> The Russian technique of just pointing the capsule at > a wide expanse of steppe and sending out helicopters > to retrieve the crew makes a lot of sense, far cheaper.
First, you do not need a carrier battle group, just the carrier and a bunch of heavy lift helos.
Second, we have a dozen (or more - some WWII carriers were used in Project Mercury) just laying around, and they had none.
Third, they have a million square miles of steppe just laying around (some of it with nice cooling ice), and we have a lot less. Further, theirs is east to west in the long dimension, and ours is north to south.
Fourth, we have to hit the 3/4 of the Earth's surface that is water, when planning splash-down, but they have to hit their steppe, which is a fairly small fraction of the land, which is just 1/4 of the Earth's surface.
Different cost structures, you see. How much would it have cost for the USA to rent or buy all of Siberia and the less mountainous parts of the -stans from the Soviets? How much for the Soviets to rent or buy a carrier or two from, well probably from France rather than the USA, but still, how much?
For the USA, sea landings and carrier pick ups were cheaper.
We also had a better accident rate, until we started landing on land, too.
> Everyone uses Lieberman as the go-to for that.... > Lieberman is an exception, not a rule.
He is proof that it possible. TR was proof that it isn't easy.
> In PA, running as Independent after losing the primary in your party isn't legal, AFAIK.
Cite? I think I remember cases where that did occur. It may require filing as independent, as well as for a particular party, before the primary, though.
What I'm really waiting for, and I'm really amazed it didn't surface yet, is some sort of "Web 2.0 MMO". I.e. an MMO following the Web 2.0 creed, "you make the content, we make the revenue".
Minions Of Mirth lets any premium player design his/her own realm or realms, and even set up their world as its own server. There were a number of such, for a while. Gradually, they died off, because the main world was better (and professionally hosted). OTOH, the long promised upgrade was (is being?) worked upon by a group of player/volunteers, after the original two programmers decided they needed an actual income to live upon, after a few years of running the company.
The problem is that all the things needed to create an MMO are difficult to do, together. One needs to be an author able to link multiple sides together (like Tolkein except with an orc's view, as well) while being a CGI modeler, and avoid the tendency to just Monty Haul everything, since putting the game on steroids is more enjoyable for users, right up until they get sick of it (look at post-Strike Major League Baseball).
Blizzard can get it reasonably right because they have an actual company, with actual people paid actual money to get it right, and enough so that burned-outs can be replaced without killing the development team. Also, they have a decent business model and price point, especially vs. one-time-fee MMOs, so they can ride out new-player droughts.
> He's 79. Have you ever noticed politicians all want you and me to retire by 72 at the latest?
Huh? Some of them don't want to index SS with the age limit (it was originally set so high that almost no one lived to collect, but improved health and fewer World Wars screwed that for Germany, let alone this country) as that scares the near-retirement people, who think that it will apply to them. I have never heard anyone advocating collect by 72 or we reduce it. You IRA distributions have to start by 72, yes, but not retirement.
> We need to have an age limit on politicians and judges. Over > 70 and they should ALL be forced out of office.
Then vote them out, stupid. Until then, let the rest of us vote for who we wish. Or who we had to, rather than the Democrat, the last time that I voted for Specter. Yeah, "Gee, how did THAT work out?"
You mean like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs? Or Jay Rockefeller? Or George Soros?
Sorry, the hyper-rich vote with your party because nothing it can do will hurt them, and it keeps them from the riff raff of the mere multimillionaires who DIDN'T win the state lottery.
> (Originally, there was no concept of parties, but that lasted all of about five seconds.)
Oh, so the Founders were too stupid to notice than Britain had its Whig party and its Tory party, and that they differed on a lot of issues since back around the Glorious Revolution? The only difference is that Aaron Burr organized the Democratic-Republican Party as a more naked power alliance in NY, just as Tammany Hall was a naked attempt to control NYC politics.
Sorry, but your statement is like suggesting that there was no original intent that government business be mostly done in English, because it has never been made official (and because its first Capital was in a state where laws had to be published in German as well as English, before they had force of law).
> At least this way, he's being open. There's no reason > he couldn't have kept his nominal Republican status > and voted the other way.
