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Well, we upgraded to include a dynamic self-modifying portion, but there are some bugs; the basic self/non-self discrimination regularizer has a high tendency to cause wars over stupid things like who has the better facial hair. Unfortunately, the wide range of other regularizers—emotions, convictions, self-preservation, altruism, and the rest—aren't enough to completely repress this sort of thing. On the plus side they're now inventing new ones.

(In all seriousness, I think comparing the human species to an ensemble of classifiers is perhaps the most profound and interesting analogy ever made. The passing of genetic algorithms out of vogue in ML research reflects our own development of an advanced nervous system as an adaptable survival mechanism; culture, then, is the mass of concepts and rules we can integrate into our personal collections of weights to tune our nets to do specific things.)

... not seeing it. Even as eye candy she's meh.

This is exactly how it works. The only difference is, at longer wavelength/lower frequencies, the size/density of objects that are considered opaque is higher (a person is roughly large/dense enough to block RF, a toothbrush is not), while each photon is less easily scattered or refracted.

You could even go so far as to say the perceived color also depends upon the channel within the Wi-Fi spectrum, much like the false-colored images of non-visible astronomical imagery (e.g.: Cosmic Microwave Background radiation).

Artificial? Or not?

Especially if you give it a massive tooth ache in the process. Then it just might get really annoyed at you.

Sharks are too hardcore to even notice a minor problem like that.

When you are a shark, teeth are basically belt-fed consumables. Lose one? Multiple rows of failover teeth just waiting to replace it.

Well, here's one way

I've been to the location where this was planned to go. There's nothing there. Nothing. The nearest "place" is Yeehaw Junction. Seriously, that's actually the name of something. It's small and a little scary. I stopped there to get gas once. The location for Destiny is very near Kissimmee Prairie preserve. There's a campground there that's a great place to go to do astronomy as the skies are nice and dark. But that's the only reason I would ever want to go to this campground. It's just miles of scrub pine. Looks like this : Kissimmee Prairie Preserve.

Trying to bootstrap a city in a location like this seems to be very difficult. The only reason someone would want to move to this location in the first place would be to get away from it all, which would preclude the type of people that would want to get in on the ground floor of a new city.

As I recall Sandy was a tropical storm when it hit.

Found a pic of Sandy
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/10/Hurricane-Sandy-on-October-29-2012.jpg
Compared to...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg/932px-Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg

The size doesn't seem that dramatic.

So. Not sure what the monster part was. Apart from, ofc, the fact that it hit at an unusually high tide.

I believe most of the damage was storm surge, not due to land covered, or rain fall.

The Pacific Ocean is something very inconvenient for a spacecraft in Geo-synchronous orbit. In fact, it is much, much easier to grab something from the Moon or from an asteroid or comet than it is to get that same bucket of water from the Pacific Ocean. In fact, it would be easier and "cheaper" (assuming the infrastructure was in place) to mine the ice caps of Mars than it would be to get water from the Pacific Ocean.

A really good diagram that shows some delta-v budgets for moving stuff around the solar system can be found here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Delta-Vs_for_inner_Solar_System.svg

The gravity well is something that is not just from science fiction, but something that has to do with real-life physics. Or are you one of those who thinks the Apollo Moon landings happened in a Burbank studio? I suppose NASA has never sent anything above the "sky" either, not even a communications satellite? Without real people doing real things in space, you would likely be dead. I'm not exaggerating.

Actually, Steve Ballmer, wearing an Amanda Bynes wig . . . would look frighteningly like Amanda Bynes . . . wearing an Amanda Bynes wig.

Recently I saw a picture of Amanda Bynes on the cover of a supermarket checkout gossip rag and my first reaction is she looked like Eddie from the Iron Maiden album covers.

There's a bit of a gap between necklaces of beads and the Sistine Chapel.

There are many views on what is socially responsible. I'm reasonably certain your view doesn't have a monopoly on that.

