The US Marine Corps enlisted members of the Navajo tribe to act as radio operators in the Pacific. The language had never been written, and it was estimated there were fewer than 30 non-native speakers at the outbreak of World War II.
Earlier, in World War I, the US Army utilized members of the Choctaw tribe as operators near the end of the war. This, however, was due to a decision in the field (a captain noted that he had several members of the tribe in his battalion), rather than a formal program.
In the Mechanical Engineering department at the U of MN, we had a janitor who was also a computer geek. He'd always strike up a conversation with the sysadmins. He was an early linux adopter.
When some of the workstations got switched to linux, some of the profs would bitch. They'd claim that it was too hard and too difficult to learn.
The standard response was, "Huh. The janitor uses linux, he has no problems." That really shut the profs up.
Re:TiVo needs two tuners
on
TiVo Will Die
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· Score: 1
If Comcast ever forces me to use a set-top box, goodbye cable, hello satellite.
While I understand your sentiment, wouldn't that defeat the purpose? Satellite requires a settop box for every TV.
That's one reason I've stuck with cable, I have the box on my big TV, but I can still get the non-digital, non-premium channels on my other TVs.
I have the Scentific Atlanta PVR through my local cable company. It's only $6 per month rental, and no up-front purchase cost. My initial unit was bad (seemed like a flaky drive), but since it was only rented I just swapped it for another one from the cable company, no hassle involved.
My brother has a TiVo. I readily admit that the search software on the TiVo is much better, but it doesn't have two tuners (the SA from my cable company does). We were stuck watching some stupid show his wife had set to record. From looking at their web site, it seems that TiVo doesn't offer any models with two tuners.
An outright banning cell phone from the workplace is extreme and should be met with a quick move to another company.
To me, it is your reaction to this type of scenario that seems extreme.
The company still has telephones. Someone can still call the front office and get you a message. I've never owned a cell phone in my life, and I'm certainly not "unreachable" at work.
As a previous poster mentioned, I think people get addicted, in a way, to their cell. It's like a security blanket that they cannot be without. As if some terrific event will occur while they are buying groceries and if they don't get the call immediately their life will collapse.
I'm not a luddite. I certainly appreciate that cell phones are handy in any number of situations. It's that they are totally unnecessary in a whole lot of other situations, but people use them anyway. How many times have you been with someone and you are interrupted because they answer a call? How many times was the call something that could just have easily been left on voicemail and handled later? To put it another way, how many times have you been interruped by a cell phone call and it turned out to be extremely important? There are on-call surgeons and firefighters out there, but 99% of people using their cell phone at the restaurant don't fall into those groups.
I think that calling is "misleading" is being generous. It is obviously a rebuttal to the previous claims that CA did not pay for the licenses, but it isn't true. It is wrong.
A professional news organization would issue a retraction.
What, exactly, in those links are the "serious reasons"?
Many people have implied that a US Navy cruiser fired the missle. Having spent many years in the Navy I can say that this is extremely unlikley. Why? Because someone would have said something by now.
A most of the crew on any ship is a bunch of young kids. A lot of them felt cheated by their recruiter and are not happy about their life of painting the ship and cleaning toilets. They'd sell out the story in a second. A missile launch from a ship is not a subtle thing. It burns the whole deck. Everyone on board knows a missile was launched.
Some have suggested a shoulder launched surface-to-air missile was fired from the area. I'll concede that this is certainly possible. A small group an keep quiet. It would explain the eyewitness accounts. My problem with this theory is that there is nothing else to support it.
Who did the firing? A terrorist group? Why didn't they claim responsibility? The US Government? To what end? The Patriot Act didn't come around for another five years and was a result of 9/11, not Flight 800.
A microprocessor and display are installed in a vehicle that has been purchased with a loan. The display indicates if your loan payment is current. As the due date approaches, the display warns you. Should you miss a payment, your vehicle is automatically disabled. When you make a payment, the loan company sends you a code to enter in to the system, giving you another month of vehicle use.
This isn't some test system. It has been used in more than 100,000 vehicles throughout the United States. Right now they are being used in situations where people are a credit risk. Typically the person has the income to afford the vehicle, but has a history of late or missed payments.
