I could point out that before World War 2, most research in this country was privately funded; it was only during the "emergency" of the war and the following cold war that research was federalized.
Federal research was very good at getting a
man on the moon, but also very good at ensuring that
manned space exploration would only be a matter of
"flags and footprints" before the program was shut
down and limited to Low Earth Orbit. Federally run
research and the government contractors that are way too similar to old Soviet design bureaus
are also successful at keeping the price of say, putting a pound into orbit is astronomically high.
We have ways of recycling nuclear waste.
The technique is being held up by those who
want there to be a nuclear waste
problem, so they can have reasons to be
against nuclear power. Rather disingenous
if you ask me.
The neat thing is, it's
self-defeating; the more they bitch about
local energy producers, the more they're at
the mercy of nasty, undemocratic, foreign
cartels. I know many of you would rather pay
$ 40 dollar/barrel to people in the Middle East
than acknowledge that people in the energy business in the US have a right to make a living; but I wonder, why, after you actually accomplish that task, you persist in blaming anyone besides yourselves for high energy prices?
Yes, the Saudi finds are very big; it's
estimated that the recent finds just about
doubled their oil reserves.
Keep in mind, whenever you hear estimates of
Saudi oil reserves, that that's all shallow
oil deposits compared to what we have here; if they
started drilling deeper, they'd probably find much
more.
Actually, that's wrong; the world has about
the same amount of proven reserves as it did
back in the seventies, because there have been
new discoveries. There have been massive oil
finds in Saudi Arabia recently, as well as
in Venezuela and in China in Xinjiang province
(which apparently has a couple times the proven
reserves of the United States).
Although I do have commodity memory in
my iBook, apparently Apple's latest firmware
fixes change things to that a lot of commodity
memory doesn't work. Of course, maybe you'd
better let them gouge you, just to be safe...
I wish PowerCAD would come out for Linux.
I wouldn't be chained to the Mac any more.
I know what you're saying, but if the
Athlon really were like the PPC, it would run
with 10 watts. It doesn't.
I know it's probably too late for the
PPC, it probably became that way when Apple
axed the clones. But we've lost a lot of
potential because of that. I wish
I could get a desktop with a Transmeta processor.
Nice, energy efficient, no fan in the living
room I can hear from the bedroom. Oh well.
It's not that the processor sucks. It's
just that Apple has put a heck of a markup
on them, so that they make a hell of a lot
more off of them than the manufacturer does.
This is the opposite of the situation in the
PC world, where the PC builder makes much less
profit than Intel... so what should be a superior
processor architecture gets marginalized.
If you think the power companies are blacking
people out from malicious spite, you've got a
seriously distorted view of how things work; the
only reason there were so many blackouts last
year in CA were because the year before, it was
easier to defer maintenance than to have minor
blackouts, and it reached the point where the
blackouts were unavoidable. The state power board
did the equivalent of only changing the oil every
50,000 miles. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
It's a very good vehicle when you occasionally
have to haul around a great deal of junk. Like
the connections I have to go down to Amelia to
pick up tomorrow morning. Among other things.
What I probably need to do is to buy two
vehicles, one for when I don't need the carrying
capacity, and one for when I do. Do any of the
people here who got obscenely rich writing obscenely
unreadable perl code feel like making a donation?
It'll help the environment!
Moderated down as flamebait; oh well, it's
just as well, I need the extra money anyway.
Thank you very much for helping save
my job from the competition cheap nuclear would
have provided.
(Although, just between you and me, your
prejudices are ugly and damaging to the environment
no matter how much it might marginally help my
standard of living.
Why should the oil companies be mad at
you? You're eventually powering your house
with the electricity created by your gas-burning
Prius. You have met the corrupt powerplant owners,
and they are you!
Actually, the US does have about forty
cents or so of tax per gallon of gas, so the
US government could , by adjusting
the level of taxation, also provide a buffer
for the price of gas. They apparently choose
not to.
Recently I had occasion to use an old old
laptop of my Dad's (a Compaq Contura 430c); the
keyboard on it is about ten times better than the
keyboard on my iBook. Weight can't be the reason,
because they're both about the same weight.
I guess it's your right if you don't want to think of him as a liberal. But if you think Clinton was a conservative, then it really makes me wonder, why didn't any of the conservatives like him? Just because he supported the AOL/Time Warner/CNN mergers doesn't make him conservative. (Especially when you think about Time Warner).
I know it's your habit to knock Bush, but
were things really that much better when it
was a pretend liberal (Clinton) pushing things
like Carnivore and the Clipper Chip? I'd rather
have someone with a hands-off approach than
an administration that was looking into giving
the Clipper Chip Backdoors to China so they'd
have incentive to use it too... all the governments
ganging up on all the citizens?