There's a bit of a gap between necklaces of beads and the Sistine Chapel.

There are many views on what is socially responsible. I'm reasonably certain your view doesn't have a monopoly on that.

"You can create very dangerous things in the chemistry lab, should we ban chemistry as well?"

They are already working on that. A 3D printer is more akin to a home chemistry kit. This is what a chemistry kit from the 40's looked like:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/1940s_Gilbert_chemistry_set_04.jpg

And this is an intro kit from today:

http://www.hometrainingtools.com/classic-chemistry-kit/p/KT-CLACHEM/

Notice anything missing?

Housing Market Happened

The US government invented MBSs. The US government made the MBS market via fannie, freddy and the whole clan of bubble inflating quasi-government enterprises buying trillions in MBSs. Government is the reason mortgages became liquid assets. Prior to then mortgages were balance sheet assets held by deposit banks and Wall Street didn't get to play with them.

then you're probably fine with big government spying on people

These goose stepping lefties have no problem indulging double standards. They cheered Obama on as he created the CFPB to sift through all electronic financial transactions. Moaning about NSA metadata collection on one hand and trumpeting the absolute nullification of privacy in financial matters on the other... somehow, in the minds of these people, the same government that can wade through your entire financial history with impunity is supposed to have the utmost respect for your phone calls and emails.

I think the problem is that unless you're very familiar with Mars and its satellites it's a little bit of a let down to see a group of pixels move across the screen, rather than the stunning moon rise we see regularly here on earth. I know I was.

It's not that I have lost any sense of wonderment, it's just that my lack of knowledge allowed me to build up a mental image of a visibly cratered moon rising over a dusty red planet's horizon. Then I searched for photos of Phobos and realised that that was pretty dumb.

Compare this to my awe at watching the transit of Venus (online, it was too cloudy where I was in the UK to see the exit), and all I was watching was a black circle move in front of the sun, but that was how I expected it to be.

Molotov cocktails.

Inconveniently, AT&T has metastasized to sites all over the place, many of them rather solidly built. You'll need an atypically good arm to more than add a few scorch marks to the masonry shell.

Specifically, advertising needs to be prohibited from all situations where a person has paid for access or entrance to something. More ideally, it would also be prohibited from any context where the person hasn't explicitly agreed to be subjected to ads in exchange to some product or service.

What would that ball game cost if all advertising was eliminated from inside the stadium? Could the fans afford it?
Could the team afford to fly to their next game, or would they all be taking the train?

Most likely these things drive the inflated contracts we pay athletes these days.

Is a train, or an airplane or even a bus is a different proposition?

Major airlines don't seem to advertise anything, except themselves.
Every city bus I've ever been in has advertising. (Some of it left over from the Pleistocene.)
New York Subways have always had advertising in the trains. Seattle light rail, none. (Although the cars are configured for advertising, it appears not to be in use yet).

You can close your eyes, or read your book, listen to your music and shut out all the ads, but bone conduction seems a little over the top.

Obligatory: New Cuyama

The LA DoT is a bunch of fucking Nazis! There, I said ir.

Well, for one, it will only cover the region around India, so it is irrelevant for everyone that is not in the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Regional_Navigational_Satellite_System

That's a coverage area, so it seems like the sort of thing that would be worth throwing in if the only additional cost above the existing GPS module/antenna is a few Kb of extra firmware; but not large enough to be worth the effort, outside of India-specific devices, if you need to throw additional hardware at the problem.

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist. In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

I left out a bit didn't think it would become an issue, I called the head of the library and got permission to use it, but we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game - but I got all of the permissions.

The head of the library can give permission all he wants, he doesn't own to copyright to the statue, the artist does (even if the object itself was donated), so his permission is pretty insignificant. Even if he did own the copyright, since stuff on Wikipedia must be freely licensed, he should have released it under CC-BY-SA 3.0 or compatible. Copyright is a pain, and terribly convoluted and complicated to do right, but a basic value of Wikipedia. As simple as possible turns out to still be surprisingly complicated

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist. In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

I left out a bit didn't think it would become an issue, I called the head of the library and got permission to use it, but we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game - but I got all of the permissions.

