No, this does not compute. I want my own care in order to arrive with all my "stuff", the briefcase, maybe extra coats, the 2 way radio that _I_ want in it, the external cell phone antenna, the laptop in the trunk, etc. I don't want to think of carrying all that stuff along to stuff in a Taxi when I'm going to work, etc. I want it in the garage when I get up at 4:00 AM and decide to go into work early, rather than waiting for a cab to get here from town, 20 miles away. I want _my_ car to have the "maximum summer grip" tires that will go 'round corners faster than other cars and I want to have an engine in the car that will out-accelerate the pinhead in the other lane that would like to keep me from changing lanes. In the snow I want my own car that happens to be a Jeep with the big, knobby tires to go thru it even tho it is up to the axles.
I'm not worried about them being prosperous so much as US being prosperous. What would gas cost if we didn't have to import any? Probably would cost as much as electricity. I find that my electric rate would power a Chevy Volt for 100 miles (20 KwH) for about $1.60 @ 8 cents / KwH. My current car (20 mpg) costs about $16.25 @ $3.25/gallon of premium (my car's a turbo, needs premium.) Almost exactly 10 times the expense. When gas gets to $7 a gallon, the Volt will be over 20 times more frugal as my current car. But anyway, we need to quit importing oil. Until we can get the Volt to go 300 miles on a charge and recharge in 5 minutes, and can get charging station that can deliver that sort of power, we need the oil. OBTW, 300 mile range volt would require 60 KwH, and to deliver that in 5 minutes would require a 720 Kw delivery rate. At, say, 300 volts, that's 2,400 amps of delivery to charge 1 car in 5 minutes to run 300 miles. Suppose a "gas" station was trying to charge 10 cars at once? Does it need its own nuclear power plant on site? Prolly. How many years until we can build up infrastructure like that? A long time - decades - which is why we need to keep doing oil right now. Which is why the "environmental extremists" (happy now that I didn't say "envirowacko") are the enemies of prosperity in the US because they think that they can just choke off the supply of oil, by opposing everything, and the solution will magically appear. No, it won't. Unfortunately, the envirowackos are all liberal arts students that took course like "photography" and "art appreciation" and don't understand 2 + 2 nor amps and volts. Or, they do understand it, and are simply societal saboteurs. The solution is HARD, and requires a lot of time and money to achieve, and we don't even HAVE the magic battery yet that can be coaxed to hold that much energy in a car without weighing tons and be recharged in that sort of time. No such battery exists, and likely won't for at least another few years.
But anyway, people that bash oil companies, that are simply folks that bring us a commodity that we desparately need, and get all sideways 'cuz they make a buck while doing it, really rub me the wrong way.
We're not only going to have to deep-6 NASA, we're going to have to give up being world cop, close all the overseas military bases, kill ridiculously expensive things like the EPA, NHTSA, DOEducation, DOEnergy, etc. etc. If we don't, in another 20 years,maybe sooner, the INTEREST on the national debt will consume ALL our tax revenue, at which point we'll have to borrow ALL of the money we spend. Somebody that wants to kill the USA just says they won't loan us any money. Sounds like China might do that. If we let them get into that position, they will.
Any alternatives? Maybe sell off every acre of US owned land that are not National Parks, like all that desert and shale oil areas out west, and without Nancy Pelosi trying to lock up the desert so's it can't be used for solar power, or the other democrats attempting to stop the exploitation of the shale for oil, we might then be able to afford to pay some of the debt with the proceeds from the sales of these lands, which should be very valuable for the already mentioned reasons. Should the US own vast areas of Alaska? Let the oil companies buy them, then they can drill them "by right," no more obstructionist envirowackos keeping the USA from being prosperous.
What part of "we're broke" don't people understand?
We need to dissolve NASA, and a whale of a lot of other gov't agencies, and let the military handle all the space stuff, which should probably be restricted to enough spy and weather satellites to keep us safe, and then the navstar system. We're borrowing 40% of what we spend. If we don't stop it, we're going to have an Argentina / Wymer Republic style meltdown, where you're entire yearly salary won't be enough to buy a loaf of bread. That's coming, if we don't balance the budget, and pretty D soon.
