I'm not sure which english you are refering to but I see no such rule that defines "at wheel" as being within some internet trolls arbitrary distance requirement. Having a motor inches from the wheel attached through a very short linkage is sufficiently close enough in my book to be considered "at the wheel".
Not entirely accurate. Motors in the wheels would mean more unsprung mass. Motors at the wheel could be mounted to the body and attached to the wheel through a jointed shaft or something.
Motors in wheels are actually currently used in locomotives, where unsprung weight isn't much of any issue. I read about a company some years ago that was experimenting with using very light weight versions of their electric locomotive motors as the rim for a cars wheels. I can't be sure but I seem to remember the motorized rim weighed in at under 20 pounds.
That depends on the implementation. Litmotors.com is actually developing an enclosed motorcycle which utilizes a gyroscope mounted under the drivers seat in order to keep the motorcycle upright, even in the case of being hit at high speed by a full size vehicle. The gyroscope is mounted in a motorized gimbal such that when the motorcycle is turning at speed the vehicle is tilted relative to the gyroscope. This of course requires a lot more complexity and computerized controls, which could fail spectacularly.
But to answer your concern specifically the flywheel could be mounted in a free floating gimbal so that the bike can move without changing the orientation of the flywheel.
And every word has been sung and every note played, blah blah blah... If nothing appeals to your tastes then I'm sorry for you as life must suck if there is nothing of interest for you. Not everything new is better and neither is all that is old.
When Netflix started out the entertainment industry figured it would be a tiny market and not anything to worry about but might work as good PR. So they allowed licensing a ton of stuff at very decent rates. When Netflix and similiar services showed that it was a very viable and lucrative market the media companies started demanding much higher fees, whether content was old or not. In fact given that they are in the business of producing new content all the time and selling that, they want to discourage consumers spending time and money watching the old content. If Netflix had their way you'd be able to watch everything online as it is cheaper to run than the DvD service. but they can't afford to continue licensing all that older content, plus new content and keep their prices at the trivially low level.
I was pretty firmly in the camp of supporting Netflix in the net nuetrality debate until recently. When you dig into the issue it is less about net nuetrality and more about Netflix always using bottom of the barrel hosting providers that aren't on an even footing with the tier 1 services. This means they are at a big disadvantage so far as peering agreements go.
Meh, once upon a time I was a downloading fiend. In recent years though as I have become more financially stable and distribution of media has improved I find that I download almost nothing. I still keep a VPN account around just in case but rarely ever use it. The only things I download now seem to be TV show episodes that I got too far behind on to catch up on through the shows website. I don't mind muting my way through commercial breaks on the official steams so as long as they I can get it through the official sites I typically do.
I started watching Breaking Bad earlier this year on Netflix. I got to the end of the available episodes and was very much looking forward to seeing the last half of the final season but it wasn't available yet. The thought occured to me that I could just go download it but the trouble of setting up the VPN and everything was just too much of a hassle when I figured the episodes would show up on Netflix sooner or later, and they did.
My Father took a few years off of work because of a no-compete clause. It took twice as long to get hired again because no one would consider hiring a guy with 25 years of experience without a BS. He finally found work as a contractor for a large non-profit, who had refused to consider his resume because of the lack of a degree. That same company had some policy about not keeping contractors for more than a couple of years. For a decade his bosses had to go round and round with the HR drones to keep him working there because finding someone willing to write and maintain assembler code for their mainframes was nearly impossible.
Witch Doctors can definitely use some ranged weapons. I don't remember which exactly but they can use ranged weapons. Most of the ranged weapons though seem to be Demon Hunter only.
Viable class builds was definitely an issue prior to the most recent patches. But honestly you have the same problem in most games like this. There is almost always some spec that is superior to all or most others and players gravitate towards them. With the 2.0 patch they changed a lot of skills and itemization, such that now there is much more variety. That said as the community gets a better handle on what is available and what works you are again seeing a few builds dominate the playing field. Although most of the time if you look into discussions about those builds you will see that the core of a build may center around 1 spender, a few defensive/utility abilities and 1 or two passives. That leaves a good bit of room for customization depending on gear choices and play style.
