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Oh, it's only 6 pages for me! Before Israel attacked, and even in the inital stages of their attack both Hamas and Hezbollah made offers for the return of the kidnapped soldiers. The inital offer asked for about 400 prisoners to be released for 2 of the kidnapped soldiers. I think that offers after that were during Israel's attack, and I think the number only went up from 400 to even more. budullewraagh: you have a viewpoint and are perfectly allowed to have. You seem to understand the situation ok, but I think there's one important view point you are missing. That is the Israeli public. There has been (with the previously mentioned kidnapping and constant bombardment of northern Israeli towns) a growing feeling within Israel that something needs to be done about the 'terrorist problem'. I said previously about how the war has been "brewing up" (or was that another thread?). Just remember the Israeli public all supported the war. And the government even more than the public were aware how overdue the war was. I see why you say that, but Wrong. The international community is well aware of the issue now. If Hezbollah attack again the international community will see it as the second time Israel has been attacked and will be forced to accept that Israel must defend itself. Also there's the pressure on Lebanon to keep groups like Hezbollah under control, and the pressure on Hezbollah not to start another war. Basically it got the world aware of the issue which has been brewing for the last few years, and which until now most of the world was happily ignoring. I totaly agree. This is a big problem. UN forces will not be anywhere near as effective as the IDF, if the UN does anything useful at all it would be suprising. But I think saying that that the IDF "failed miserably" is unfair.

Haha Ye, it sounds a theoretically good solution. If Israel and it's Arab neighbours can't co-exist then move one. But hey, it's impractical, unrealistic and could/will never happen.

Gauss's law can be used wherever the inverse-square law is true.

Ye, I second that... what does the graph show?

Cool. I'm applying for UCL. What you doing in your gap year?

Seems like some kind of automatic error report generated by the game for some reason. The kind of thing that you don't understand (and neither do I), and we are not supposed to!

I've never gone fishing, not my thing really.

CanadaAotS: you wanna use the [math] tags!

For two reasons bud: Firstly the captured soldiers situation. In the past Israel has had to exchange hundreds of personnel for just one or two Israelis, sometimes the Israelis were dead, and Israel still exchanged hundreds of prisoners just for the one or two dead bodies. This is a very bad exchange on Israel's behalf, they did not want to be forced into another "exchange". Also by reacting this way and not doing a prisoner exchange, as they have in the past, they have shown Hezbollah and Hamas that capturing Israelis and demanding the release of hundreds of prisoners simply will not work. This is an important message to get across to prevent future kidnapping. Secondly the missile situation. Missiles have been hitting northern cities in Israel almost daily for many months (probably years, moo will know). Just as you don't hear much about deaths in Africa, so you don't normally hear about rockets landing in Israel, but they were there and they were very real. With the rocket attacks so frequent you could almost argue that this war had been brewing up for a long time, and with each rocket Hezbollah fired into Israel the war got a little closer. They also had all of the Israeli public behind them. And were supported by countries like the USA for helping in the fight against terror.

Cool. Which uni are you off to?

Good, so you can equally argue both "there is no charge" and "it has all cancelled itself out" and at the end of the day there is no difference. So the way I've though of as gravity cancelling itself out whilst there is no electric charge inside a uniformly charged sphere is fine.

It wasn't me though! Stop stalking me you illegal....!

I suppose there would be a band of orbitting photons. And thinking about it again I suppose it would be very intense, because the number of orbitting photons would be quite high. The number of photons would probably reach some net constant, where the number of photons entering orbit equalled the number being absorbed, but I think it would be quite a high number of photons, so quite/very intense light.