Just about happened to a couple of us that were following the GPS route thru Death Valley. We believed the gadget when it said to go in a certain direction that was not the main road. 40 miles later, the next turn put us on a road paved with fairly large, sharp rocks. The sign said, "Next services 70 miles." Well, we had an AWD SUV, but that road looked seriously challenging, and although we filled up at the last opportunity, there wasn't enough gas to go 69 miles down that road, find a bridge out, come 110 miles back to the main road, and then coutinue on the main road to California. We turned around, even tho the road we were on before the unpaved road was shown to join up with the main road. That was a good decision, too, as we found out later that it didn't go "thru" either.
I remember reading a sci-fi book a long time ago, I think it was "Ringworld", where there were plants with shiny surfaces, that, if you were airborne over them, they would turn their leaves in response to your position, and actually focus the sun's rays on you, all of several hundred acres like that - instant crispy! Real dangerous.
No subway here - I'm single, so if I'm traveling, it means I'm driving. Making a phone call, or taking one, is about all I want to do with a phone if I'm driving. And I know I could never text and drive without runnning the car up a phone pole or worse. Maybe someday they'll make a smart phone that will text via some electrical contacts on the machine, where I can plug my ham radio morse key paddles into it, and send the letters that way. Receive the message via morse or voice translation. But reading from the screen, or texting on keys while driving, I'm not _that_ good...
You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you, and the cops are always out to get you - they have a case to close, and if you're a reasonably probable innocent bystander, they can make a case just from you being there, and close their books, problem solved. You think the Duke LaCrosse Team are the only ones to ever have been railroaded? Ha! Happens every day.
In addition to all the other downsides, like having to switch to a particular carrier, and the regular drawbacks of cellphones that you supposedly can't use 'em anywhere in public 'cuz it might annoy someone, or in the car 'cuz the state believes we can't walk and chew gum at the same time nor drive while talking on a cell phone, we now have to worry about the state tromping around it looking for something - anything - to try to hang us with it. Maybe I have a single phone # in my address book for somone who turns out to be a criminal, so I end up sharing the same cell with the guy 'cuz the cops can make a case out of anything. Hey, Mel Gibson is now going to be charged with hitting his girlfriend, whether she's maybe lying or not, mostly 'cuz a lotta politically correct righteous individuals who never had a wrong though don't like him because of his views and beliefs. Odds are, he didn't do a D thing. But I bet he ends up in the clink. Shoulda gone back to Australia while he had the chance.
I have the simplest, cheapest phone you can imagine - doesn't text, doesn't GPS, doesn't do anything but 1 single thing, and that's make and receive phone calls. I think I'll keep it.
... is that Russia or India or Japan or anyone-but-the-USA that doesn't respect a bunch of bogus regulations that are designed to work to the disadvantage of the USA in the 1st place will be doing the mining, and we'll have to IMPORT the expensive, outer-space minerals that we should have been mining in the 1st place.
Assange has involved himself in the war on terror as an enemy of the USA on the battlefield of information.
Whether the latest publications by Wikileaks ultimately ends up killing US soldiers or other citizens, the Wikileaks site contains information on some of our defensive weapons, like radio jammers. I've seen the tech manual for one of these jammers on the site. I worked in Iraq as a civilian sci/tech advisor in the counter-IED program, and one of our strategies was to jam the radio frequencies used to set off IED's, or roadside bombs. But, with the manuals for these jammers revealed, the bad guys can just read 'em and adjust their radio triggers to operate on frequencies other than the ones these jammers are capable of jamming. Just wonderful, eh? Next time you have someone you care about come back from Iraq or Afganistan with no legs, or dead, you have to ask yourself whether the bad guys were able to set off their IED, and harm your loved one, because of this Assange character. He is an enemy of the USA, no question, and deserves at the very least life in prison.
Fills in the lines for me. It tells me you don't have a clue.
First of all, the difference in US violence and most other of the Euro countries is that the US has a history of personal use of violence. This is the "wild west" sort of attitude that makes people resort to fists, broken beer bottles, and guns, rather than calling the police. Yeah, the murder rate is much less using guns than places like Switzerland, that have a fully automatic militia weapon in most homes, but so is the murder rate using knives and other weapons. In other words, its the PEOPLE that don't choose to murder, rather than a lack of a particular means of murder.