I think we might have played different Diablo 2's. The Diablo 2 I played had a level cap but you definitely weren't hitting it until long after you beat all the difficulty levels. The cap was 99, but somwhere in the early 90's you stopped getting experience for anything but Hell Baal kills. It took thousands of Hell Baal kills to get to 99.
The Auction House to me was a failure in that it was too easily accesible. There was tons of trading in Diablo 2 but you had to really go out of your way to do it in a meaningful way and get big benefits out of it.
I've enjoyed the torchlight games but haven't gotten nearly the same mileage out of them that I got out of the Diablo games. I think the big design decision in the Torchlight series that I couldn't stand was that spender abilities didn't benefit from leech affects and whatnot. I don't want to rely on boring generic attacks to heal and refill mana.
1 - I don't think I'm seeing any more items actually drop, in fact I'm seen a good bit of evidence to the contrary. On the upside the quality of drops is better because of the "smart loot" feature and the general revamp of items and their properties.
2 - That is the "smart loot" system which for rares has something like a 20% chance to affect an item. Legendaries seem to nearly always be smart loot drops, which in combination with the revamp of legendaries in general makes for better items.
My only complaint is the Bind on Account for all Set and Legendary drops. I don't particularily mind the loss of the AH. But not being able to trade the items that are actually very time consuming to find is very frustrating.
I can't play with clan mates and friends without looking like a jerk, because I crush the monsters in the difficulties they play on. They can't play on higher difficulty levels where I play because then they can't manage to survive by themselves for long. Neither of those is much fun. This could be solved by giving them some of the extra equipment I have stashed to bring them up closer to my level of gear, except that stuff is all BoA so no go anymore on that. I could in theory gimp myself by equiping crappier gear, but again that isn't fun for me either.
I don't really see how the height of the level cap actually matters. What I think would matter is more than just a single extra Act worth of storyline. They did some other content including a new character but it does seem pretty shallow for a $40 expansion.
Decimating predator populations is part of it. In many parts of the country though the much bigger problem is that we have created perfect habitat for animals like White Tailed Deer. Where I grew up much of the state was forrested prior to european settlement. Now though about the only land that isn't cleared and used for farming is state parks and very hilly terrain. The farmland provides an ideal habitat for the White Tailed Deer population. There are huge fields that are used to grow grains and other foods much of the year. And seperating the fields from each other are typically fencelines that have long since become over grown by trees and low shrubs. This means the Deer have all the food they could ever want during the growing seasons and plenty of shelter when they need it. Honestly if we had enough wolves to keep the deer population in control without human intervention there would be justifiable calls to cull the wolves.
An interesting factoid about the irish potato famine is that while the potato crops were failing 75% of farmland was being used for food exports. During the years of the famine Ireland was exporting ever more food, including meat and butter, to England. The Brittish actually sent troops to guard the food in case any serfs got uppity and tried to feed their children.
In the end the potato crop failure didn't cause the famine, it was just the conveinent excuse. What caused the famine was the greed of the wealthy who lobbied to keep exporting food while their workers starved to death.
Aluminun is actually used in the vaccines specifically because it illicits a response from the immune system. This is done so that the vaccine can contain less virii (whatever the plural of virus cells is). The idea is to get the immune system into gear so it'll bother fighting the relatively tiny amount of virus that is injected and create antibodies so you have long term immunity.
So Aluminum is harmful and too much of it can be bad for you. Vaccines are usually tested by themselves, which makes sense because they are looking for problems with that specific vaccine. However that is not how vaccines are ordinarily given in practice. Doctors and hospitals usually bundle the vaccines in an atempt to make sure that kids get all of them because they can't be sure when a kid will show up next if at all. I don't believe that even with 3 or 4 vaccines at once you are likely to cause real harm to a kid but by doing so many vaccinations at once the amount of aluminum being injected is far higher than it needs to be for the desired affect and if for whatever reason a child is more sensitive to the aluminum they are more likely to suffer ill affects from having such a large dose all at once.