Well, yeah, there is. He has a Republican challenger who might win the primary, if not the general, election.
Personally, I would prefer that he had replicated what Ben Nighthorse Campbell did, which meant that he had to be re-elected in a special election held the very year that he switched parties.
> Have you heard "gun control" mentioned since WE took control?
No, but I have heard "We can't do anything because the Republicans might filibuster" (emphasis: MIGHT) as the reason that they haven't done *anything* after taking it. Either as a tactic to better get out the vote or because your party in Congress are all chicken. You decide.
> Most importantly, a filibuster is not a tool of compromise.
It most certainly IS. Anything so repugnant that one side announces that it will filibuster tends to make the other side at least consider a compromise. Of course, I personally would like to SEE one, as opposed to empty threats of one causing the other side to surrender abjectly. Maybe a nice long one, with the Senator leading it going to the hospital for observation afterwards, like in the good old days (maybe even a death, like in Advice and Consent. Now THAT would prove that he/she meant it!).
> and running as an independent is almost always a ticket to Also-Ran City.
Yeah, Joe Leiberman was just crushed, when HE did it.
Running as an independent fails because it usually means that you cannot get anyone on any side of issues to vote for you. You aren't the middle, you are the Z+100 position on the X/Y plain. If he had a real Democratic opponent in the primary, he would lose that, too. Instead, he is promised a clear shot if he switches, regardless of what the would-have-been candidate wanted (rather like Hillary Clinton's primary opponent, when she ran for the Senate).
> This would all be moot if PA, like most states, had open > primaries where registered dems and indies could vote in > the GOP primary if they chose to do so.
Whereas, to shift one's party registration, now, requires sacrificing your first-born to Ba'al, and reversing your circumcision status? Come on, switching parties is less work than Henry IV's "Paris is worth a Mass." They have the forms in every government office, and they process them quite quickly.
It would be all moot if the uninvolved middle would get interested enough to register for one party or the other and actually vote in the primaries, at all. That has led to both parties pandering to their extremes.
Then maybe you should stop buying those glossy magazines by the grocery checkout that claim to be news. I see very little gossip about celebrities in the Wall Street Journal, nor (barring the Clintons, back in Bill's term) in either of my home town newspapers (barring the Sunday "Get Them To Look At These Ads" magazine inserts).
And, of course, the GP neglected that how it really works in the UK is that they have an attractive woman showing her breasts on page 2 or 3, and THAT is what sells newspapers. Well, it beats the funny pages, I guess:-)
> He *IS* saying that you shouldn't use a dry cleaner; that you should dry clean at home.
More like, if you cannot dry clean at home, or somewhere that will let you in the back to check out the process, then you should not use a dry cleaner, because then there is no way to escape from Smalley's Dry Cleaners (or whichever your local dry cleaner is).
My guess is that he would be against laws restricting the right to grow one's own fruits and vegetables, and probably against anything (like purchased hybrid seeds) that a farmer could not grow another crop from, after the first.
No, it is based on criminal penalties against those who try to abuse its trust.
Your local grocery store trusts that your check won't bounce,
No, they trust that if it does, they can still get the money, if it exists, and if not they can get you sent to jail where you learn the dangers of check kiting to the forger.
and they trust that when they take the check to the store it won't be fake, and that the bank will process it correctly and deposit the appropriate amount in their bank account. You trust that your bank will debit the appropriate amount from your checking account.
Again, every step in this process is surrounded by criminal penalties for deliberate violations, as well as civil recourse for small and/or accidental ones. It is only the fact that they can repossess the car that allows auto loans; if there were no such ability no one would loan except to their best friends, or those that they outgunned. Thus, the mortgage market has dried up because housing prices have fallen to the extent that banks cannot guarantee that they will get their money if they repossess your house.
> but he's ignoring the fact that many of these > computation-as-service frameworks are built on open source.
But if they are not open source, themselves, you run into the same problem as proprietary software compiled with gcc. Now, that may be good enough for you (or me, or company X) but it is not for him. Actually, even if they have open sourced something that looks like their software, how can one be sure that they run it, and not an evil variant (for various levels and descriptions of evil)?