As for the handguns that don't supposedly have any use but killing people, I'll have to tell my buddy that hunts deer with a.44 magnum revolver. While the revolver is not generally thought of as a semi-auto, it works the same way - each pull of the trigger produces a shot. He hauls deer out of the woods very nicely with it.
And as for killing people, some people just need it. I read the back of a T-shirt that said something to the effect that, "A liberal is someone who thinks it is morally superior for a woman is found dead in an alley, strangled with her own panty-hose, rather than a woman explaining to police how her attacker received that bullet hole right over his heart."
And, yes, some hunting weapons need to be semi-automatic. It is, for instance, recommeded that when hunting for bears, you put 3 rounds in them in quick succession if you want a clean kill. Mostly you can only do that with a semi-auto, most other actions being too slow. The bear will naturally run. You need a weapon that can operate for those 3 rounds in the bear's first couple strides, or you'll likely miss after it gets going. If you don't want the bear to make it over the next hill and get totally lost from your vision, and possibly die days later where you cannot find it, you need a semi-auto action rifle.
Somebody's screen saver bothers you? Get a life! You're not going to graduate anyway if you're so easily distracted.
And I wish I had a laptop back in the early 80's when I went to college! Take notes and save them to disk! Outstanding. Not have to carry a notebook with 5 separate sections for the 5 different classes I was taking, be able to search the text for a particular word or phrase, etc., would be outstanding. Download PDFs having to do with the subject, and have them on hand it class? Great. Maybe even scan the texbook and have it on-line, rather than lugging 30 lbs of textbooks around campus in a backpack. I just don't see much of a valid downside to having laptop / notebook computer in class.
I remember reading 10 - 15 years ago about a couple Russian scientists that said we didn't have to worry about global warming because there would be a mini ice age commencing somewhere around the year 2010. No, really... I did read that. Boy those Russkies are smart.
Should we be working on a space-based mirror system to concentrate sunlight and maybe prevent 10,000 foot thick glaciers marching down the continent all the way to Omaha? If you thought GW was going to screw up the environment, think about that. Far worse.
Or maybe a series of electric power satellites, 1000's of terawatts that would, when the waste heat is dumped into the atmoshphere, just maybe help things along to thwart the glaciers.
It would require too many pilots for small numbers of people. Nobody would be able to afford it unless you either make the airplanes so automated that they fly and takeoff/land themselves, or so simple to operate that they don't require more skills than operating a car. And, of course, people still screw that up so I think we'd STILL see a major bump in air transport deaths and injuries. That's fine for those that want to take the increased risk, but I don't want 'em falling into my bedroom, either. Looks kinda dead-endish to me.
Yes, but that is an _engineering_ problem, not a cause for the envirowackos to get involved and try to stop it. That's my beef - they are absolutely not satisfiable, and simply attempt to stop _everything_. They even stopped a power wire from a solar farm from crossing a mountain range to get to where the power was needed on the California coast. I'd post a link but CNN appears to have taken it down. But... its preposterous. Am I fed up? You bet.
If its being built in California, the anti-progress luddite envirowackos will either stop it, or the power wires necessary to distribute its electricity, or both. Nobody should try to build ANYTHING in California until it undergoes a serious attitude adjustment and embraces progress.
The exposure of names of allies in either Iraq or Afghanistan has a potential to get them killed, which might prove to be a chilling effect on others helping us and maybe extend our stay in either or both countries. That's major in my book.
The revelation about the nuclear material in Pakistan could result in the bad guys scoring the theft, and then it ends up in a dirty bomb in times square. That's major too.
And not in this release, but earlier I took a peek at WL, a couple years ago, and found the specs for an anti-IED jammer that we used in Iraq, which would allow the bad guys to build triggers in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the jammer didn't cover, and thus defeat it. That's major if you're riding in a vehicle that is about to get blown up by a ton of ANFO, and you're relying on that jammer to prevent it from happening.
You bet I disagree. I volunteered for a year in Afghanistan earlier this year - my last major TDY of my career at age 63 - and although I've not been chosen _yet_, I may be, and then I'll be one of the Navy Civilian Employees that will be there for a year, attempting to aid our side / hinder the other side in a technical role, and riding around in those vehicles, so YEAH, IT SEEMS REALLY MAJOR TO ME!!!