So I'm very glad that we were able to find a pediatrician who is willing to see my kids more frequently and split the vaccines up between visits. This way our children are still vaccinated in time for school and day care but we've spread whatever risk there might be. As a side benefit my youngest seems to almost expect a shot each doctors visit and doesn't even tear up anymore when he gets one. The only vaccine we've waived is Chicken Pox, because, seriously it's the fucking chicken pox. The vaccine is hardly worthy of the name, it produces a very weak immunity, is manadatory so that insurance companies have to cover it, and requires contant boosters to have any affect at all. Meaning we are nearing the point that a whole generation will mature to adulthood without a real immunity to chickenpox, won't that be fun.
So far as aluminum in food goes I'm not sure how well it is absorbed by the digestive track. So it may be that you could consume aluminum without risk. Injecting it into the blood stream though is a completely different matter.
There is a group that has been working to improve impoverished high crime areas through urban farming in Kansas City. http://theurbanfarmingguys.com...
The idea is that it puts a shelf life on the usability of any compromised credentials. If the malicous hacker is prepared and quickly exploits those credentials then it isn't likely to help much. But from my understanding a lot of these attacks are carried out by people just looking to scoop up as many credentials as they can and then resell them to people who actually intend to do something more illegal with them. In the later case putting a shelf life on credentials can mean that by the time someone actually tries to utilize the credentials they are no longer valid.
In over a decade of working around and with TS/SCI clearance people I've never known any of them to be polygraphed. All I can think is that it varies by agency and office. From what I hear the FBI has a big hardon for using Poly's and if you are a serious applicant you'll have to pass one to get in.
I doubt it would fall afoul of the existing laws. In the Whistle Blower training we take anually there is a quiz question that has always bothered me. It seems to indicate that if someone hasn't blown the whistle yet, but you believe they might, then you are free to take action against them which is prohibited once they actually do.
I think the only standard practice for TS over S clearance is that they will very likely send people to talk to your references and vaildate work and habitation history in so far as it is possible. I've worked with a lot of TS people and never heard of any of them being subjected to a polygraph, though it is allowed for in the clearance agreement. What I do see happening on a semi regular basis is drug testing. They also pull a random sampling on a fairly constant basis for periodic review of stuff like credit history.
When I enlisted it was standard practice for every basic graduate to be given a Secrect Clearance. The only people I knew that didn't get a clearance were obvious exceptions, like the guy who was born in the US but visited relatives in Columbia every couple years since the time he was an infant. There was no way he could give them a detailed list of every association he had made in Columbia and even less of a chance that they'd be able to validate it.
We don't have the production capacity to switch to all EV's in a short time frame. But that can be fixed by building more production facilities for batteries. The rare earth minerals we need to make those batteries are actually pretty abundant and production for them has plenty of room to scale up. I don't know what the other posters anticipated timeline was but I think we could put every US driver in an EV within a decade if we actually tried and made that a goal. Not that I think it would be a sane goal.
I seem to remember reading a study somewhere that indicated our existing grid infrastructure could handle a complete switch to EV. We might need some more power generation capacity but again in some places there is lots of spare capacity and since it'll take a decade at least to get that many EV's manufactured there is plenty of time to build.
To replace every single mile driven a year we would need 1,212 Billion Kilowatts. That is including semi's and using the efficiency of a Tesla S driving at 80 mph constantly. So that is probably a relatively high estimate of how much power we would need. Last year in the USA we produced just over 4,058 Billion Kilowatts. Depending on weather and disasters affecting the grid we have between 6.5% and 18.6% spare/unused capacity during the summer months. So we definitely have the spare capacity to get started in a big way. And we could probably spool that up if there was enough demand. But until their is demand we aren't likely to see industry build up a ton of oversupply beyond what we already have.
