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The sea floor is a veritable desert compared to the ocean surface. The food chain starts in the first 10' of water, where plankton have access to sunlight.

Absolutely wrong. Anybody who has ever gone diving or fishing knows that the bottom is where all the action is. A reference: http://www.fathom.com/course/10701050/session2.html
While the food chain starts at the top, the biodiversity is accumulated near the bottom. Even if you might not care about biodiversity, commercial crab, shrimp, and lobster fisheries will depend on organisms on the sea floor to be uncontaminated, even if they do survive.

There are creatures that will be effected by oil on the sea floor like crabs and such, but it's still better than letting it run ashore.

Better for whom? The tourist industry?

Briefly, oil on the ocean floor or dispersed in the water column is bad. Oil on the ocean surface is worse. And oil on the ocean surface at the shoreline and in the estuaries is an ecological catastrophe.

Still wrong. As far as animal life is concerned, each is bad for its own reasons. Surface oil may affect animals that are visually more photogenic--birds, dolphins, seals--but oil on the bottom will make life difficult for the myriads of bottom-dwellers. Sea urchins and starfish are especially sensitive. http://echinoblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spiny-skinned-canaries-in-coal-mine.html

(yeah, I know I'm posting two days later)

As far as your solutions to the problems (frogs? Are you joking), none of them are nearly close to answering energy needs

Other than that it take energy to make DDT what does energy have to do with mosquito control? Oh yea, mosquitoes can breed in the stagnant water behind dams. Oh, and they can also breed in water pools below dams. Guess that only goes to show how much I know, imagine how humans can increase the mosquito population.

First and foremost let me say this, wasting money on hurricanes is stupid, period .

We know what areas get hit "repeatedly" and we know they cost billion of dollars to clean up from .

Putting a trailer in the death zone just begs for destruction . This does not account for lost lives, and lost productivity .

I think the cost of all the major modern day hurricanes needs to be computed, and then all the ppl living in the death zone need to be moved to higher ground .

The industrial/commercial needs that can be moved, get moved, those that cannot are not moved, and basically battle hardened .

Make it a 20 year time table, any housing in the area will be like bldg requirements in california for earthquakes .

You get a permit, you build it to code, it is inspected at many steps along the way . It is built hurricane proof, period .

The first floor of all bldgs is a parking garage , roof access is secure but can be unlocked by multiple responsible ppl .

Killing a hurricane: If you want "any" chance of stopping a hurricane you first have to consider it gets its power from the sun in the form of heat .

Doing this would cost many many billions of dollars , and is not worth it except as a exercise in theory of the possible . The warm water feeds the hurricane .

Thus your best chance to "kill" a hurricane or weaken it is at night . At night its only heat fuel is the water .

Dragging icebergs 5,000+ miles is not only a bad idea, but getting "several" slow moving mountains of ice in front of the hurricane at "just the right time" is ludicrous .

Submarine ploughing was on the right track, but I think it would need to be deeper colder water brought top side, and could be done if subs used a scoop to feed lines that were dragged topside .

However, when u introduce this kind of drag into a sub it is going to slow down a great deal, and were not designed with this in mind .

Look at the screws on a modern aircraft carrier and u start to understand what is need to counter massive drag . The best bet is to use what is all ready in place . In the gulf are many large oil platforms, hundreds in fact . Some are in VERY deep water, over one mile deep in fact . The water temperature down there is more than just cooler, it is "seriously" cold .

Excerpt: No matter how warm the surface layers are, between 300 and 1,000m beneath the surface the temperature falls to about 5C ****

**** http://www.fathom.com/course/10701050/session1.htm l (temperature paragraph)

So just several hundred meters is water 5 Celsius above freezing. So the issue is how do you move the cold water top side . That is where the oil rigs come into play .

The oil rigs if started a few days before the hurricane hit could "not" pump enough water to "drastically" reduce surface temperature .

This would require a automated , unmanned , computer controlled response to the changes of the storm .

It would require tremendous amounts of cold water to be dispersed top side at night as it closed in .

So the oil platforms would need cold water storage, and dispersion lines similar to lateral lines on a septic system .

If the storage was above the water level during daylight it would be heated by the sun, insulating it would add more expense to what would already be a massively expensive project .

Thus u temporarily submerge it, I am thinking u might use the new super barges, or super tankers that are no longer sea worthy .

The ballast would be flotation air bags, with extras in place in case of failure , and make them independent of each other in case of systemic failure .

The tanks stays on ocean floor and the automated monitoring system waits for the storm to move in .

The tank is not crushed as it is full of water, thus equalized pressure .

Kashmir is majority Muslim, and its inhabitants want to either join Pakistan or become independant. Its not just the terrorists who want Kashmir out of India, its the Kashmiris themselves.