Major damage can include the revelation of a stockpile of some nuclear material in Pakistan that may now be attacked, or stolen by the Taliban there.
Major damage is a new reluctance of foreign diplomants to trust the USA with vital information lest it become public because of this security breack.
Major damage that may occur is if there are SOME messages that do indeed reveal that this or that tribal chieftan cooperates / cooperated with US forces against the Taliban, and is then marked for elimination by the bad-guys-du-jour.
Major damage is the hard feelings incurred by frank assesments of other world leaders, which may / probably will cause them to be less cooperative after what they will likely, and rightly deem an insult.
This is a good thing, as it protects service members and civilian employees. The problem is, it is a really _bad_ thing for these folks to end up with classified documents on their computers. Just becuase WL went and released a bunch of classsified docments does not mean that they are now unclassified. They are still confidential, secret, or top secret. An employee with this sort of material on his/her hard disk could be in a lot of trouble, not to mention that the computer in question would have to be processed to positively remove the classified material. This could involve destruction of the hard disk, as simply erasing it might leave a trace of the classified material if the erase head didn't exactly track the previous path of that write head. A thin strip of classified could still remain. So, total destruction of the hard disk might be required, with obvious loss of not only the value of the disk, but possibly other material the user was working on.
Better to block these sites, and avoid the problem from the get-go. And I'm not sorry to see these site lose the traffic. Its a mild punishment for the major damage that it has done to the country, and possibly more horrific consequences to come if insurgents / Taliban find a use for some of the names that may be exposed.
Yep - just STOP. And wind it back about 20 years. I've been driving over 45 years, and I've never needed antilock brakes, air bags, traction control, stability control, etc. etc. The only thing that is mandated that I'd likely buy anyway is seat belts. My car would probably be $10,000 cheaper, too, than ones for sale nowday with all the mandated crap on them.
There's a simple solution to this nonsense: NEVER buy any electronics that REQUIRES jailbreaking to use it the way you want to use it. If everyone did that, they wouldn't sell any of that crap, and would change their tune in a hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this does not compute. I want my own care in order to arrive with all my "stuff", the briefcase, maybe extra coats, the 2 way radio that _I_ want in it, the external cell phone antenna, the laptop in the trunk, etc. I don't want to think of carrying all that stuff along to stuff in a Taxi when I'm going to work, etc. I want it in the garage when I get up at 4:00 AM and decide to go into work early, rather than waiting for a cab to get here from town, 20 miles away. I want _my_ car to have the "maximum summer grip" tires that will go 'round corners faster than other cars and I want to have an engine in the car that will out-accelerate the pinhead in the other lane that would like to keep me from changing lanes. In the snow I want my own car that happens to be a Jeep with the big, knobby tires to go thru it even tho it is up to the axles.
...buy things with DRM... or that need to be jailbroken. If they didn't make any money at this, they wouldn't do it...
I'm not worried about them being prosperous so much as US being prosperous. What would gas cost if we didn't have to import any? Probably would cost as much as electricity. I find that my electric rate would power a Chevy Volt for 100 miles (20 KwH) for about $1.60 @ 8 cents / KwH. My current car (20 mpg) costs about $16.25 @ $3.25/gallon of premium (my car's a turbo, needs premium.) Almost exactly 10 times the expense. When gas gets to $7 a gallon, the Volt will be over 20 times more frugal as my current car. But anyway, we need to quit importing oil. Until we can get the Volt to go 300 miles on a charge and recharge in 5 minutes, and can get charging station that can deliver that sort of power, we need the oil. OBTW, 300 mile range volt would require 60 KwH, and to deliver that in 5 minutes would require a 720 Kw delivery rate. At, say, 300 volts, that's 2,400 amps of delivery to charge 1 car in 5 minutes to run 300 miles. Suppose a "gas" station was trying to charge 10 cars at once? Does it need its own nuclear power plant on site? Prolly. How many years until we can build up infrastructure like that? A long time - decades - which is why we need to keep doing oil right now. Which is why the "environmental extremists" (happy now that I didn't say "envirowacko") are the enemies of prosperity in the US because they think that they can just choke off the supply of oil, by opposing everything, and the solution will magically appear. No, it won't. Unfortunately, the envirowackos are all liberal arts students that took course like "photography" and "art appreciation" and don't understand 2 + 2 nor amps and volts. Or, they do understand it, and are simply societal saboteurs. The solution is HARD, and requires a lot of time and money to achieve, and we don't even HAVE the magic battery yet that can be coaxed to hold that much energy in a car without weighing tons and be recharged in that sort of time. No such battery exists, and likely won't for at least another few years.