Well we are in luck with Mammoths. There have been a number of Mammoth finds that were found with relatively intact guts. I remember one being dug up near my home when I was a child that had stomach contents and everything. That isn't to say that it gives us a complete picture but it is certainly a better situation than for something like dinosaurs. The pigeons only went extinct in the last century, so it is highly probable that their gut bacteria would resemble other modern birds.
The San Jose actually does have some light rail stations. I knew people that lived about an hour south of San Jose proper who commuted via light rail directly to a stop across a parking lot from their office.
That said the land directly around light rail stations is priced beyond premium. And very likely isn't even on the market for any price when talking about commercial property.
Why does any nation attack another? There are probably more conceivable reasons than there are people on the planet. Anyways I was speaking to a possible future scenario that a vastly reduced US military wouldn't likely be able to counter. It obviously would not work in todays reality because like you said they would be stranded and completely cut off from resupply by our navy and air force. But if our military was reduced to some special forces and a lot of trainers we'd be completely screwed.
A container ship could be modified to act as a troop carrier rather easily, and disembarkation likely wouldn't be that difficult if they prepared gang ways for combat ready troops to use. Reserve the cranes for moving off containers with vehicles and heavy weaponry. The record for loading/unloading a ship is something like 700+ containers an hour. Even if they could only do 100 containers an hour of equipment it would be far faster than the local police could handle it. If they used special forces teams or something first they could probably capture the shipping yard in the early evening and then spend five or six hours disembarking and staging before rolling out to capture a city like San Fransico. With out a standing military you would have nothing to push back with.
Actually the capturing of horseshoe crabs has been recently restricted in New Jersey and Deleware and outright banned in Sought Carolina. As it turns out this "forgettable" species provides food in the form of eggs to a number of migratory shorebirds that are in decline. The decline is partially blamed on the over fishing of the horseshoe crab.
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I'm not sure which english you are refering to but I see no such rule that defines "at wheel" as being within some internet trolls arbitrary distance requirement. Having a motor inches from the wheel attached through a very short linkage is sufficiently close enough in my book to be considered "at the wheel".
Not entirely accurate. Motors in the wheels would mean more unsprung mass. Motors at the wheel could be mounted to the body and attached to the wheel through a jointed shaft or something.
Motors in wheels are actually currently used in locomotives, where unsprung weight isn't much of any issue. I read about a company some years ago that was experimenting with using very light weight versions of their electric locomotive motors as the rim for a cars wheels. I can't be sure but I seem to remember the motorized rim weighed in at under 20 pounds.
That depends on the implementation. Litmotors.com is actually developing an enclosed motorcycle which utilizes a gyroscope mounted under the drivers seat in order to keep the motorcycle upright, even in the case of being hit at high speed by a full size vehicle. The gyroscope is mounted in a motorized gimbal such that when the motorcycle is turning at speed the vehicle is tilted relative to the gyroscope. This of course requires a lot more complexity and computerized controls, which could fail spectacularly.
But to answer your concern specifically the flywheel could be mounted in a free floating gimbal so that the bike can move without changing the orientation of the flywheel.
And every word has been sung and every note played, blah blah blah... If nothing appeals to your tastes then I'm sorry for you as life must suck if there is nothing of interest for you. Not everything new is better and neither is all that is old.
When Netflix started out the entertainment industry figured it would be a tiny market and not anything to worry about but might work as good PR. So they allowed licensing a ton of stuff at very decent rates. When Netflix and similiar services showed that it was a very viable and lucrative market the media companies started demanding much higher fees, whether content was old or not. In fact given that they are in the business of producing new content all the time and selling that, they want to discourage consumers spending time and money watching the old content. If Netflix had their way you'd be able to watch everything online as it is cheaper to run than the DvD service. but they can't afford to continue licensing all that older content, plus new content and keep their prices at the trivially low level.
