'm just an old fuddy duddy...

Why's that?

Their beliefs are rooted in their Buddhism. Their atheism says only that they are not theist. I personally am a skeptical agnostic atheist humanist. My various beliefs are rooted in my skepticism, my agnosticism and my humanism. My atheist value merely says that I am not theist.

Can't say that I particularly have a preference but I've had my analog Swiss Army pocket watch for over 20 years now. It should last a lifetime so I'll probably never have to worry about my preference since I have no need to buy another watch

Do you mean "invisible" laser beams being solved with fog machines? If the beams were visible it would seem an air filter would have been a better solution than a fog machine.

I'll say it again, send all of the 535 current Congress critters home as they come up for reelection. There's not a statesman in the bunch...

Like Singham you are trying to append the definition of atheist. Do not confuse skepticism with atheism. Atheism is simply about a lack of belief in God and has nothing to do with a belief or disbelief in anything else. It is not a disbelief in ghosts or spirits and it is not a belief in the scientific method or natures laws. It quite literally means not·theist, nothing more, nothing less.

This is actually as it should be on copyrighted news pieces. On these it would be convenient to post a Fair Use extract here as a lead in with a link to the story for people to go there and read it themselves while beginning a discussion thread here on that particular news piece. On non-copyrighted works like public news releases from government sites and universities the entire article could be posted here for discussion. On these I still recommend a link to the source as a courtesy and declaration that someone is not claiming the work as their own.

More the reason for it to be a forum limited to such members, one requiring an additional group membership in addition to the membership to the forums in general. Members that don't abide can be expelled from that individual forum for violating the rules.

Even before Weixiao Huang received his doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his new transistor captured the attention of some of the biggest American and Japanese automobile companies. The 2008 graduate’s invention could replace one of the most common pieces of technology in the world — the silicon transistor for high-power and high-temperature electronics. Huang, who comes from humble roots as the son of farmers in rural China, has invented a new transistor that uses a compound material known as gallium nitride (GaN), which has remarkable material properties. The new GaN transistor could reduce the power consumption and improve the efficiency of power electronics systems in everything from motor drives and hybrid vehicles to house appliances and defense equipment. “Silicon has been the workhorse in the semiconductor industry for last two decades,” Huang said. “But as power electronics get more sophisticated and require higher performing transistors, engineers have been seeking an alternative like gallium nitride-based transistors that can perform better than silicon and in extreme conditions.” More at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute...

A story I saw today about a letter from Einstein made me think about where to put news stories about famous people that pop up in the media. I think 'Current Events' would be a good catch all for such articles.

But there's really not a good place now to post links to current news pieces. It doesn't need to drive the front page, just be a location that's topic appropriate for current, science related news.

Have you ever thought about a forum for posting science related news articles?