But anyway, people that bash oil companies, that are simply folks that bring us a commodity that we desparately need, and get all sideways 'cuz they make a buck while doing it, really rub me the wrong way.
We're not only going to have to deep-6 NASA, we're going to have to give up being world cop, close all the overseas military bases, kill ridiculously expensive things like the EPA, NHTSA, DOEducation, DOEnergy, etc. etc. If we don't, in another 20 years,maybe sooner, the INTEREST on the national debt will consume ALL our tax revenue, at which point we'll have to borrow ALL of the money we spend. Somebody that wants to kill the USA just says they won't loan us any money. Sounds like China might do that. If we let them get into that position, they will.
Any alternatives? Maybe sell off every acre of US owned land that are not National Parks, like all that desert and shale oil areas out west, and without Nancy Pelosi trying to lock up the desert so's it can't be used for solar power, or the other democrats attempting to stop the exploitation of the shale for oil, we might then be able to afford to pay some of the debt with the proceeds from the sales of these lands, which should be very valuable for the already mentioned reasons. Should the US own vast areas of Alaska? Let the oil companies buy them, then they can drill them "by right," no more obstructionist envirowackos keeping the USA from being prosperous.
What part of "we're broke" don't people understand?
We need to dissolve NASA, and a whale of a lot of other gov't agencies, and let the military handle all the space stuff, which should probably be restricted to enough spy and weather satellites to keep us safe, and then the navstar system. We're borrowing 40% of what we spend. If we don't stop it, we're going to have an Argentina / Wymer Republic style meltdown, where you're entire yearly salary won't be enough to buy a loaf of bread. That's coming, if we don't balance the budget, and pretty D soon.
Just about happened to a couple of us that were following the GPS route thru Death Valley. We believed the gadget when it said to go in a certain direction that was not the main road. 40 miles later, the next turn put us on a road paved with fairly large, sharp rocks. The sign said, "Next services 70 miles." Well, we had an AWD SUV, but that road looked seriously challenging, and although we filled up at the last opportunity, there wasn't enough gas to go 69 miles down that road, find a bridge out, come 110 miles back to the main road, and then coutinue on the main road to California. We turned around, even tho the road we were on before the unpaved road was shown to join up with the main road. That was a good decision, too, as we found out later that it didn't go "thru" either.
That was close...
I remember reading a sci-fi book a long time ago, I think it was "Ringworld", where there were plants with shiny surfaces, that, if you were airborne over them, they would turn their leaves in response to your position, and actually focus the sun's rays on you, all of several hundred acres like that - instant crispy! Real dangerous.
I like the 3D movies. Sorry, that's all there is to it. They're more fun.
No subway here - I'm single, so if I'm traveling, it means I'm driving. Making a phone call, or taking one, is about all I want to do with a phone if I'm driving. And I know I could never text and drive without runnning the car up a phone pole or worse. Maybe someday they'll make a smart phone that will text via some electrical contacts on the machine, where I can plug my ham radio morse key paddles into it, and send the letters that way. Receive the message via morse or voice translation. But reading from the screen, or texting on keys while driving, I'm not _that_ good...
You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you, and the cops are always out to get you - they have a case to close, and if you're a reasonably probable innocent bystander, they can make a case just from you being there, and close their books, problem solved. You think the Duke LaCrosse Team are the only ones to ever have been railroaded? Ha! Happens every day.
In addition to all the other downsides, like having to switch to a particular carrier, and the regular drawbacks of cellphones that you supposedly can't use 'em anywhere in public 'cuz it might annoy someone, or in the car 'cuz the state believes we can't walk and chew gum at the same time nor drive while talking on a cell phone, we now have to worry about the state tromping around it looking for something - anything - to try to hang us with it. Maybe I have a single phone # in my address book for somone who turns out to be a criminal, so I end up sharing the same cell with the guy 'cuz the cops can make a case out of anything. Hey, Mel Gibson is now going to be charged with hitting his girlfriend, whether she's maybe lying or not, mostly 'cuz a lotta politically correct righteous individuals who never had a wrong though don't like him because of his views and beliefs. Odds are, he didn't do a D thing. But I bet he ends up in the clink. Shoulda gone back to Australia while he had the chance.