I was pretty firmly in the camp of supporting Netflix in the net nuetrality debate until recently. When you dig into the issue it is less about net nuetrality and more about Netflix always using bottom of the barrel hosting providers that aren't on an even footing with the tier 1 services. This means they are at a big disadvantage so far as peering agreements go.
Meh, once upon a time I was a downloading fiend. In recent years though as I have become more financially stable and distribution of media has improved I find that I download almost nothing. I still keep a VPN account around just in case but rarely ever use it. The only things I download now seem to be TV show episodes that I got too far behind on to catch up on through the shows website. I don't mind muting my way through commercial breaks on the official steams so as long as they I can get it through the official sites I typically do.
I started watching Breaking Bad earlier this year on Netflix. I got to the end of the available episodes and was very much looking forward to seeing the last half of the final season but it wasn't available yet. The thought occured to me that I could just go download it but the trouble of setting up the VPN and everything was just too much of a hassle when I figured the episodes would show up on Netflix sooner or later, and they did.
My Father took a few years off of work because of a no-compete clause. It took twice as long to get hired again because no one would consider hiring a guy with 25 years of experience without a BS. He finally found work as a contractor for a large non-profit, who had refused to consider his resume because of the lack of a degree. That same company had some policy about not keeping contractors for more than a couple of years. For a decade his bosses had to go round and round with the HR drones to keep him working there because finding someone willing to write and maintain assembler code for their mainframes was nearly impossible.
Witch Doctors can definitely use some ranged weapons. I don't remember which exactly but they can use ranged weapons. Most of the ranged weapons though seem to be Demon Hunter only.
Viable class builds was definitely an issue prior to the most recent patches. But honestly you have the same problem in most games like this. There is almost always some spec that is superior to all or most others and players gravitate towards them. With the 2.0 patch they changed a lot of skills and itemization, such that now there is much more variety. That said as the community gets a better handle on what is available and what works you are again seeing a few builds dominate the playing field. Although most of the time if you look into discussions about those builds you will see that the core of a build may center around 1 spender, a few defensive/utility abilities and 1 or two passives. That leaves a good bit of room for customization depending on gear choices and play style.
I think we might have played different Diablo 2's. The Diablo 2 I played had a level cap but you definitely weren't hitting it until long after you beat all the difficulty levels. The cap was 99, but somwhere in the early 90's you stopped getting experience for anything but Hell Baal kills. It took thousands of Hell Baal kills to get to 99.
The Auction House to me was a failure in that it was too easily accesible. There was tons of trading in Diablo 2 but you had to really go out of your way to do it in a meaningful way and get big benefits out of it.
I've enjoyed the torchlight games but haven't gotten nearly the same mileage out of them that I got out of the Diablo games. I think the big design decision in the Torchlight series that I couldn't stand was that spender abilities didn't benefit from leech affects and whatnot. I don't want to rely on boring generic attacks to heal and refill mana.
1 - I don't think I'm seeing any more items actually drop, in fact I'm seen a good bit of evidence to the contrary. On the upside the quality of drops is better because of the "smart loot" feature and the general revamp of items and their properties.
2 - That is the "smart loot" system which for rares has something like a 20% chance to affect an item. Legendaries seem to nearly always be smart loot drops, which in combination with the revamp of legendaries in general makes for better items.
My only complaint is the Bind on Account for all Set and Legendary drops. I don't particularily mind the loss of the AH. But not being able to trade the items that are actually very time consuming to find is very frustrating.
I can't play with clan mates and friends without looking like a jerk, because I crush the monsters in the difficulties they play on. They can't play on higher difficulty levels where I play because then they can't manage to survive by themselves for long. Neither of those is much fun. This could be solved by giving them some of the extra equipment I have stashed to bring them up closer to my level of gear, except that stuff is all BoA so no go anymore on that. I could in theory gimp myself by equiping crappier gear, but again that isn't fun for me either.