The head of the library can give permission all he wants, he doesn't own to copyright to the statue, the artist does (even if the object itself was donated), so his permission is pretty insignificant. Even if he did own the copyright, since stuff on Wikipedia must be freely licensed, he should have released it under CC-BY-SA 3.0 or compatible. Copyright is a pain, and terribly convoluted and complicated to do right, but a basic value of Wikipedia. As simple as possible turns out to still be surprisingly complicated

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist.
In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

I left out a bit didn't think it would become an issue, I called the head of the library and got permission to use it, but we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a
need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game - but I got all of the permissions.

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist.
In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

I left out a bit didn't think it would become an issue, I called the head of the library and got permission to use it, but we both felt a bit odd as there wasn't a
need to. It's a statue and a statue is free game - but I got all of the permissions.

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist.
In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

This is a copyright issue. It's stupid, no doubt about that, but the outdated copyright laws are to blame in this case, not Wikipedia.

Commons:Copyright rules by subject matter: "If the original artwork remains in copyright a license from the artist is nearly always needed. Mere physical ownership of an original artwork such as a sculpture does not confer ownership of the copyright: that remains with the artist.
In some countries a 3D artwork that is permanently located in a public place can be photographed and the image uploaded without the artist's permission: See Commons:Freedom of panorama."

Commons:Freedom of panorama#United States: "Artworks and sculptures: not OK."

Waw en-Namus, south-western Libya

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c8/Syndrome.jpg

and they are not loaded down student loands

And therefore what? Shun foreigners to help perpetuate wildly excessive education cost growth? Or ...and here comes a new thought... change domestic education to stop the relentless growth of costs.

We flail about trying to pin the costs of healthcare and education on each other while the costs of these products annually balloon to record breaking levels. Educated people somehow elide any thought about why the costs of these things compound themselves while honing ever more hate filled arguments about who is supposed to pay to a fine point.

Is it sort of like if you could somehow plug in a speakon connector or a 1/4 inch connector into the same jack?

http://www.markertek.com/Connectors-Adapters/Audio-Connectors/Speakon-Connectors/Neutrik-USA-Inc/NLJ2MD-H.xhtml?utm_medium=shoppingengine&utm_source=googlebase&cvsfa=3786&cvsfe=2&cvsfhu=4e4c4a324d442d48&gclid=CLqKt4Kjh7gCFU7hQgodkS0AbA

... or the 1/4" | XLR combo port found on most decent quality mixing boards since at least the 1990's.

1980s Ally Sheedy, or "now" Ally Sheedy?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Ally_Sheedy.jpg/220px-Ally_Sheedy.jpg

Stephanie ... change color!

1980s Ally Sheedy, or "now" Ally Sheedy?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Ally_Sheedy.jpg/220px-Ally_Sheedy.jpg

I think having a moustache is important: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Tesla_circa_1890.jpeg But sometimes you could be also shaved: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Guglielmo_Marconi.jpg

I think having a moustache is important: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Tesla_circa_1890.jpeg But sometimes you could be also shaved: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Guglielmo_Marconi.jpg

How is any reconstruction not "cherry picked"?

Where would you have it start? At the end of the ice age? Why not at the end of Ediacaran period? No? How about Permian? What period would you start with and why?

It's ALL cherry picked to support the conclusion they want to reach.

Nonsense. If it has been warming from 1997 to date, it has been warming from 1996 to date, it has been warming from 1995 to date, etc.; it has been warming from 1999 to date, it has been warming from 2000 to date, it has been warming from 2001 to date, etc.; but it has NOT been warming from 1998 to date, and you conclude from that that the climate has now switched over to cooling, that is very definitely cherry picking, even if you fuzz it up as "Global Cooling that has been going on for the past 15 or so years", as though you could pick any year back then, rather than it's just your faulty memory which has some faded postit note saying "see, AGW is fake after all" without marking what particular specific year is the only one that works for your argument.