I have the simplest, cheapest phone you can imagine - doesn't text, doesn't GPS, doesn't do anything but 1 single thing, and that's make and receive phone calls. I think I'll keep it.
... is that Russia or India or Japan or anyone-but-the-USA that doesn't respect a bunch of bogus regulations that are designed to work to the disadvantage of the USA in the 1st place will be doing the mining, and we'll have to IMPORT the expensive, outer-space minerals that we should have been mining in the 1st place.
Assange has involved himself in the war on terror as an enemy of the USA on the battlefield of information.
Whether the latest publications by Wikileaks ultimately ends up killing US soldiers or other citizens, the Wikileaks site contains information on some of our defensive weapons, like radio jammers. I've seen the tech manual for one of these jammers on the site. I worked in Iraq as a civilian sci/tech advisor in the counter-IED program, and one of our strategies was to jam the radio frequencies used to set off IED's, or roadside bombs. But, with the manuals for these jammers revealed, the bad guys can just read 'em and adjust their radio triggers to operate on frequencies other than the ones these jammers are capable of jamming. Just wonderful, eh? Next time you have someone you care about come back from Iraq or Afganistan with no legs, or dead, you have to ask yourself whether the bad guys were able to set off their IED, and harm your loved one, because of this Assange character. He is an enemy of the USA, no question, and deserves at the very least life in prison.
Fills in the lines for me. It tells me you don't have a clue.
First of all, the difference in US violence and most other of the Euro countries is that the US has a history of personal use of violence. This is the "wild west" sort of attitude that makes people resort to fists, broken beer bottles, and guns, rather than calling the police. Yeah, the murder rate is much less using guns than places like Switzerland, that have a fully automatic militia weapon in most homes, but so is the murder rate using knives and other weapons. In other words, its the PEOPLE that don't choose to murder, rather than a lack of a particular means of murder.
As for the handguns that don't supposedly have any use but killing people, I'll have to tell my buddy that hunts deer with a .44 magnum revolver. While the revolver is not generally thought of as a semi-auto, it works the same way - each pull of the trigger produces a shot. He hauls deer out of the woods very nicely with it.
And as for killing people, some people just need it. I read the back of a T-shirt that said something to the effect that, "A liberal is someone who thinks it is morally superior for a woman is found dead in an alley, strangled with her own panty-hose, rather than a woman explaining to police how her attacker received that bullet hole right over his heart."
And, yes, some hunting weapons need to be semi-automatic. It is, for instance, recommeded that when hunting for bears, you put 3 rounds in them in quick succession if you want a clean kill. Mostly you can only do that with a semi-auto, most other actions being too slow. The bear will naturally run. You need a weapon that can operate for those 3 rounds in the bear's first couple strides, or you'll likely miss after it gets going. If you don't want the bear to make it over the next hill and get totally lost from your vision, and possibly die days later where you cannot find it, you need a semi-auto action rifle.
Somebody's screen saver bothers you? Get a life! You're not going to graduate anyway if you're so easily distracted.
And I wish I had a laptop back in the early 80's when I went to college! Take notes and save them to disk! Outstanding. Not have to carry a notebook with 5 separate sections for the 5 different classes I was taking, be able to search the text for a particular word or phrase, etc., would be outstanding. Download PDFs having to do with the subject, and have them on hand it class? Great. Maybe even scan the texbook and have it on-line, rather than lugging 30 lbs of textbooks around campus in a backpack. I just don't see much of a valid downside to having laptop / notebook computer in class.
I remember reading 10 - 15 years ago about a couple Russian scientists that said we didn't have to worry about global warming because there would be a mini ice age commencing somewhere around the year 2010. No, really... I did read that. Boy those Russkies are smart.
Should we be working on a space-based mirror system to concentrate sunlight and maybe prevent 10,000 foot thick glaciers marching down the continent all the way to Omaha? If you thought GW was going to screw up the environment, think about that. Far worse.
