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http://www.zianet.com/web/mcgee.htm

Gimme a link. I couldn't find the photos of which you speak, but I did find an article from "In these times, 1987", in which, in accusatory tones, they describe the denitrating of actinide nitrates, with ammonia and spraying the resultant ammonium nitrate (i.e., sans actinides) on their own farmland. Seems reasonable enough to me, but then, I know some chemistry. To convert your waste from a stream of undisposable nitrates into a solid you can dispose of within the realm of government regulations, you take the nitrate groups off. You then have to do something with the nitrate groups that isn't going to piss people off, despite it's being non-radioactive and fairly valuable fertilizer otherwise. So, spray it on your own lands. Problem solved.

Best I can tell, the cattle thing is a synthesis. If you can link me the photos, I can probably help track down their source. They could be legit, but the fact is there are lots of sources of photos for mutilated and/or simply dead cattle. Hell, my wife grew up on a farm, and her family's entire herd died of a virus one year, ending their farming lives forever. Of course, I'm biased: I've seen some of the more zealous of environmentalists bald-facedly lie about important things; I would not ever put it past them to tell a whopper, even in picture form.

I had heard before that hot peppers were used to coat cables, since rodents apparently hate it. A quick google gave me this: this.

Seriously how can you make the claim that the climate of the US is not "that much different" than that of Europe with a straight face?

A significant portion of the US has summer average temperatures in the high 90's or low 100's, with winter that rarely touches freezing. Another huger portion has winters that dump many feet of snow and leave the area in a frozen blanket of ice for significant portions of the year. Many places have both the high temperatures and the low temperatures. The range of temperatures in the continental US is larger than the range of temperatures in "continental Europe".

As to standard of living differences, that claim is also false as has been shown by the UN for at least a couple decades. If you only just now learned that N.A. uses more energy per capita than Europe you must be new to BBC, or slashdot. America also has a much higher GDP. We make more stuff. so even considering energy use per capita is an incomplete and useless thing to do on it's own.

Go ahead, cut off the electricity supply to millions of people living in 110 degree heat so they can't use their air conditioner and compare that to someone in London not needing an air conditioner. Now tell the millions of people in that 100+ degree weather that their standard of living is "not that much different" than those in Europe. Take the heat source away from those in Minnesota or Canada in January so they can use less energy per capita and convince them that their standard of living isn't any different.

Consider this chart from UN data in 2005: http://www.zianet.com/ehusman/weblog/uploaded_images/E_Intens_v_pCap_GDP-718899.jpg

The US and the UK, for example, are very similar in how many BTUs are consumed per unit of GDP. Yet we produce more GDP per capita. How does that affect your assertion that North America's energy consumption is excessive. IN terms of GDP, the US is about as efficient as the UK, and much more so than Norway which produced about the same GDP per capita as the US, or Canada which produced far less GDP than the US per capita and consumed far more BTUs per unit of GDP to do it. The big "winner" on that chart is Japan which produced a high GDP/capita with a BTU/GDP far lower than that of Europe.

Indeed:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/energy.html

Shows that the US' energy use has in fact been getting more efficient in that our energy user per dollar of GDP has gone down by 42% since 1980. And for those who might say otherwise, it ha snot risen once over the previous year in that 27 year run. Energy use per capita had a slight uptick in the second half of the 90's but is still down a few points from 1980.

How about next you don't just try to take a swipe at those in a different area with a dumb-ass isolated statistic and do some real research? Even a 10 minute excursion into the data coudl have prevented you from such silliness.

The Sandia National Laboratories ham club is operating a special event station from the site. I just talked to them using 35 watts.

See here.

A bunch of NM hams are running a special event station at the site all day today. Details at http://www.zianet.com/qrp/Special/TRINITY_PR.jpg

Call me a stickler but its a good idea to be aware that acronyms are unique, and one acronym can have different meaning in different contexts. Here are two examples of the meaning of MAC from a military perspective:
MILITARY AIR COMMAND (MAC) - for an example see this url - http://www.mcchordairmuseum.org/REV%20B%20OUR%20HI STORY%20UNITS%20COMMANDS%20MAC.htm

Military Airlift Command(MAC) -
http://www.zianet.com/jpage/airforce/history/majco ms/mac.html

That tired old quote?

Everybody knows that the real reason was their several pack a day smoking habit. (Thanks, Gary Larson!)

You might want to post anonymously the next time you give out legal advice so you don't get sued when some Slashdotter winds up with a homicide charge.

According to http://www.zianet.com/desertx/law/interview.html "it is not okay to shoot someone simply because he has broken into your home. You have to have a reasonable belief that he is threatening you or another person, such that you believe he may kill you or do you great bodily harm."

But alas there is this remark:

And, since US policy was to "limit availability of their radionavigation systems in the event of a real or potential threat of war or impairment to national security", Europe saw that its access to this vital new utility depended on the decisions of a single nation, with which it might well disagree on matters of national security. Recent event have given examples of just such disagreements. Europe's response was Galileo.

Barbary Pirates

Then as now, Europe thinks being nice to nasty folk is a better than getting tough, sending out the frigates, and making them behave. Hence their policy of leaning toward the Arabs. In contrast, the U.S. supports feisty little Israel, perhaps the only nation in history to fight four major wars in one lifetime with foes that outnumber them twenty to one and win every one. We back a democracy and a winner. They (particularly the French), back repressive dictatorships and losers.