I don't really see how the height of the level cap actually matters. What I think would matter is more than just a single extra Act worth of storyline. They did some other content including a new character but it does seem pretty shallow for a $40 expansion.
Decimating predator populations is part of it. In many parts of the country though the much bigger problem is that we have created perfect habitat for animals like White Tailed Deer. Where I grew up much of the state was forrested prior to european settlement. Now though about the only land that isn't cleared and used for farming is state parks and very hilly terrain. The farmland provides an ideal habitat for the White Tailed Deer population. There are huge fields that are used to grow grains and other foods much of the year. And seperating the fields from each other are typically fencelines that have long since become over grown by trees and low shrubs. This means the Deer have all the food they could ever want during the growing seasons and plenty of shelter when they need it. Honestly if we had enough wolves to keep the deer population in control without human intervention there would be justifiable calls to cull the wolves.
An interesting factoid about the irish potato famine is that while the potato crops were failing 75% of farmland was being used for food exports. During the years of the famine Ireland was exporting ever more food, including meat and butter, to England. The Brittish actually sent troops to guard the food in case any serfs got uppity and tried to feed their children.
In the end the potato crop failure didn't cause the famine, it was just the conveinent excuse. What caused the famine was the greed of the wealthy who lobbied to keep exporting food while their workers starved to death.
Aluminun is actually used in the vaccines specifically because it illicits a response from the immune system. This is done so that the vaccine can contain less virii (whatever the plural of virus cells is). The idea is to get the immune system into gear so it'll bother fighting the relatively tiny amount of virus that is injected and create antibodies so you have long term immunity.
So Aluminum is harmful and too much of it can be bad for you. Vaccines are usually tested by themselves, which makes sense because they are looking for problems with that specific vaccine. However that is not how vaccines are ordinarily given in practice. Doctors and hospitals usually bundle the vaccines in an atempt to make sure that kids get all of them because they can't be sure when a kid will show up next if at all. I don't believe that even with 3 or 4 vaccines at once you are likely to cause real harm to a kid but by doing so many vaccinations at once the amount of aluminum being injected is far higher than it needs to be for the desired affect and if for whatever reason a child is more sensitive to the aluminum they are more likely to suffer ill affects from having such a large dose all at once.
So I'm very glad that we were able to find a pediatrician who is willing to see my kids more frequently and split the vaccines up between visits. This way our children are still vaccinated in time for school and day care but we've spread whatever risk there might be. As a side benefit my youngest seems to almost expect a shot each doctors visit and doesn't even tear up anymore when he gets one. The only vaccine we've waived is Chicken Pox, because, seriously it's the fucking chicken pox. The vaccine is hardly worthy of the name, it produces a very weak immunity, is manadatory so that insurance companies have to cover it, and requires contant boosters to have any affect at all. Meaning we are nearing the point that a whole generation will mature to adulthood without a real immunity to chickenpox, won't that be fun.
So far as aluminum in food goes I'm not sure how well it is absorbed by the digestive track. So it may be that you could consume aluminum without risk. Injecting it into the blood stream though is a completely different matter.
There is a group that has been working to improve impoverished high crime areas through urban farming in Kansas City. http://theurbanfarmingguys.com...
The idea is that it puts a shelf life on the usability of any compromised credentials. If the malicous hacker is prepared and quickly exploits those credentials then it isn't likely to help much. But from my understanding a lot of these attacks are carried out by people just looking to scoop up as many credentials as they can and then resell them to people who actually intend to do something more illegal with them. In the later case putting a shelf life on credentials can mean that by the time someone actually tries to utilize the credentials they are no longer valid.
In over a decade of working around and with TS/SCI clearance people I've never known any of them to be polygraphed. All I can think is that it varies by agency and office. From what I hear the FBI has a big hardon for using Poly's and if you are a serious applicant you'll have to pass one to get in.