This really isn't anything new. Space-based weapons have been thought of for at least as long as man has been in space.
Starting in the late 1950s the Soviets began working on an nuclear orbital bombardment system that would bypass US early warning systems. There was also Salyut 3 in 1975 which carried a 23mm cannon that was used to fire at a target satellite
Ethanol is a lot easier to transport, refill,... than hydrogen. I bet a lot of energy is wasted in the ethanol->hydrogen reaction. So why not just use the ethanol directly?
Because this system is using low-grade ethanol that has a lot of water in it. Engine-grade ethanol has to have the water removed, the process is much less efficient. Institute of Physics article.
This USDA paper concludes that ethanol production provides more energy than it uses (not in an absolute sense, of course, but we're not counting the sun-supplied energy in the corn). The paper concludes a 34% energy gain.
The paper addresses some of the issues raised in the column you linked. Pimentel in particular. It compares the results of several studies and attempts to address them.
Pimentel (who comes up with the negative energy results) tried to include some very hard to quantify items, such as the energy required to build the farm machinery that was used to grow the corn. Certainly a valid input, but he provides no details as to how he came up with his numbers.
True, it is difficult to outsource reporters, but they're already on-site and low paid. What about editors, graphics, and layout? As long as we're using print, the actual printing is cheaper to do locally since transport costs would kill you. I'd guess, however, that print news will die a lot in the next ten years.
As I noted in another post, some law journals are already outsourcing work to India.
The idea is not as improbable as some people think.
This article talks about how some legal services are being outsourced to India. It is very small scale right now, but everything starts out small. It has some lawyers quite concerned that their expensive hourly jobs are being done by Indian lawyers for much less.
What I can't figure out is why Ford gave permission to use the Pinto photo, but not the Bronco II. As I see it, the Bronco II was just ahead of its time. We have lots of cheap, shitty SUVs today.
In any case, wouldn't the photo be fair-use for news?
The Ranger was a name given to a style of pickup beginning in 1967 (the option packages were base, custom, and Ranger). In 1978 this style was changed to "Ranger Lariat" and in 1982 the style became simply "Lariat".
The Ranger, as a "mini" pickup began in 1983. Prior to that, Ford had the Courier, which was a repainted Mazda.
I guess amazon.com which went public in 1997 must have been frequented only be researches and nerds for the first 5 years of operation.
Well, let's see...
1997, loss of $31 million 1998, loss of $125 million 1999, losss of $719 million 2000, loss of over $1 billion 2001, loss of $567 million 2002, loss of $149 million
Yeah. I'd say the statement is more or less correct.
I do understand politics. Of course there are a lot of common interested between the US and South Korea. They export a lot of good to the US. There is a shared defense. This situation exists between many nations throughout the world. You are now claiming that any allied nation has a puppet government?
You're claiming the governments of South Korea, Japan, Cuba, and the Phillipines are all US puppets?
Or are you only referring to Iraq and Afghanistan? In the latter case, I'll agree that you may be correct, but it is very early in the process. Not too long ago Cuba had a "puppet" US government. Not so any longer. Does that mean the US empire collapsed?
You really think that Iraq or Afghanistan are anything like imperial colonies? Like British India? Has the US claimed they are now annexed territory? Do you really believe the US plans on being there for the long term? The US is actively forming government (local government) in Iraq. That is not the role of a colonial empire.
Look at the Phillipines, Japan, or South Korea. They were all once in an "occupied" state by the US. Now they are independent nations.
The notion of the US as a modern western empire may be true on many levels, but there are a number of significant differences between it and previous empires. The US "empire" cannot collapse because its colonies become independent-- the already are.
You are correct. In terms of national economies I certainly can see the same thing happening. I assumed the original poster was making a broader comparison, which is why I thought Russia was a better anaolgy.
Too many people see the government as an endless stream of money, and they don't look at the big picture. Politicians, being in the business of getting reelected, pander to those interests.
I won't claim that anything will last forever, least of all the United States. My argument was that, within a generation, the US would not resemble Argentina.