In that context, it helps to remember what Churchill warned in 1939 after the Munich Agreement, "Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war."

In the end, every people gets the government they deserve. If the Europeans have so little sense of 'honor,' that they cannot defend their free and democratic societies from an ideology driven by hatred and revenge, then perhaps they deserve to drop into history's dustbin, always knowing precisely where they are thanks to a Galileo that will never be turned off to fight terrorism. And in their obsession with not fighting a few brush wars, they may lose a far greater and more critical cultural war. Europe may become Eurabia. In a generation, European women may only leave their homes clad in a sack from head to toe.

Am I the only one to catch the madness of all this? For perhaps two decades we've been told that there was a 'religious right' or 'fundamentalism' spanning from Jew and Christian to Arab that is a threat to free and democratic societies. But when push comes to shove, when religiously sanctioned terrorism and repression must be fought, it is the secular left who apologizes for religious repression and who wants little or nothing done to open up brutally repressive Arab societies. The left of western democracies is defending Saddam with all the zeal they once had for cruel Stalin.

All this brings to mind the Chinese proverb about the curse of living in "interesting times."

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

blakespot

Later on I got a chance to use and program an RCA Spectra-70 in High School. The Spectra-70 was a poorly designed clone of an IBM mainframe. The school board had the computer, and each high school was given a teletype and a 110 baud modem. You could write programs in WATFOR (Waterloo FORTRAN), Dartmouth BASIC and RPG.

The first electronic computer that I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM, later upgraded to 16K RAM, and Extended BASIC.

But then wouldn't we have to call it blass?

Cute, but no. We'd have to call it Bill Monroe.

And that's discounting passive components and assuming that you can squeeze the wiring between the gaps.

For comparison, using the same assumptions, a P4 would require a square board measuring ~22.5m on each edge [504(m^2) area].

I'll leave it to someone else to work out the power requirements, and how reliable it would be with all those heat-generating components packed so closely together.

--

Here's a mirror of the screenshot.

http://www.zianet.com/endikos/sedsokoban.png

The people of Wisconsin are fat, stupid, drunken oafs. They consider themselves "America's Dairyland", although this title was taken from them many years ago by the state of California. This is not the only false claim to fame that the state keeps. Green Bay Packers fans consider their city to be "Titletown, U.S.A.", because of the numerous NFL championships the team has won. The numbers may seem impressive, but the majority of them were won when the NFL was a small league, and there was no playoff for the championship.

Getting back to the fatness, they do produce and consume a lot of dairy, but this is not why they are called "cheeseheads". A little known fact is that most of Wisconsin's citizens are inbred, and even those that aren't inbred frequently suffer birth defects, due to maternal alcoholism. This results in a condition that produces small holes in the skull, where fluids escape and eventually congeal into small, yellow lumps, hence the term "cheesehead". Hence, the traditional Packer "cheesehead hat" is actually a symbol of Wisconsin's perseverance in the face of a world that looks down upon inbreeding.

Getting to the point, Wisconsinites _crave_ beer to feed their alcoholism, so much so that beer is an extremely valuable commodity, despite the abundance of breweries throughout the state. In fact, the Leinenkugel's brewery of Chippewa Falls goes so far as to indicate the value of its beer on the label of their original lager -- "Leinie's Original" is "Good as Gold".

So you see, we still haven't found an English word or phrase quite as good as "libre" -- "free as in beer" can be just as ambiguous as the word "free" is by itself.

The towers were specifically built to withstand a direct hit from a 707, which was the largest plane at the time of construction. Whether or not it they actually would have withstood such a hit is unknown, of course.

With all due deference to your inside knowledge, Hogwash.

The building was hit by a 767. Taking the first google'd link (http://www.sasflightops.com/fleet/767_general.htm ) we see it has a max all-up weight of 185 metric tons.

A 707 (see here) has a takeoff weight of 150 tonnes.

Both of these are large lumps of metal and jet fuel moving at high velocity. Given the failure mode of the buildings, and the time to do so under a direct hit, I don't think 30 tonnes would have made a hell of a lot of difference.

To any building.

http://www.zianet.com/endikos/msad.jpg

I was at the Vintage Computer Fair last weekend, and the going rate is about ten bucks. Yes, with manuals and everything. My VIC-20 isn't even worth a quarter of that price, and that's including the original boxes, manuals, an expansion card, programs on tape, and a bunch of other cool original stuff.

By the way, the original price was... $99.95! (Oh, O.K.... they started out at $199.95, but were later lowered to $99.95. I last saw a new one in a store in New York City in the late 80s for $14.95.)

This link may be of interest to the ZX-curious. --Tom

Recent geologic studies have shown that the temperature of the Earth is normally 8-10 degrees warmer than it is now. We're still coming out of the last ice age! Try http://www.junkscience.c om/news/william-the-conqueror.html or http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/ge olog.htm Hell, hit any major search engine and you'll see that the scientists are split into two camps; The camp using models saying that we'll see a dramatic warm up, even though the models can't even figure out the current weather correctly from the 1960-70 statistics, and those that point out the fact we're ony a few thousand from the last Ice age and that man-made greenhouse gas accounts for less than 1% of that produced in a year.

What public transportation? The nearest bus stop is twenty miles further than my employer, in the opposite direction! And is riding a bicycle 90 miles/day actually feasable? Some of us still live in the great wasteland that is Suburbia because we can't afford $1,200/month apartments in the major cities.