And, he may be right, over a long term. Just because Google has been able to waste money on the Google Apps in the hopes of getting eyes for its ads (the real customers are the ad companies and their clients, not you) does not mean that they will not decide to shut them down in this or the next advertising drought, or the one after that, if they start to go GM on us. Especially when the SaaS is not part of a contract between supplier (Google, in the example) and user (you, me, a company going cheap, etc), there is no way to prevent them from doing whatever they want to do.
Now, I am willing to take that risk to some extent (Gmail and Yahoo, although I cannot get my TV schedule to work well from Yahoo any more), others to a larger extent, but he would just as soon run his own silicon foundry if he could, to guarantee what comes out. In this, his concerns are similar to that of government X using products from government Y, if X and Y are in some sort of conflict. For example, supposedly the USA bugged printers delivered to Iraq, before Gulf War I, to give a radio beacon to guide bombing missions of government offices. Likewise, there have been questions, here, about the wisdom of the US DoD depending on computers built in, or with parts from, the PRC, in the case where they decide to take Taiwan.
> So we may see new movies with Bogart, Wayne, Hepburn, Garbo and many others.
They already did this with Laurence Olivier in the otherwise-forgettable Something Something and the Something Something, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but it really was that forgettable, just as The Last Starfighter would have been, despite the best CGI available at the time, without Robert Preston).
And, as my parenthetical indicates, you may get Katherine Hepburn's body, but you will get someone else's acting.
They did succeed in establishing a much cheaper printing industry (and religious freedom) in the areas that they conquered. But the eastern printing technology was embargoed in western Europe, and it took several more centuries for it to be developed by Gutenberg et al in the 1400s.
Which is why Freedom of the Press originated in Russia, and only spread west in later centuries. Printing was first done in Russia, and only later copied by that German, Gutenburg. And, of course, the airplane was invented in Russia, too. While you think on this, could you please direct me to your nuclear wessels?
-- History, as claimed by Pavel Chekov
Of course, the idea that the Mongols were invaders was silly, and those pyramids of skulls were just an art project, and exterminating the populace of any city that offered any resistance was just performance art.
And if she doesn't know it, your mother-in-law does:-)
The comment could be in jest or not. During big arguments, you might well hear it. The trick is to get around that, or find a way to prove that you are not a drag (this is where make-up sex comes in).
"The reason why we can't do this separation is because we don't want to encourage rogue nations like Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons."
And they are developing their own uranium refining capacity anyway, making the restriction moot.
> (I did the math; assuming 5% APR, which nobody gets anymore, > you'd have to be doing about $550,000 in daily deposits to > make back the $75/month.)
You forget not having to pay for someone to securely schlep the checks to the bank, once or more a day. At minimum wage, and a 20-30 minute round trip each day, it would become a bit more economical.
But, yes, this sounds like the bank is drinking its own kool-aid, on the scanner rate, unless they are supplying a very nice scanner.
> It's not your Italian-American bookie now. > It's the tagger in the 'hood, that sells you pot, coke > and rock, plus a trick with his favorite hooked-up girl, > who does it to get high.
And who gets his product from a Russian, Columbian, or Asian mobster, as opposed to a Sicilian/Neapolitan mobster or a Jewish mobster, like in the good old days.
Ending Prohibition absolutely killed the income of the Mob, NOT! The "We're bigger than General Motors" quote was from the 1950s, before they were really into selling drugs (with its vast revenue stream). All that Prohibition did was kill off the mobsters who couldn't shift out of alcohol or become "respectable" bar owners or liquor wholesalers. The Chicago Mob just became quiet, like the mobsters in every other major city had long been, not because of a lack of money, but because Frank Nitti and later Capone successors succeeded in consolidating the city under one group, rather than the several that had once existed.
> Again, contraband will always be in demand.
And if it isn't, something else will be found, like kidnapping, just as privateers became pirates, rather than going back to supplying beef jerky for passing ships. These people are not willing to become ordinary "chumps" like Wall Street brokers or bank financial products specialists or bond salesman, even if the latter group made far more money.
> Now that Obama has given the order to shoot pirates...
Be glad. It used to be that they were hanged below the high tide line and left to rot. And the hangmen usually did NOT go for the clean break, as it was less of an object lesson. Shooting is MUCH more humane.