On a side note, the US isn't quite like previous western empires (Britain, Rome). It has no far flung colonies to support, defend, or suppress. It did once, Cuba and the Phillipines for example. Some states could leave and it could fall from within, that almost happened once before. I certainly don't think it will stay this way forever, I just believe that it will have to be different than previous "empires".
Well, this is an obvious troll but it seems the mods bit.
Let's pretend all your arguments are correct. The United States is going to collapse. Even still, the US is a massive country with a huge wealth of natural resources within its borders. It also has a powerful military to defend those borders. Argentina was never like the US.
If you want to pursue an analogy, then the US is headed to being another Russia. Russia may not be what it was at the height of the Soviet Union, but Russia is nothing like Argentina.
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Earlier, in World War I, the US Army utilized members of the Choctaw tribe as operators near the end of the war. This, however, was due to a decision in the field (a captain noted that he had several members of the tribe in his battalion), rather than a formal program.
In the Mechanical Engineering department at the U of MN, we had a janitor who was also a computer geek. He'd always strike up a conversation with the sysadmins. He was an early linux adopter.
When some of the workstations got switched to linux, some of the profs would bitch. They'd claim that it was too hard and too difficult to learn.
The standard response was, "Huh. The janitor uses linux, he has no problems." That really shut the profs up.
While I understand your sentiment, wouldn't that defeat the purpose? Satellite requires a settop box for every TV.
That's one reason I've stuck with cable, I have the box on my big TV, but I can still get the non-digital, non-premium channels on my other TVs.
My brother has a TiVo. I readily admit that the search software on the TiVo is much better, but it doesn't have two tuners (the SA from my cable company does). We were stuck watching some stupid show his wife had set to record. From looking at their web site, it seems that TiVo doesn't offer any models with two tuners.
To me, it is your reaction to this type of scenario that seems extreme.
The company still has telephones. Someone can still call the front office and get you a message. I've never owned a cell phone in my life, and I'm certainly not "unreachable" at work.
As a previous poster mentioned, I think people get addicted, in a way, to their cell. It's like a security blanket that they cannot be without. As if some terrific event will occur while they are buying groceries and if they don't get the call immediately their life will collapse.
I'm not a luddite. I certainly appreciate that cell phones are handy in any number of situations. It's that they are totally unnecessary in a whole lot of other situations, but people use them anyway. How many times have you been with someone and you are interrupted because they answer a call? How many times was the call something that could just have easily been left on voicemail and handled later? To put it another way, how many times have you been interruped by a cell phone call and it turned out to be extremely important? There are on-call surgeons and firefighters out there, but 99% of people using their cell phone at the restaurant don't fall into those groups.
I think that calling is "misleading" is being generous. It is obviously a rebuttal to the previous claims that CA did not pay for the licenses, but it isn't true. It is wrong.
A professional news organization would issue a retraction.
What, exactly, in those links are the "serious reasons"?
Many people have implied that a US Navy cruiser fired the missle. Having spent many years in the Navy I can say that this is extremely unlikley. Why? Because someone would have said something by now.
A most of the crew on any ship is a bunch of young kids. A lot of them felt cheated by their recruiter and are not happy about their life of painting the ship and cleaning toilets. They'd sell out the story in a second. A missile launch from a ship is not a subtle thing. It burns the whole deck. Everyone on board knows a missile was launched.
Some have suggested a shoulder launched surface-to-air missile was fired from the area. I'll concede that this is certainly possible. A small group an keep quiet. It would explain the eyewitness accounts. My problem with this theory is that there is nothing else to support it.
Who did the firing? A terrorist group? Why didn't they claim responsibility? The US Government? To what end? The Patriot Act didn't come around for another five years and was a result of 9/11, not Flight 800.
A microprocessor and display are installed in a vehicle that has been purchased with a loan. The display indicates if your loan payment is current. As the due date approaches, the display warns you. Should you miss a payment, your vehicle is automatically disabled. When you make a payment, the loan company sends you a code to enter in to the system, giving you another month of vehicle use.
This isn't some test system. It has been used in more than 100,000 vehicles throughout the United States. Right now they are being used in situations where people are a credit risk. Typically the person has the income to afford the vehicle, but has a history of late or missed payments.
You are correct. An asteroid impact is not very likley. If it occurs, however, the cost is very high. This research is only $75,000. Cheap insurance.