Or maybe a series of electric power satellites, 1000's of terawatts that would, when the waste heat is dumped into the atmoshphere, just maybe help things along to thwart the glaciers.
We may yet have to do something...
It would require too many pilots for small numbers of people. Nobody would be able to afford it unless you either make the airplanes so automated that they fly and takeoff/land themselves, or so simple to operate that they don't require more skills than operating a car. And, of course, people still screw that up so I think we'd STILL see a major bump in air transport deaths and injuries. That's fine for those that want to take the increased risk, but I don't want 'em falling into my bedroom, either. Looks kinda dead-endish to me.
Yes, but that is an _engineering_ problem, not a cause for the envirowackos to get involved and try to stop it. That's my beef - they are absolutely not satisfiable, and simply attempt to stop _everything_. They even stopped a power wire from a solar farm from crossing a mountain range to get to where the power was needed on the California coast. I'd post a link but CNN appears to have taken it down. But... its preposterous. Am I fed up? You bet.
If its being built in California, the anti-progress luddite envirowackos will either stop it, or the power wires necessary to distribute its electricity, or both. Nobody should try to build ANYTHING in California until it undergoes a serious attitude adjustment and embraces progress.
The exposure of names of allies in either Iraq or Afghanistan has a potential to get them killed, which might prove to be a chilling effect on others helping us and maybe extend our stay in either or both countries. That's major in my book.
The revelation about the nuclear material in Pakistan could result in the bad guys scoring the theft, and then it ends up in a dirty bomb in times square. That's major too.
And not in this release, but earlier I took a peek at WL, a couple years ago, and found the specs for an anti-IED jammer that we used in Iraq, which would allow the bad guys to build triggers in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that the jammer didn't cover, and thus defeat it. That's major if you're riding in a vehicle that is about to get blown up by a ton of ANFO, and you're relying on that jammer to prevent it from happening.
You bet I disagree. I volunteered for a year in Afghanistan earlier this year - my last major TDY of my career at age 63 - and although I've not been chosen _yet_, I may be, and then I'll be one of the Navy Civilian Employees that will be there for a year, attempting to aid our side / hinder the other side in a technical role, and riding around in those vehicles, so YEAH, IT SEEMS REALLY MAJOR TO ME!!!
Major damage can include the revelation of a stockpile of some nuclear material in Pakistan that may now be attacked, or stolen by the Taliban there.
Major damage is a new reluctance of foreign diplomants to trust the USA with vital information lest it become public because of this security breack.
Major damage that may occur is if there are SOME messages that do indeed reveal that this or that tribal chieftan cooperates / cooperated with US forces against the Taliban, and is then marked for elimination by the bad-guys-du-jour.
Major damage is the hard feelings incurred by frank assesments of other world leaders, which may / probably will cause them to be less cooperative after what they will likely, and rightly deem an insult.
This is a good thing, as it protects service members and civilian employees. The problem is, it is a really _bad_ thing for these folks to end up with classified documents on their computers. Just becuase WL went and released a bunch of classsified docments does not mean that they are now unclassified. They are still confidential, secret, or top secret. An employee with this sort of material on his/her hard disk could be in a lot of trouble, not to mention that the computer in question would have to be processed to positively remove the classified material. This could involve destruction of the hard disk, as simply erasing it might leave a trace of the classified material if the erase head didn't exactly track the previous path of that write head. A thin strip of classified could still remain. So, total destruction of the hard disk might be required, with obvious loss of not only the value of the disk, but possibly other material the user was working on.
Better to block these sites, and avoid the problem from the get-go. And I'm not sorry to see these site lose the traffic. Its a mild punishment for the major damage that it has done to the country, and possibly more horrific consequences to come if insurgents / Taliban find a use for some of the names that may be exposed.
As long as you have a mod category like "funny", people will compete for it.
Yep - just STOP. And wind it back about 20 years. I've been driving over 45 years, and I've never needed antilock brakes, air bags, traction control, stability control, etc. etc. The only thing that is mandated that I'd likely buy anyway is seat belts. My car would probably be $10,000 cheaper, too, than ones for sale nowday with all the mandated crap on them.
There's a simple solution to this nonsense: NEVER buy any electronics that REQUIRES jailbreaking to use it the way you want to use it. If everyone did that, they wouldn't sell any of that crap, and would change their tune in a hurry.