As someone in an industry that would be in
competition with solar power satellites, from
what I know of the design of rectennas for power
generation, they would have a strong safety feature
in that the waveform characteristics on the
satellite would be created by a pilot beam sent
up from the ground. They're basically designed so
that the beam would be very wide, and locked onto
the receiving array.
For more info, check
out the usenet group sci.space.policy.
As someone in the oil industry, I resent that.
YOU people have done much to create the crisis
with YOUR belief that only opec members should be
allowed to make money in the oil business, and frankly that article of faith has done a lot of damage to our ability to fix things. (As has the behavior of the IMF in Venezuela, which really wasn't a nice way to make friends.
As for NASA, part of the problem regarding
solar power satellites is that it would require cheap launch. NASA, as I have seen over the past
twenty-one years, wants billions upon billions of dollars so they can research cheap launch, but they also very much appear to not want to be successful.
Looking at the way they mismanaged DC-X, eventually going with Lockheed's design for the X-33, which doesn't appear to have even been a good-faith effort, is kinda indicative of the problem. They went over budget 50% and are still roughly the amount of the original budget away from flying. Or were, when the program got cancelled. That much money in Roton, and we'd be able to launch solar powered satellites by now.
In a way, a lot of you don't get it.
Goldin picked twenty years because in twenty
years, people will have forgotten that Goldin
made a promise about getting to Mars and we
still aren't there yet. I remember when the
space station was supposed to be done in ten
years; I also remember when the shuttle really
was supposed to be economical.
Actually, I'd trust a randomly selected
group of Randites to be able to better run
an asteroid deflection program than today's
NASA. Their inability to accomplish anything
remotely resembling cheap launch (considering the
twin fiascos of the shuttle and X-33) really
gives me the creeps in situations like this.
The pretend-private-corporations/ cost-plus contractors
aren't making the situation any better.
Don't forget about areas of the
US where there is only one Country and Western
station, but it only really plays Country.
Or even worse, when the Country and
Western station doesn't even play Country,
but the sort of warmed-over pop you get from
Shania Twain and Faith Hill... I recently
discovered a local "Louisiana artists" station
that has a lot of local country, blues, swamp
pop, and cajun music, and it's pretty good,
in between bursts of static.
If Country Music is dead, it's Nashville
that's killed it, not rock and roll.
Slashdot Mirror
I could point out that before World War 2, most research in this country was privately funded; it was only during the "emergency" of the war and the following cold war that research was federalized.
Federal research was very good at getting a man on the moon, but also very good at ensuring that manned space exploration would only be a matter of "flags and footprints" before the program was shut down and limited to Low Earth Orbit. Federally run research and the government contractors that are way too similar to old Soviet design bureaus are also successful at keeping the price of say, putting a pound into orbit is astronomically high.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
We have ways of recycling nuclear waste. The technique is being held up by those who want there to be a nuclear waste problem, so they can have reasons to be against nuclear power. Rather disingenous if you ask me.
Ah, yet another democrat setting up a straw man.
The neat thing is, it's self-defeating; the more they bitch about local energy producers, the more they're at the mercy of nasty, undemocratic, foreign cartels. I know many of you would rather pay $ 40 dollar/barrel to people in the Middle East than acknowledge that people in the energy business in the US have a right to make a living; but I wonder, why, after you actually accomplish that task, you persist in blaming anyone besides yourselves for high energy prices?
Yes, the Saudi finds are very big; it's estimated that the recent finds just about doubled their oil reserves.
Keep in mind, whenever you hear estimates of Saudi oil reserves, that that's all shallow oil deposits compared to what we have here; if they started drilling deeper, they'd probably find much more.
Actually, that's wrong; the world has about the same amount of proven reserves as it did back in the seventies, because there have been new discoveries. There have been massive oil finds in Saudi Arabia recently, as well as in Venezuela and in China in Xinjiang province (which apparently has a couple times the proven reserves of the United States).
And the author said he didn't use p3/p4 specific benchmarks in the test. Just generic x86 stuff, which is what you get from Debian.
Although I do have commodity memory in my iBook, apparently Apple's latest firmware fixes change things to that a lot of commodity memory doesn't work. Of course, maybe you'd better let them gouge you, just to be safe...
I wish PowerCAD would come out for Linux. I wouldn't be chained to the Mac any more.
I know what you're saying, but if the Athlon really were like the PPC, it would run with 10 watts. It doesn't.
I know it's probably too late for the PPC, it probably became that way when Apple axed the clones. But we've lost a lot of potential because of that. I wish I could get a desktop with a Transmeta processor. Nice, energy efficient, no fan in the living room I can hear from the bedroom. Oh well.
