Well, if the vacuum and lack of bacteria isn't important, then maybe they could give free stone targets to shooting ranges, with the stipulation that the dust be collected and given back. All kinds of problems with that too. Bullets are probably less energetic than meteors, and maybe you need meteors of various sizes. If it turns out they actually need to reproduce the process, that sounds like a really cool machine. You'd need to have one heck of a containment system for fragments produced by rocks colliding at astronomical speeds.
Real Estate. I thought Greenland was owned by Denmark, but apparently it's autonomous now. AFAIK, nobody has surveyed the land, and even if the ice melted today it would probably be a nasty unstable place for a while, but you know some Lex Luthor type has to be smacking his lips at the prospect of an ice sheet collapse and a temperate polar climate.
It's quite abundant, and I'm sure there are some places in the Phillipines or maybe even our own Mt. St. Helens area where they've still got excess and would be happy to get rid of it. If that doesn't fit the bill, how hard is it to find rocks of the same composition as the moon, and grind them up?
Excuse me? Low risk? Astronauts killed during Apollo program, 3 during the Apollo-1 fire, right? No losses in space until the Shuttle program. 7 killed just recently. Risk doesn't make the space program exciting. If I wanted that, I'd watch NASCAR. Exploration and discovery make the space program exciting. The development of new technology required to do that is exciting. That's why we need to write off the Shuttle experiecne ASAP and get back to the Moon and then on to Mars. The problems we will have to overcome to get there will be exciting, and it can be very exciting without a single fatality.
FWIW, I'm in the gap--too young to really remember Apollo, and I don't care about the stinkin' iPod. No sealed unit appliance is terriby interesting.
People with desktops need offsite backup to preserve their data. People with web apps need onsite backup, or "othersite" backup. This is certainly one of the reasons I don't like the web app thing so much. It's no big deal for me to ZIP or tar-gzip my desktop data, and transfer it someplace. Pulling down data from some of these web apps in a standard format is less straightforward. So. These things really ought to have a "download all your data" option. Not sure what format you'd want to use. For Gmail, maybe Berkely DB format would be sufficient.
Duh. So is Intel. That's OK though, because Intel works at the wholesale level. The statement is an incomplete truth: "Apple is a consumer hardware company". Having competing consumer hardware companies for say... CD players or radios is fine. They all play standard CDs and receive standard AM/FM signals (except for the new satellite radios, which are evil).
Why is this distinction important? Because with PC hardware as an industry standard, which IBM did the inadvertant public service of allowing to escape its clutches, is what enables the FREEDOM to devlep an OS like Linux, which so many on Slashdot hold to be so bloody sacred. If the Apple business model were to prevail, if there were several incompatable PC hardware vendors vying for our attention, this has the potential to make the effort to develop something like Linux N times harder, where N is the number of hardware vendors.
I don't care what you say. This is NOT a troll. It's an important point. Mark my words, 10 years from now we could be looking back on these times as the good old days, before the clones were effectively killed by competing hardware platforms and game consoles. The open specification for IBM hardware was a happy corporate mistake, just like the simple elegance of analog AM/FM, and you can just see the corporations trying to "fix" that "flaw" in these systems.
Oh, and how is Apple's DRM 1/10th as bad? Isn't being "a little bit DRM'd" kind of like being "a little bit pregnant"?
...is that I will continue to not care about it. The whole "compete by selling different kinds of hardware" model reminds me of the 8-bit days. It was bad enough when you had to port to multiple 8-bit machines. The only thing that's worse is game consoles. You have to pick which one you want to port to, *and* you have to be a company that's big enough to pay an arm and a leg to the console company for the privelege of developing on their machine. Oh please, mr. console maker, oh please let me write software for you. I'll kiss your boots. Oh, please, pretty please.
If Apple released OS-X for commodity PC hardware and competed againts MS, then I'd start caring. Or, if they allowed Mac clones, I'd start caring. Othwerwise, they can tank and I won't shed a tear. I just don't get how everyone can hate MS so much, and look the other way at Apple's proprietary hardware and DRM.