Here's a nice piece of cherry picking by Roy Spencer, utilizing not just 1998, but also March 2011.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/uah_march2011.png
which is conveniently forgotten 18 months later, back to the default just 1998 cherry picking
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Dec_2012_v5.51.png

see also
http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg1655_990_600.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Satellite_Temperatures.png/800px-Satellite_Temperatures.png

For the rest of us "gee. 1998 was a freakishly hot year, wasn't it?"

So, 2009 is now only the second hottest year in recorded history, not the first hottest.A lot of folks might think that having the two hottest years in the past few centuries all within 15 years might be an indicator that it's warmer now; particularly if you notice that the first half a decade of the 21st century was also right up there.

Of course, if you took seriously the denialist arguments that "there are lots of things that affect climate" and "climate is cyclic", you'd notice that the high points of the El Nino (hot) years starting 1998 till now are on the average suddenly about 0.2 degrees C hotter than they were 1980 through 1995, just as the high points of the La Nina (cool) years from 1996 to 2008 are on the average suddenly about 0.15 degrees C warmer than they were from 1979 through 1989.

Why stop there? It has definitely cooled from noon today till midnight now, I therefore declare that we are in a cooling trend.

No, this was a standard trackball you'd find in an office supply store, just the largest one you'd typically find. The ball was about the same size as a typical billiard ball. It may have even been the same, Ive seen people use billiard balls (usually the 8) in opto-mechanical trackballs. It was a lot like this Kensington, but beige and it had only two buttons and a scroll wheel rather than the scroll ring. It didn't matter (she only used the ball part) until I had to hack it to think the middle pedals were its scroll wheel. Everyone else used a mouse on the right, and her trackball lived on the left.

The one she was using for buttons and that I initially hooked the pedals to was this Logitech, with a rather small ball intended to be operated by the thumb. I think you can see why this would be awkward for any kind of foot manipulation, even if used only for buttons and scrolling.

Citation please.

Okay. How's this?

That's the old "Terrorists might..." argument. Sure, terrorists *might* do anything. The question is, which of those billions of possibilities are the highest risk and most likely?

Cheltenham's Largest Employer remains Cheltenham's Largest Employer regardless. There's no need to specifically target anywhere in particular, there are so many workers that you could pick any gathering of people in town and hit an employee. "Terrorists might" attack pretty much anywhere in or around town, and be guaranteed to score.

There are several far higher, clearly labelled soft targets:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gchq-bus-2012.jpg

The fact that a communications intercept base employs a lot of geeks who like D&D and sci-fi quizzes is not a security revelation.

There's always the option of not buying them and going with open pollinated seed.

Tell that to the farmers living in Iraq.

The link is down, but is it anything like that?

There is an intentional movement, almost entirely within the Republican-Libertarian party, to rewrite history to portray businessmen as heroes, the upper class as victims of oppressive government, and the lower classes as villainous scum intent on leeching the working man blind.

The fact is that it is the lower classes, sub- $500,000 income per year, that design everything, build everything, and do everything. The top 1%ers are no heroes, they are a blackhole in our economy. A pit into which money falls in but never returns. As they grow richer we all starve. This was common knowledge a hundred years ago

Anyone wonder how all of this land came to be for sale ? And, how good his title is?

In the old Hawaiian monarchy set up by Kamehameha, the King owned all of the land. In the "Great Mahele" (division) of 1850, private land ownership was introduced, with 1/3 of the land going to the crown, 1/3 to the commoners, and 1/3 to the chiefs (the "ahupua" land, really a type of shared commons). Due to failure to follow through with paperwork, only about 1% of the "commoners" land was actually allocated to commoners. (I believe that there are only 4 acres on Lanai, out of 40,000 or so, that are actually available for fee simple purchase by the likes of us - that would be the old commoner land.) This old map shows the division into Crown and chief lands after the Mahele. This article describes how Claus Spreckels (a sugar baron) got fee simple for the entire island (minus the 4 acres, and some state land). Of course this was corrupt, but note the corruption appears to have occurred before the 1893 coup d'etat that destroyed the old Hawaiian monarchy and delivered the country over to the USA as a territory.