It's not that the processor sucks. It's just that Apple has put a heck of a markup on them, so that they make a hell of a lot more off of them than the manufacturer does. This is the opposite of the situation in the PC world, where the PC builder makes much less profit than Intel... so what should be a superior processor architecture gets marginalized.
Thank you, Apple.
And I've been running Xfree 4.whatever on my iBook for about the past six months. Contrary to the blurb.
Whatever...
If you think the power companies are blacking people out from malicious spite, you've got a seriously distorted view of how things work; the only reason there were so many blackouts last year in CA were because the year before, it was easier to defer maintenance than to have minor blackouts, and it reached the point where the blackouts were unavoidable. The state power board did the equivalent of only changing the oil every 50,000 miles. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
It's a very good vehicle when you occasionally have to haul around a great deal of junk. Like the connections I have to go down to Amelia to pick up tomorrow morning. Among other things.
What I probably need to do is to buy two vehicles, one for when I don't need the carrying capacity, and one for when I do. Do any of the people here who got obscenely rich writing obscenely unreadable perl code feel like making a donation? It'll help the environment!
Funny how they never came up with a term for the opposite of a karma whore... someone who literally spends it?
Moderated down as flamebait; oh well, it's just as well, I need the extra money anyway. Thank you very much for helping save my job from the competition cheap nuclear would have provided.
(Although, just between you and me, your prejudices are ugly and damaging to the environment no matter how much it might marginally help my standard of living.
$16K is twice the price I paid for my '89 Suburban. Just a data point.
Why should the oil companies be mad at you? You're eventually powering your house with the electricity created by your gas-burning Prius. You have met the corrupt powerplant owners, and they are you!
Actually, the US does have about forty cents or so of tax per gallon of gas, so the US government could , by adjusting the level of taxation, also provide a buffer for the price of gas. They apparently choose not to.
Recently I had occasion to use an old old laptop of my Dad's (a Compaq Contura 430c); the keyboard on it is about ten times better than the keyboard on my iBook. Weight can't be the reason, because they're both about the same weight.
Just a data point.
I guess it's your right if you don't want to think of him as a liberal. But if you think Clinton was a conservative, then it really makes me wonder, why didn't any of the conservatives like him? Just because he supported the AOL/Time Warner/CNN mergers doesn't make him conservative. (Especially when you think about Time Warner).
I know it's your habit to knock Bush, but were things really that much better when it was a pretend liberal (Clinton) pushing things like Carnivore and the Clipper Chip? I'd rather have someone with a hands-off approach than an administration that was looking into giving the Clipper Chip Backdoors to China so they'd have incentive to use it too... all the governments ganging up on all the citizens?
As someone in an industry that would be in competition with solar power satellites, from what I know of the design of rectennas for power generation, they would have a strong safety feature in that the waveform characteristics on the satellite would be created by a pilot beam sent up from the ground. They're basically designed so that the beam would be very wide, and locked onto the receiving array.
For more info, check out the usenet group sci.space.policy.
As someone in the oil industry, I resent that. YOU people have done much to create the crisis with YOUR belief that only opec members should be allowed to make money in the oil business, and frankly that article of faith has done a lot of damage to our ability to fix things. (As has the behavior of the IMF in Venezuela, which really wasn't a nice way to make friends.
As for NASA, part of the problem regarding solar power satellites is that it would require cheap launch. NASA, as I have seen over the past twenty-one years, wants billions upon billions of dollars so they can research cheap launch, but they also very much appear to not want to be successful. Looking at the way they mismanaged DC-X, eventually going with Lockheed's design for the X-33, which doesn't appear to have even been a good-faith effort, is kinda indicative of the problem. They went over budget 50% and are still roughly the amount of the original budget away from flying. Or were, when the program got cancelled. That much money in Roton, and we'd be able to launch solar powered satellites by now.
In a way, a lot of you don't get it. Goldin picked twenty years because in twenty years, people will have forgotten that Goldin made a promise about getting to Mars and we still aren't there yet. I remember when the space station was supposed to be done in ten years; I also remember when the shuttle really was supposed to be economical.
Actually, I'd trust a randomly selected group of Randites to be able to better run an asteroid deflection program than today's NASA. Their inability to accomplish anything remotely resembling cheap launch (considering the twin fiascos of the shuttle and X-33) really gives me the creeps in situations like this. The pretend-private-corporations/ cost-plus contractors aren't making the situation any better.
Or even worse, when the Country and Western station doesn't even play Country, but the sort of warmed-over pop you get from Shania Twain and Faith Hill... I recently discovered a local "Louisiana artists" station that has a lot of local country, blues, swamp pop, and cajun music, and it's pretty good, in between bursts of static.
If Country Music is dead, it's Nashville that's killed it, not rock and roll.