Some background on the whole situation here
http://www.fathom.com/course/10701013/session2.htm l

Human rights abuses have been committed by both the Indian army and militants. The Indian army has been accused of killing 50,000 people in Kashmir since 1989.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kashmir/

Nonsense! Armstrong developed FM ca. 1933 http://www.fathom.com/course/10701020/session3.htm l. By then, the FCC was in place as the USA spectrum authority.

There was also a lot of corporate crap going on where one company would make a radio that would only recieve stations that used their transmitters (again a modulation scheme roadblock). So if you wanted to listen to certain programs, you had to buy more than one brand of radio.

There were only three workable modulation schemes at the time: keyed spark gap Morse code (outlawed early on because it generates severe broad-band interference), keyed "continuous wave" Morse code, and full-carrier AM. There were competing circuit designs to implement them, but these three modulation methods were the only choices with the day's technology. You could talk about the patent battles between the companies, but that had to do with the apparatus--not the modulation methods. FM, video, radar, etc. came later when vacuum tubes and other components improved enough to make them feasible.

The myth that the video game industry is larger in profits than the movie industry is not only bogus, but it has been thrown around for ages.

From a somewhat reputable source:
"The confusion as to the actual size of the gaming industry is widespread. Since the early eighties, claims has been made that games outsell movies. Nevertheless, it appears not to be so."

The claim has been around ever since 1982, when the Atari era was at its peak.

"Hartee began trying to build a Meccano model 'more for amusement than with any serious purpose', which was so successful that, with the help of a student, Arthur Porter, he built a small differential analyser using many standard Meccano parts. It was capable of useful work, and gave good practice in 'programming' whilst the full-size analyser was under construction."

Who knows, maybe they're just castrati.

Sure, we know he wasn't good at math, but an even more important point was that he couldn't memorize details to save his life. I remember reading a story about how he called the telephone operator from a pay phone to ask what his phone number and address were -- he couldn't remember them.

We've just had the 20thC version of Railway Mania. I'm sure there was a short period in the mid 19thC when it was cool to discuss the differences between Bullhead and flat rail, or if 0-6-0 was the best setup for steep hills#. No doubt they had "*, but with a railway" patents too. Sooner or later the net will be as nerdy as trainspotting, and the besuited types will have to find something else to pretend to understand.

# I'm not exactly well informed about railways, so forgive my examples

The space elevator has been featured in a lot of books, most recently David Gerrold's "Jumping off the Planet".

This is a great idea, but it has one big problem. It isn't energy - The idea of generating energy by dangling something into the atmosphere from space has been explored and proven that it will work.

The problem is this: With every gram of matter you chuck into space (or even lift from the surface), the rotation of the Earth slows in direct proportion to the cargo's mass relative to the mass of the Earth. In other words, every time we throw something in to space,the Earth will slow down just a bit, no matter how small the load. Proving yet again that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Fine, you say. It'll take a TREMENDOUS amount of mass to be lifted into space to stop the rotation of the Earth. I completely agree. However, if the Earth slows .000001%, (about 9 hundredths of a second, enough to win/lose a car race) then the days will get measurably longer unless we bring an equal amount of mass down.

Just to sate your curiosity, the earth weighs about 5.98 X 10^24 kilograms (or, 5,980,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, metric, roughly speaking. Source.). That said, it would just take us lifting 59,800,000,000,000 trillion tons into space to affect the aforementioned change. Again, a tremendous amount, right?

Consider this: New York city alone produces 13,000 tons of residential waste a DAY, and they've run out of places to put it (Again, Source). That's 4.7 Million tons a year. And they're currently paying PA to dump is for them. There are other cities with the same problem. Exactly how long do you think it will take for someone to decide to move the waste even farther away? Like Space? And that's just residential.

That's only one example. Let's add Yucca Mountain's 77,000 Metric tons of waste and 100,000,000 gallons of high level radioactive waste water (Call Claire at the Yucca Mountain Project (dept. of civilian radioactive waste mgmt. for more info -Link or 1-(800) 225-6972). Okay, lets add the "extra" garbage of all of the other states, countries, provinces etc who have run out of places to put their waste. It adds up REALLY quickly.

And that's not including the actual mass of the elevator itself, including it's anchor.

Mind you, I still think we should build it, I just don't think we should use it as a tool to get rid of our problems that's we're too stupid to fix, but smart enough to move out of sight.

Fathom.com which is trying to be the international university course clearinghouse has a FREE onlie course called "The Globalization Debate". Maybe some of you are serious enough about this to take the FREE course and see some examples of well considered and balanced opinion on globalisation.

Here's the course description that I include here because the Fathom site would not allow internal links:

Globalisation is a fervidly contested and often misunderstood concept. It has occupied and divided economists, sociologists and anti-capitalists alike. Anti-globalisation protestors have regularly and successfully picketed World Trade Organisation summits as part of their stand against the might of globalisation. Yet, many economists tout the benefits of increased trade, sophisticated telecommunications networks and cross-border investment to developing countries, pointing to the gains workers and unions throughout the world stand to make from closer integration.