Slashdot Mirror
> but apart from that his style just doesn't warrant a parody.
SNL disagreed, even though they probably agreed with much that he says.
Clearly, they are better comedians than you.
> The Russian technique of just pointing the capsule at
> a wide expanse of steppe and sending out helicopters
> to retrieve the crew makes a lot of sense, far cheaper.
First, you do not need a carrier battle group, just the carrier and a bunch of heavy lift helos.
Second, we have a dozen (or more - some WWII carriers were used in Project Mercury) just laying around, and they had none.
Third, they have a million square miles of steppe just laying around (some of it with nice cooling ice), and we have a lot less. Further, theirs is east to west in the long dimension, and ours is north to south.
Fourth, we have to hit the 3/4 of the Earth's surface that is water, when planning splash-down, but they have to hit their steppe, which is a fairly small fraction of the land, which is just 1/4 of the Earth's surface.
Different cost structures, you see. How much would it have cost for the USA to rent or buy all of Siberia and the less mountainous parts of the -stans from the Soviets? How much for the Soviets to rent or buy a carrier or two from, well probably from France rather than the USA, but still, how much?
For the USA, sea landings and carrier pick ups were cheaper.
We also had a better accident rate, until we started landing on land, too.
> Everyone uses Lieberman as the go-to for that. ...
> Lieberman is an exception, not a rule.
He is proof that it possible. TR was proof that it isn't easy.
> In PA, running as Independent after losing the primary in your party isn't legal, AFAIK.
Cite? I think I remember cases where that did occur. It may require filing as independent, as well as for a particular party, before the primary, though.
Minions Of Mirth lets any premium player design his/her own realm or realms, and even set up their world as its own server. There were a number of such, for a while. Gradually, they died off, because the main world was better (and professionally hosted). OTOH, the long promised upgrade was (is being?) worked upon by a group of player/volunteers, after the original two programmers decided they needed an actual income to live upon, after a few years of running the company.
The problem is that all the things needed to create an MMO are difficult to do, together. One needs to be an author able to link multiple sides together (like Tolkein except with an orc's view, as well) while being a CGI modeler, and avoid the tendency to just Monty Haul everything, since putting the game on steroids is more enjoyable for users, right up until they get sick of it (look at post-Strike Major League Baseball).
Blizzard can get it reasonably right because they have an actual company, with actual people paid actual money to get it right, and enough so that burned-outs can be replaced without killing the development team. Also, they have a decent business model and price point, especially vs. one-time-fee MMOs, so they can ride out new-player droughts.
> He's 79. Have you ever noticed politicians all want you and me to retire by 72 at the latest?
Huh? Some of them don't want to index SS with the age limit (it was originally set so high that almost no one lived to collect, but improved health and fewer World Wars screwed that for Germany, let alone this country) as that scares the near-retirement people, who think that it will apply to them. I have never heard anyone advocating collect by 72 or we reduce it. You IRA distributions have to start by 72, yes, but not retirement.
> We need to have an age limit on politicians and judges. Over
> 70 and they should ALL be forced out of office.
Then vote them out, stupid. Until then, let the rest of us vote for who we wish. Or who we had to, rather than the Democrat, the last time that I voted for Specter. Yeah, "Gee, how did THAT work out?"
> and until all of the hyper rich decide
You mean like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs? Or Jay Rockefeller? Or George Soros?
Sorry, the hyper-rich vote with your party because nothing it can do will hurt them, and it keeps them from the riff raff of the mere multimillionaires who DIDN'T win the state lottery.
> (Originally, there was no concept of parties, but that lasted all of about five seconds.)
Oh, so the Founders were too stupid to notice than Britain had its Whig party and its Tory party, and that they differed on a lot of issues since back around the Glorious Revolution? The only difference is that Aaron Burr organized the Democratic-Republican Party as a more naked power alliance in NY, just as Tammany Hall was a naked attempt to control NYC politics.
Sorry, but your statement is like suggesting that there was no original intent that government business be mostly done in English, because it has never been made official (and because its first Capital was in a state where laws had to be published in German as well as English, before they had force of law).
> At least this way, he's being open. There's no reason
> he couldn't have kept his nominal Republican status
> and voted the other way.