Severian: you're idea sounds alright, but there are many reasons why that couldn't and wouldn't happen. > Initial political process (with the ultimatium) would take too long for a country which wanted a quick response to the kidnapping. > Too many Israeli deaths. > Too much financial cost. > The Israeli public would not like it. > Even if Israel gave out food/medical supplies the Lebanese people would not like Israelis invading and taking control of their country. > Just like many years ago when Hezbollah was formed to force Israel to withdraw from Lebanon the same thing would happen now. Fights would break out everywhere as Lebanese tried to prevent Israel taking total control. > Terrorist groups like Hezbollah do not easily respond to political talk. And also if you think about how long it took for the Israelis to capture a few southern villages. Hezbollah are guerilla fighters who have had years to build bunkers and tunnel networks. It would be very hard to take over Lebanon, militarily. And what of the thousands of Hezbollah militants? And of the thousands of civilians who become militants as there country is invaded? And what would the rest of the world say if Israel went and invaded Lebanon, overthrowing the governement? Remember the Lebanese government can't fight against Hezbollah, militarily, as Hezbollah is a part of the government and anyway it would most likely cause a civil or internal war. And Hezbollah would win the fight anyway.

If you're not doing AS or A2 then what are you doing? It was 4:15pm when I posted that... saved the pub for a tad later than that! Went just gone 5... back quite early actually, 10 something...

I think that warrantless wiretapping should be legal, if the security services or a government have some reason to suspect someone, they should be able to wiretap, without having to go through the process of getting a warrant.

But that's because the charge has moved to the outside. Whereas inside a plannet the gravitational fields have cancelled. Am I wrong? Or is there no difference between the two?

Sounds reasonable; that there is some projection with which an object could orbit a black hole. Just like a plannet can orbit a star, so a photon could orbit a black hole. However just like there are many different orbital paths around a star, there would be many different orbital paths around a black hole. So you wouldn't suddenly reach a point where there is very intense light, however as you approach the black hole you could come across orbitting photons. Now I'm thinking; what would these photons show you? Well if the photon came from, say, a red dwarf star then you would observer a single red-frequency photon. It would look a bit out of place. You obvserve many distant galaxies and then some red-frequency photon which has been orbitting the black hole for the last 5 light years comes into your eye. Now despite the fact that the human eye is not sensitive enough to detect a single photon if there were many 'old' photons orbitting a black hole then as you approach it you will see lots of random photons from all over the galaxy all at the same time, it would look quite confusing.

Sure there must be some people doing A-Levels around here somewhere! What did you all get? (And GCSEs, but I think they're out next week) I got: Physics: A Maths: A Chemistry: B ICT: A I'm doing Further Maths next year (already done lots of extra maths units this year). And my Chemistry teacher is going to kill me! I was 5/300 marks from an A. I'll retake a/some unit(s), so should end up with an A, but still...

Ye, to move on the surface of the Earth you push backwards against the ground and the ground pushes you forward. If you're "floating" in the center of the Earth then there's nothing to push against, so you can't move. I prefer to think of it as the sum of all forces equalling zero. There is mass around you, to say there is no gravity just sounds wrong, to me, it's like saying "yes there's mass but there is no gravity", it goes against the "all mass has a gravitational field" thing.

MacSwell: the idea was to have uranium with a neutron source, the idea was that as the uranium entered the black hole it would become denser and so become supercritical and then the neutron source could cause a nuclear reaction. But thinking about it now the side of the uranium nearer the black hole will undergo greater acceleration than the side further from the black hole. This would have an overall effect of stretching ie. decreasing the density of the uranium.

That is an interesting idea. A very interesting one...

No there's nothing wrong with them. Stereotypically they are very good quality with very good customer services. Stereotypically they are also very expensive. Just like when you buy Nike products you are paying for the name, same thing with Dell. Although now-a-days I think the price is quite reasonable and whilst the quality remains as good as ever you can find quality elsewhere too.

I dislike people who sit saying "its wrong, its wrong, its terrorism" and then have no better or alternative solution that could ever realistically work. At least Israel in Lebanon, America in Iraq, UK and allies in World War 2 are trying to do something good. You just sit there saying there how wrong it is. What's the point in complaining if there is no other way? ___________________ Tetrahedrite and budullewraagh, three direct questions: 1) Was kidnapping Israeli soldiers from Israeli land an act of peace, or an act or war? 2) Was firing rockets into Israel from across the border a friendly import, or a death threat being executed? 3) Do you think that what Hezbollah has done is correct? Or is it terrorism? NB: we are ignoring Israel's reactions etc. however you feel, ignore it for these three questions, these are about Hezbollah, not Israel