Starting in the late 1950s the Soviets began working on an nuclear orbital bombardment system that would bypass US early warning systems. There was also Salyut 3 in 1975 which carried a 23mm cannon that was used to fire at a target satellite
Because this system is using low-grade ethanol that has a lot of water in it. Engine-grade ethanol has to have the water removed, the process is much less efficient. Institute of Physics article.
The paper addresses some of the issues raised in the column you linked. Pimentel in particular. It compares the results of several studies and attempts to address them.
Pimentel (who comes up with the negative energy results) tried to include some very hard to quantify items, such as the energy required to build the farm machinery that was used to grow the corn. Certainly a valid input, but he provides no details as to how he came up with his numbers.
This USDA paper addresses the issue. It compares various ethanol studies and concludes a positive energy balance in production.
As I noted in another post, some law journals are already outsourcing work to India.
This article talks about how some legal services are being outsourced to India. It is very small scale right now, but everything starts out small. It has some lawyers quite concerned that their expensive hourly jobs are being done by Indian lawyers for much less.
What I can't figure out is why Ford gave permission to use the Pinto photo, but not the Bronco II. As I see it, the Bronco II was just ahead of its time. We have lots of cheap, shitty SUVs today.
In any case, wouldn't the photo be fair-use for news?
The Ranger was a name given to a style of pickup beginning in 1967 (the option packages were base, custom, and Ranger). In 1978 this style was changed to "Ranger Lariat" and in 1982 the style became simply "Lariat".
The Ranger, as a "mini" pickup began in 1983. Prior to that, Ford had the Courier, which was a repainted Mazda.
Well, let's see...
1997, loss of $31 million
1998, loss of $125 million
1999, losss of $719 million
2000, loss of over $1 billion
2001, loss of $567 million
2002, loss of $149 million
Yeah. I'd say the statement is more or less correct.
I do understand politics. Of course there are a lot of common interested between the US and South Korea. They export a lot of good to the US. There is a shared defense. This situation exists between many nations throughout the world. You are now claiming that any allied nation has a puppet government?
You're claiming the governments of South Korea, Japan, Cuba, and the Phillipines are all US puppets?
Or are you only referring to Iraq and Afghanistan? In the latter case, I'll agree that you may be correct, but it is very early in the process. Not too long ago Cuba had a "puppet" US government. Not so any longer. Does that mean the US empire collapsed?
You really think that Iraq or Afghanistan are anything like imperial colonies? Like British India? Has the US claimed they are now annexed territory? Do you really believe the US plans on being there for the long term? The US is actively forming government (local government) in Iraq. That is not the role of a colonial empire.
Look at the Phillipines, Japan, or South Korea. They were all once in an "occupied" state by the US. Now they are independent nations.
The notion of the US as a modern western empire may be true on many levels, but there are a number of significant differences between it and previous empires. The US "empire" cannot collapse because its colonies become independent-- the already are.
You are correct. In terms of national economies I certainly can see the same thing happening. I assumed the original poster was making a broader comparison, which is why I thought Russia was a better anaolgy.
Too many people see the government as an endless stream of money, and they don't look at the big picture. Politicians, being in the business of getting reelected, pander to those interests.
I won't claim that anything will last forever, least of all the United States. My argument was that, within a generation, the US would not resemble Argentina.
On a side note, the US isn't quite like previous western empires (Britain, Rome). It has no far flung colonies to support, defend, or suppress. It did once, Cuba and the Phillipines for example. Some states could leave and it could fall from within, that almost happened once before. I certainly don't think it will stay this way forever, I just believe that it will have to be different than previous "empires".
Well, this is an obvious troll but it seems the mods bit.
Let's pretend all your arguments are correct. The United States is going to collapse. Even still, the US is a massive country with a huge wealth of natural resources within its borders. It also has a powerful military to defend those borders. Argentina was never like the US.
If you want to pursue an analogy, then the US is headed to being another Russia. Russia may not be what it was at the height of the Soviet Union, but Russia is nothing like Argentina.
R2 claims to belong to Obi-Wan because that's the cover story that Leia planted so he'd find Obi-Wan and get him to help.