Well, yeah, there is. He has a Republican challenger who might win the primary, if not the general, election.
Personally, I would prefer that he had replicated what Ben Nighthorse Campbell did, which meant that he had to be re-elected in a special election held the very year that he switched parties.
> Have you heard "gun control" mentioned since WE took control?
No, but I have heard "We can't do anything because the Republicans might filibuster" (emphasis: MIGHT) as the reason that they haven't done *anything* after taking it. Either as a tactic to better get out the vote or because your party in Congress are all chicken. You decide.
> Most importantly, a filibuster is not a tool of compromise.
It most certainly IS. Anything so repugnant that one side announces that it will filibuster tends to make the other side at least consider a compromise. Of course, I personally would like to SEE one, as opposed to empty threats of one causing the other side to surrender abjectly. Maybe a nice long one, with the Senator leading it going to the hospital for observation afterwards, like in the good old days (maybe even a death, like in Advice and Consent. Now THAT would prove that he/she meant it!).
> and running as an independent is almost always a ticket to Also-Ran City.
Yeah, Joe Leiberman was just crushed, when HE did it.
Running as an independent fails because it usually means that you cannot get anyone on any side of issues to vote for you. You aren't the middle, you are the Z+100 position on the X/Y plain. If he had a real Democratic opponent in the primary, he would lose that, too. Instead, he is promised a clear shot if he switches, regardless of what the would-have-been candidate wanted (rather like Hillary Clinton's primary opponent, when she ran for the Senate).
> This would all be moot if PA, like most states, had open
> primaries where registered dems and indies could vote in
> the GOP primary if they chose to do so.
Whereas, to shift one's party registration, now, requires sacrificing your first-born to Ba'al, and reversing your circumcision status? Come on, switching parties is less work than Henry IV's "Paris is worth a Mass." They have the forms in every government office, and they process them quite quickly.
It would be all moot if the uninvolved middle would get interested enough to register for one party or the other and actually vote in the primaries, at all. That has led to both parties pandering to their extremes.
> Yet another alternative: republicans may be less able
> to pretend that you don't have to compromise in politics.
Because now the Democrats will not have to compromise on anything?
Yeah, that will prove that compromise is really necessary.
> No, it's pretty much the same here.
Then maybe you should stop buying those glossy magazines by the grocery checkout that claim to be news. I see very little gossip about celebrities in the Wall Street Journal, nor (barring the Clintons, back in Bill's term) in either of my home town newspapers (barring the Sunday "Get Them To Look At These Ads" magazine inserts).
And, of course, the GP neglected that how it really works in the UK is that they have an attractive woman showing her breasts on page 2 or 3, and THAT is what sells newspapers. Well, it beats the funny pages, I guess :-)
> He *IS* saying that you shouldn't use a dry cleaner; that you should dry clean at home.
More like, if you cannot dry clean at home, or somewhere that will let you in the back to check out the process, then you should not use a dry cleaner, because then there is no way to escape from Smalley's Dry Cleaners (or whichever your local dry cleaner is).
My guess is that he would be against laws restricting the right to grow one's own fruits and vegetables, and probably against anything (like purchased hybrid seeds) that a farmer could not grow another crop from, after the first.
No, it is based on criminal penalties against those who try to abuse its trust.
No, they trust that if it does, they can still get the money, if it exists, and if not they can get you sent to jail where you learn the dangers of check kiting to the forger.
Again, every step in this process is surrounded by criminal penalties for deliberate violations, as well as civil recourse for small and/or accidental ones. It is only the fact that they can repossess the car that allows auto loans; if there were no such ability no one would loan except to their best friends, or those that they outgunned. Thus, the mortgage market has dried up because housing prices have fallen to the extent that banks cannot guarantee that they will get their money if they repossess your house.
> but he's ignoring the fact that many of these
> computation-as-service frameworks are built on open source.
But if they are not open source, themselves, you run into the same problem as proprietary software compiled with gcc. Now, that may be good enough for you (or me, or company X) but it is not for him. Actually, even if they have open sourced something that looks like their software, how can one be sure that they run it, and not an evil variant (for various levels and descriptions of evil)?