I doubt it would fall afoul of the existing laws. In the Whistle Blower training we take anually there is a quiz question that has always bothered me. It seems to indicate that if someone hasn't blown the whistle yet, but you believe they might, then you are free to take action against them which is prohibited once they actually do.
I think the only standard practice for TS over S clearance is that they will very likely send people to talk to your references and vaildate work and habitation history in so far as it is possible. I've worked with a lot of TS people and never heard of any of them being subjected to a polygraph, though it is allowed for in the clearance agreement. What I do see happening on a semi regular basis is drug testing. They also pull a random sampling on a fairly constant basis for periodic review of stuff like credit history.
When I enlisted it was standard practice for every basic graduate to be given a Secrect Clearance. The only people I knew that didn't get a clearance were obvious exceptions, like the guy who was born in the US but visited relatives in Columbia every couple years since the time he was an infant. There was no way he could give them a detailed list of every association he had made in Columbia and even less of a chance that they'd be able to validate it.
We don't have the production capacity to switch to all EV's in a short time frame. But that can be fixed by building more production facilities for batteries. The rare earth minerals we need to make those batteries are actually pretty abundant and production for them has plenty of room to scale up. I don't know what the other posters anticipated timeline was but I think we could put every US driver in an EV within a decade if we actually tried and made that a goal. Not that I think it would be a sane goal.
I seem to remember reading a study somewhere that indicated our existing grid infrastructure could handle a complete switch to EV. We might need some more power generation capacity but again in some places there is lots of spare capacity and since it'll take a decade at least to get that many EV's manufactured there is plenty of time to build.
To replace every single mile driven a year we would need 1,212 Billion Kilowatts. That is including semi's and using the efficiency of a Tesla S driving at 80 mph constantly. So that is probably a relatively high estimate of how much power we would need. Last year in the USA we produced just over 4,058 Billion Kilowatts. Depending on weather and disasters affecting the grid we have between 6.5% and 18.6% spare/unused capacity during the summer months. So we definitely have the spare capacity to get started in a big way. And we could probably spool that up if there was enough demand. But until their is demand we aren't likely to see industry build up a ton of oversupply beyond what we already have.
Well we are in luck with Mammoths. There have been a number of Mammoth finds that were found with relatively intact guts. I remember one being dug up near my home when I was a child that had stomach contents and everything. That isn't to say that it gives us a complete picture but it is certainly a better situation than for something like dinosaurs. The pigeons only went extinct in the last century, so it is highly probable that their gut bacteria would resemble other modern birds.
The San Jose actually does have some light rail stations. I knew people that lived about an hour south of San Jose proper who commuted via light rail directly to a stop across a parking lot from their office.
That said the land directly around light rail stations is priced beyond premium. And very likely isn't even on the market for any price when talking about commercial property.
Why does any nation attack another? There are probably more conceivable reasons than there are people on the planet. Anyways I was speaking to a possible future scenario that a vastly reduced US military wouldn't likely be able to counter. It obviously would not work in todays reality because like you said they would be stranded and completely cut off from resupply by our navy and air force. But if our military was reduced to some special forces and a lot of trainers we'd be completely screwed.
A container ship could be modified to act as a troop carrier rather easily, and disembarkation likely wouldn't be that difficult if they prepared gang ways for combat ready troops to use. Reserve the cranes for moving off containers with vehicles and heavy weaponry. The record for loading/unloading a ship is something like 700+ containers an hour. Even if they could only do 100 containers an hour of equipment it would be far faster than the local police could handle it. If they used special forces teams or something first they could probably capture the shipping yard in the early evening and then spend five or six hours disembarking and staging before rolling out to capture a city like San Fransico. With out a standing military you would have nothing to push back with.
Actually the capturing of horseshoe crabs has been recently restricted in New Jersey and Deleware and outright banned in Sought Carolina. As it turns out this "forgettable" species provides food in the form of eggs to a number of migratory shorebirds that are in decline. The decline is partially blamed on the over fishing of the horseshoe crab.