Does he have good title? I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc., but my guess would be no, not to all of it. The courts and political system in Hawaii tend to look very favorably to claims from Hawaiian natives about land ownership. There is an entire state bureaucracy, the Department of Hawaii Homelands, dedicated to returning crown lands (and other state lands) to Hawaiians. The DHHL has a land use plan for Lanai, which is full of more facts and maps about Lanai land history and ownership for those who are interested.

Here is my guess how this will proceed. Ellison will develop this and that and eventually do something that will seriously piss off Lanai locals, and then will be enveloped in clouds of lawsuits and political agitation until he sells the land. Having heard stories of the way he runs business meetings, and having had some dealing in Hawaii real estate at the Federal level, I think that predicting a collision is a good bet, and it would be highly unlikely to end favorably for Mr. Ellision.

Not quite. Rust is iron oxide(s), yes. But it is the oxygen being smaller than the iron that allows access to lower levels of iron. The goal is for the oxide to be the same size as what was there. Too small and you don't have a barrier, so the oxygen penetrates, the rust flakes off and the cycle repeats. Atom size is related to molecular weight with Oxygen's is 16, Iron is 55.8 (periodic table) so oxygen is a much smaller atom.

Atomic radius IS a function of ATOMIC weight... (That's what you meant, right? You didn't mean that atomic radius is affected in any way by the size of the molecule it finds itself in, did you?) But this is so only within any given row on the table. From left to right, as atomic number increases, atomic radius decreases, (due to more powerful attractive force from the nucleus given more protons, and successively larger atoms' electrons are in the same orbital when the elements are in the same period,) but then at the outset of the next row, the radius jumps to a much higher value, and begins decreasing right again. In picometers, the atomic radii are:

H: 37,
Li: 152, Be: 112, ... B: 83, C: 77 ... and so on, decreasing. Then the next row begins with sodium -
Na:186, Mg:160, etc.

"The increase in radius going down a group of the periodic table occurs because successively larger valence-shell orbitals are occupied" (176). (All taken from "Chemistry," McMurry Fay, 5th Ed., 2008, Pearson/Prentice Hall.) This is right under figure 5.19, which has explicitly written comments around a modified periodic table, that radius increases down, and decreases as you move right.

From pg. 770, under the heading "A Review of General Properties and Periodic Trends," it states in Figure 19.2 that Atomic radius and metallic character INCREASE as an element is found further DOWN the table, and that these two traits DECREASE the further one is to the RIGHT.

One other thing, internet friends... remember when you quote Wikipedia, that Wikipedia is NOT necessarily correct or up to date, (since it can be edited by nearly anyone, and quality control is, well... distributed. As researchers have shown, (and no, I can't site the study, I don't have my psych textbook anymore...) when you have a sufficiently large group of people, it is possible that something can need to be done, but NO ONE will do it because everyone will assume someone else will. This very phenomenon is why in training people to give CPR, that when a crowd gathers around an apparent heart-attack victim, they tell people to grab someone specific and tell THAT PERSON to go get an AED (Automated External Defibrillator), rather than just exclaiming "someone go get the AED!" because everyone will assume someone else will go get it, and they want to stay and watch 'the show,' by which I mean, watch the poor schmuck die. (We're sick bastards, aren't we?)

Case in point, your post's periodic table link - I navigated to it, and noticed almost right off the bat that Flerovium (element 114) and Livermorium (element 116) are not listed. Oddly, there is a link on the page you indicated to an SVG version of the table, (that is more up-to-date)

In case anyone is wondering, IUPAC added Fl and Lv on May 30th, 2012.

