thebestaquaman

It does not violate international law. It's specifically regulated by an international treaty that some countries are part to. Don't go around spreading disinformation, it's a bad look.

That’s why we have the Bill of Rights: it’s meant to stop people from simply saying “the government needs this power so we’re going to give it that power.” It isn’t about creating rights, it’s about recognizing and protecting rights that have existed all along.

This is kind of a contradiction. What the bill of rights does is exactly to codify certain rights into law. There are a bunch of things considered a right today which aren't written into the bill of rights, and there are things codified in there that a lot of people don't consider to be "natural and universal human rights". Something doesn't become morally right by being written in the bill of rights, it just becomes a legal right. And of course, the US government can in some hypothetical scenario throw out the whole constitution and write a new one, making a whole new set of legal rights.

Of course, the above hypothetical changes nothing regarding what is considered morally correct, it just changes what rights are codified into law. In fact, the bill of rights is explicit in pointing out that what should be considered a right can change over time, and several of its clauses are therefore open to interpretation.

The whole "recognizing that right X exists outside the legal system" kind of falls apart when you look at the details. For example:

The Seventh Amendment guarantees jury trials in federal civil cases that deal with claims of more than twenty dollars.

This is not something that was ordained from above and has always applied to every living person. It's a right the government has decided to give you. You can agree or disagree with it, but it's a right every american citizen has nevertheless. In other countries people have a right to housing, sick leave from work, or a certain number of vacation days per year. Those are rights that the american government has decided to not grant its citizens. Again, you can agree or disagree with that decision, but the fact remains that american citizens do not have those rights. Whether any of those rights in some sense "existed all along" (even though a lot of people don't have them) is a purely hypothetical question. The question with practical consequence is which rights should be codified into law.

The last sentence in every chapter of the Russian history book:

And then it got worse.

You seem to be missing a key part here: I can disagree with the government. It also appears that you are confusing the concept of rights in a legal sense, and the moral sense.

If the government can decide what rights there are, then anything they do is morally correct?

Obviously not. The decisions of the government are based on what some majority wants (in a democracy, in an authoritarian state it doesn't even need to be that). The fact that a majority of those in power decide something does not make it morally right. I don't understand how that is a difficult concept to grasp?

Until relatively recently, same-sex marriages were not allowed. Gay people did not have the right to marry who they wanted. This was decided by the government. Me recognising that as historical fact does not mean I think it was morally justified to prevent people from marrying who they wanted.

Also today, we have laws granting or restricting peoples rights that the government is free to change. I do not think that the current state of our laws is the end-all-be-all of morality, and neither does my government, which is part of the reason why laws are constantly changing.

You're making a jump here that I have a hard time believing you're making in good faith..

Saying "The government makes the laws and decides what rights people have" is just miles away from saying "the government is justified in making whatever laws it pleases."

Yes: the Nazis were in power, and took away peoples rights. Me recognising that that's how governments work does not mean I support the actions of that government or think they are morally justified in doing what they did... obviously.

Holy shit! Does anyone have a location for this?

I'm honestly wondering what it's made of to go up in absolute flames like that?

That would be fine, I can live with choosing two of those for any given account.

What I hate is when the company offering the service forces its choice on me. I may be reliant on logging into some specific account without access to my phone, but then along comes company X and says "NOPE! Your account security is more important than you being able to access your own stuff. We're completely on board with locking you out of your own accounts in the name of security."

To be clear, I'm talking about personal accounts. Those on a network where I'm responsible for preventing a breach are another matter of course.

I'm surprised you're getting downvoted so heavily: Is it really that controversial of an opinion that I want to be able to make the choice between reliable accessibility, efficiency, and hardened security for my personal stuff?

Of course: On a corporate network I have a responsibility to have a very secure account so that I'm not a weak point, I'm not talking about scenarios where my account being breached exposes others that I'm responsible for.

I'm talking about my personal accounts. I may want to choose to have a password and no 2FA, for the simple reason that I may want to be able to access my account from a library computer or internet cafe without having access to any of my devices. That reliable access may be more important to me than having heavier security, and nobody has any business asking me why, because it's my data that I'm choosing how to protect. However, that's become pretty much an impossibility by now, with everyone shoving 2FA and whatnot down my throat, regardless of what I want.

If I happen to lose/break my laptop and phone simultaneously, which is not unthinkable given that I carry both on me pretty much every day, I'm pretty much locked out of everything.

Yes, there are an infinite number of velocities you can use, but if you look at their distribution, you'll find that it quickly goes to zero somewhere around 1-2 m/s, so the expectation value of the velocity is convergent.

If you have an object with a velocity taken from a distribution that doesn't approach zero sufficiently fast as the velocity goes to infinity, the expectation value diverges. A simple example would be a person that would be half as likely to get up at a velocity of 2 m/s as 1 m/s, and half as likely to get up at 4 m/s as 2 m/s, etc.

The more mathematical version of the same argument is to compute the kinetic energy of a particle whose wavefunction is a delta pulse (i.e. a particle whose position is exactly defined), and you'll find that the particle has infinite energy.

There are a lot of good answers here already, but I'll try to attack the question from a new angle.

Firstly, yes: they experience an attractive force from the nucleus, and would in principle have their lowest possible potential energy if they were located exactly in the nucleus. An equilibrium state is the state with lowest energy, so why aren't they exactly in the nucleus?

Consider that an electrons position and speed cannot be exactly defined at the same time (uncertainty principle). So an electron with an exact position could have any speed. If you compute the expectation value of a particles kinetic energy, when the particle can have any speed, you'll find that it's divergent (goes to infinity).

So: Because an electron with an exactly defined position must have infinite kinetic energy, the equilibrium state cannot be an electron with an exactly defined position, and so cannot be an electron exactly in the nucleus. So what do we do?

We have to make the electrons position "diffuse". Of course, that means it is no longer exactly inside the nucleus, so it gains some potential energy, but on the other hand it can move more slowly and has lower kinetic energy.

The equilibrium state is the state we find where the trade off between kinetic and potential energy gives us the lowest total energy, which is described as a 1s orbital. The electron is "diffuse" enough to have a relatively low kinetic energy, and "localised" enough to have a relatively low potential energy, giving as low total energy as possible.

Once you start adding more electrons you need to start taking Pauli exclusion into account, so I won't go there, but the same manner of thinking still essentially holds up.

Al lot of the same properties as a mine field. An unobserved mine field is quite quickly passed through. The issue primarily arises when you need to clear a mine field while under fire.

Combine them with ditches, barbed wire, possibly mines, and have forward observers directing fire on anyone trying to break through, and they're a real PITA for attacking forces.

Essentially, they give just a couple forward observers the power to hold up an attacking force for quite some time while reinforcements arrive, at which point you've lost whatever advantage of manpower or surprise you had when attacking.