Most people seem to know whether they are for or against globalisation, without pausing to consider what exactly it is and where its effects can be seen. Globalisation might be a term too slippery to be closely defined, but it is a vibrant debate worth engaging in.

In this seminar two major sociologists put forward their versions of globalisation. For Anthony Giddens, it is a phenomenon characterised by fundamental changes in the world economy, the communications revolution and trade between nation-states in physical commodities, information and currency. For Leslie Sklair, globalisation should be seen as a new phase of capitalism, one that transcends the unit of the nation-state. In an interview, he introduces the globalisation debate and stakes out his position within it. Sklair builds on these arguments through a flash image gallery, which explores how the idea of globalisation is used by transnational corporations.

Leslie Sklair is a reader in sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is responsible for the doctoral programme in the sociology department. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, San Diego State University and Hong Kong University, and has lectured on globalisation all over the world. His Sociology of the Global System (1995) has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Chinese and Spanish. He has conducted fieldwork on transnational corporations in Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Egypt and Australia, and in Europe and North America.

Sklair's latest book, The Transnational Capitalist Class, aims to provide the first systematic, research-based sociological analysis of the relationships between processes of globalisation and the major transnational corporations that are widely considered to dominate the global economy. Using the Global Fortune 500 as an example, the book focuses on the extent of globalisation in these corporations.

Anthony Giddens is the director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He started his academic career at the University of Hull, and went on to study for an M.A. in sociology at the LSE; by 1976 he had completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge University.

Giddens has held numerous teaching positions within sociology, including at the University of Leicester and the University of Cambridge, and has lectured extensively at many overseas universities. He has received 10 honorary degrees throughout his career. More recently he was the BBC Reith Lecturer in 1999.

Giddens is the most widely read and cited social theorist of his generation, authoring 34 books and countless articles and reviews. He co-founded the academic publishing house Polity Press in 1985 and still stands as chairman and director of Polity Press Ltd. as well as the director of Blackwell-Polity Ltd. He also stands as the chairman and director of the Centre for Social Research.

Giddens is well respected for developing the theory of structuration, and has been at the forefront of developing ideas in left-of-centre politics, helping to popularize the idea of the "third way," and travelling to many countries around the world to talk to political leaders and heads of state about the development of third way politics. Frequently referred to as "Tony Blair's guru," Giddens has also made a strong impact on the evolution of New Labour.

The London School of Economics is giving a Free course called "The Globalisation Debate" at the onlineline University course clearinghouse "Fathom.com. Their system doesn't permit direct linking, so you will need to search on Globalisation, or the school. Here's the course description:

Globalisation is a fervidly contested and often misunderstood concept. It has occupied and divided economists, sociologists and anti-capitalists alike. Anti-globalisation protestors have regularly and successfully picketed World Trade Organisation summits as part of their stand against the might of globalisation. Yet, many economists tout the benefits of increased trade, sophisticated telecommunications networks and cross-border investment to developing countries, pointing to the gains workers and unions throughout the world stand to make from closer integration.

Most people seem to know whether they are for or against globalisation, without pausing to consider what exactly it is and where its effects can be seen. Globalisation might be a term too slippery to be closely defined, but it is a vibrant debate worth engaging in.

In this seminar two major sociologists put forward their versions of globalisation. For Anthony Giddens, it is a phenomenon characterised by fundamental changes in the world economy, the communications revolution and trade between nation-states in physical commodities, information and currency. For Leslie Sklair, globalisation should be seen as a new phase of capitalism, one that transcends the unit of the nation-state. In an interview, he introduces the globalisation debate and stakes out his position within it. Sklair builds on these arguments through a flash image gallery, which explores how the idea of globalisation is used by transnational corporations.

The course is taught by Leslie Sklair is a reader in sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is responsible for the doctoral programme in the sociology department. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, San Diego State University and Hong Kong University, and has lectured on globalisation all over the world. His Sociology of the Global System (1995) has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Chinese and Spanish. He has conducted fieldwork on transnational corporations in Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Egypt and Australia, and in Europe and North America.

As a Engineering student not majoring in CompSci, but extremely interested in computers, I think I will be seriously considering ArsDigita after my stint at Columbia University is over.

But speaking of columbia fathom.com... My question to you is, does this attempt at putting an insane amount of currently unavailable information on the web a good thing. Currently, I don't exactly follow their profit model, but I have a feeling that they will release all sorts of digitized content for free, but for the whole kit and kaboodle they will charge. Perhaps for a correspondence degree or something.

Does this just increase the digital divide? Isn't the whole Ivy situation an educational divide in the first place? Am I working for evil? Is the hi-fi audio section of your web site a little absurd? (sorry about that last one...)

Thanks.

I am posting anonymously 'cause you know...