And, he may be right, over a long term. Just because Google has been able to waste money on the Google Apps in the hopes of getting eyes for its ads (the real customers are the ad companies and their clients, not you) does not mean that they will not decide to shut them down in this or the next advertising drought, or the one after that, if they start to go GM on us. Especially when the SaaS is not part of a contract between supplier (Google, in the example) and user (you, me, a company going cheap, etc), there is no way to prevent them from doing whatever they want to do.
Now, I am willing to take that risk to some extent (Gmail and Yahoo, although I cannot get my TV schedule to work well from Yahoo any more), others to a larger extent, but he would just as soon run his own silicon foundry if he could, to guarantee what comes out. In this, his concerns are similar to that of government X using products from government Y, if X and Y are in some sort of conflict. For example, supposedly the USA bugged printers delivered to Iraq, before Gulf War I, to give a radio beacon to guide bombing missions of government offices. Likewise, there have been questions, here, about the wisdom of the US DoD depending on computers built in, or with parts from, the PRC, in the case where they decide to take Taiwan.
> So we may see new movies with Bogart, Wayne, Hepburn, Garbo and many others.
They already did this with Laurence Olivier in the otherwise-forgettable Something Something and the Something Something, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but it really was that forgettable, just as The Last Starfighter would have been, despite the best CGI available at the time, without Robert Preston).
And, as my parenthetical indicates, you may get Katherine Hepburn's body, but you will get someone else's acting.
Which is why Freedom of the Press originated in Russia, and only spread west in later centuries. Printing was first done in Russia, and only later copied by that German, Gutenburg. And, of course, the airplane was invented in Russia, too. While you think on this, could you please direct me to your nuclear wessels?
-- History, as claimed by Pavel Chekov
Of course, the idea that the Mongols were invaders was silly, and those pyramids of skulls were just an art project, and exterminating the populace of any city that offered any resistance was just performance art.
And if she doesn't know it, your mother-in-law does :-)
The comment could be in jest or not. During big arguments, you might well hear it. The trick is to get around that, or find a way to prove that you are not a drag (this is where make-up sex comes in).
Yeah, me giving marital advice :-)
> and no women actually make MORE money than their partners.
If she does (over a long term) then clearly, she should have traded up. And, odds are, she knows it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel))
A bit too obscure. Perhaps a name that we can lookup?
To be fair, that was sarcasm, not humor.
> (I did the math; assuming 5% APR, which nobody gets anymore,
> you'd have to be doing about $550,000 in daily deposits to
> make back the $75/month.)
You forget not having to pay for someone to securely schlep the checks to the bank, once or more a day. At minimum wage, and a 20-30 minute round trip each day, it would become a bit more economical.
But, yes, this sounds like the bank is drinking its own kool-aid, on the scanner rate, unless they are supplying a very nice scanner.
> It's not your Italian-American bookie now.
> It's the tagger in the 'hood, that sells you pot, coke
> and rock, plus a trick with his favorite hooked-up girl,
> who does it to get high.
And who gets his product from a Russian, Columbian, or Asian mobster, as opposed to a Sicilian/Neapolitan mobster or a Jewish mobster, like in the good old days.
Ending Prohibition absolutely killed the income of the Mob, NOT! The "We're bigger than General Motors" quote was from the 1950s, before they were really into selling drugs (with its vast revenue stream). All that Prohibition did was kill off the mobsters who couldn't shift out of alcohol or become "respectable" bar owners or liquor wholesalers. The Chicago Mob just became quiet, like the mobsters in every other major city had long been, not because of a lack of money, but because Frank Nitti and later Capone successors succeeded in consolidating the city under one group, rather than the several that had once existed.
> Again, contraband will always be in demand.
And if it isn't, something else will be found, like kidnapping, just as privateers became pirates, rather than going back to supplying beef jerky for passing ships. These people are not willing to become ordinary "chumps" like Wall Street brokers or bank financial products specialists or bond salesman, even if the latter group made far more money.
> Now that Obama has given the order to shoot pirates...
Be glad. It used to be that they were hanged below the high tide line and left to rot. And the hangmen usually did NOT go for the clean break, as it was less of an object lesson. Shooting is MUCH more humane.