Those numbers are probably inflated by iPad numbers. If you check the Wikimedia stats the number of hits of iPhone and Android users is roughly the same. Although the iPhone still has some advantage.

Moore's Law doesn't say anything about CPU speed, it's about the number of transistors on a chip doubling every two years. And it is still accurate (roughly).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Transistor_Count_and_Moore's_Law_-_2011.svg

Despite the fact that ship owners are faced with a bad market, the PCA (Panama Canal Administration) keeps needlessly inflating the costs to transit at least once or twice per year. Our larger vessels can easily cost ~USD$200,000.00 and more to transit.

Regardless of how much they inflate the cost, if it costs less than a trip around South America, it's still a good deal.

The industry has long been awaiting some competition to mitigate these over-inflated costs and it is high time it materialised.

That's what makes me wonder how viable this really is. I suspect the financial viability reports just used the Panama's current transit rates to estimate the potential financial payoff from this. It may very well end up being built, but then taking over 100 years to pay for itself due to Panama and Nicaragua underbidding each other to try to attract more traffic. My hunch is the bigger payoff will be global shipping transitioning to larger-than-Panamax cargo ships. And that Panama and Nicaragua won't see as much benefit (Panama has had multiple plans to add more locks. If you look at their geography, it'd be a helluva lot cheaper for them to do it than Nicaragua too. They just haven't had much incentive to do it quickly since there's no competition.)

Most definitely it is cheaper to transit via the Canal rather than via South America. The point is that the PCA and the majority of port and facility operators in BOTH North and South America are over-inflating their prices making it more and more non-viable to operate vessels at a profit. The freight rates chargeable no longer reflect the reality of the costs of fuel and operations. In regards to global shipping transitioning to "larger-than-Panamax" vessels, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capesize and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax The ship owners and other interests that invested heavily in these vessels are now suffering mightily at the hands of depressed commodity prices, over-inflated fuel prices and once again, over-inflated port and transit costs. Operating "smaller" vessels, (30,000 - 100,000 DWT) is often more feasible as it is easier for a commodity trader to buy and sell cargo quantities in those ranges rather than in the much larger quantities those over-sized vessels are designed to carry. The ultimate point is that the PCA and all port operators in general should take a lesson from the Canadian and US Seaway authorities that operate the waterways transiting to the US Great Lakes. They have a monopoly as well and they made it __ridiculously__ expensive for ship owners to trade the area and now..... we hardly do. So their business is dead and their people are out of work.....

Despite the fact that ship owners are faced with a bad market, the PCA (Panama Canal Administration) keeps needlessly inflating the costs to transit at least once or twice per year. Our larger vessels can easily cost ~USD$200,000.00 and more to transit.

Regardless of how much they inflate the cost, if it costs less than a trip around South America, it's still a good deal.

The industry has long been awaiting some competition to mitigate these over-inflated costs and it is high time it materialised.

That's what makes me wonder how viable this really is. I suspect the financial viability reports just used the Panama's current transit rates to estimate the potential financial payoff from this. It may very well end up being built, but then taking over 100 years to pay for itself due to Panama and Nicaragua underbidding each other to try to attract more traffic.

My hunch is the bigger payoff will be global shipping transitioning to larger-than-Panamax cargo ships. And that Panama and Nicaragua won't see as much benefit (Panama has had multiple plans to add more locks. If you look at their geography, it'd be a helluva lot cheaper for them to do it than Nicaragua too. They just haven't had much incentive to do it quickly since there's no competition.)

Back in the days they had these keyboards:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Apple_Macintosh_ADB_Keyboard.jpg ... which you could turn the computer on with.

Maybe you still can?

Define cylindrical. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/NeXTcube.jpg

Like that, only more cylindrical.

Define cylindrical. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/NeXTcube.jpg

Sorry it's hard to understand what you're saying with all that DICK in your mouth.