Too bad they can't train rats to do this. They're ubiquitous in cities, they run off readily available biomass fuel, and they automaticly replace themselves when they wear out. Of course, I'm being facetious. Really, it would be nice if the robots could be programmed to kill rats too.
Yep, I'm sure this could be highly modified for civilian use. Obviously all the steps relating to the camera can be eliminated. I wonder how many passengers it could accomodate by removing the recon equipment. I imagine fuel and engine takes up almost all available space. I recall seeing a TV interview with a crew, and they remarked they were too busy to enjoy the views! Now, maybe this was because they were wrapped up making sure the pictures got taken, and didn't get shot down; but maybe the thing requires a crew of two even without that. Let's say that it can fly with just a pilot and no copilot/navigator. That leaves at least one passenger, and whatever you can squeeze in by removing the recon equipment. Two passengers? three? I don't know. I haven't run across anything that described carryig capability. A really moot point of course, since many of the original air frames are stuck in some unusual locations. One of them is wedged into the lobby of an office building, many are tourist attractions. Lots of luck convincing these locations to give up their show pieces, and then you have to buy it and refurbish it. Some of them were actually cut apart and re-assembled. Can they be safely re-assembled? Lots of questions. Probably much better off just building from scratch.
It's funny you mentioned that. Just the other day I was surfing around and came across this. Now of course, like the man says, it could be done faster; but how many executive dollars does it take to equal genuine Cold War, officer barking in your ear, do-or-die mission pressure? Nevermind the nasty chemicals and mid-air refueling procedure the thing went through (thing actually leaks fuel until the skin heats up and seals the tanks!). It's not as bad as a shuttle, of course, but still. Ouch.
Well, if you're going to pull this discussion outside the scope of improving mileage, then nevermind the gas tax. We need to discourage sprawl. Bring back residential-commercial zoning with sane limits on nasty commercial usages. Chemical plants and cement mills don't belong at the end of the block, but convenience stores do! The compartmentalized development where "officers are here, stores are there, your house is someplace else" is a nightmare. I've had this fantasy of going back to the neighborhood where I grew up, condemning everything within a block of the elementary school in the center of the development, placing 3-5 story mixed use construction there, and getting light rail there. It will rain donuts before that happens.
...is something like a Nielsen rating for mileage. Pay some people to put a black box in their car that records the mileage. For new models, you just publish the EPA "laboratory" mileage. For cars with a year or more of real-world driving, they could post "actual" mileage. One big problem however, is that you might not be able to get enough people to sign up. You need enough people to sort out the lemons (although if mileage lemons are produced, that's important to know).
Kudos to the EPA for taking this a step closer to the real world.
Now, it wouldn't carry the same weight as a controlled data-gathering or testing effort, but is anybody aware of a mileage website, where people just enter their mileage for various makes and models? Sounds like something GasBuddy could add as a feature.
I've been saying for a while now, "in order for Big Brother to be a problem, he has to care about you". While a lot of the things I've said online have been embarassing in retrospect, I haven't confessed to anything that could land me in jail, and I haven't done anything that will land me in jail. Beyond some anonymous person smirking at what an idiot they think I am, or perhaps a friend thinking I'm a bit odd, there are no real consequences to this stuff. Also, people first would have to know me, and do a lot of data mining. This would be especially complicated by the numerous handles I've used over the years, and the possibility that someone might steal my handle, and the fact that there's actually someone with my name out there too. It's not like I'm Joe Smith either. I have a fairly unusual name in real life. If you are Joe Smith, BB's job is even harder. At some point, all this information has to be processed by a human being, and if it's merely embarassing, what's the big deal?
This kind of stuff is usually only a problem if you're running for office. In the previous generation it was "did he smoke pot", well... duh! A whole bunch of them smoked pot, and then they all turn around and use it against eachother. What a bunch of dolts. Today's generation doesn't care if you're gay, or like to do it with stuffed animals, or have done drugs, etc. Good grief. In part of my city, they don't even care if you are still smoking crack, they will still elect you (I live in DC).
1. Agreed. Precedent? You can't advertise cigarettes.
2. Disagreed. Impossible to determine or regulate what should or shouldn't be developed.
2a. Agreed--the war on drugs is being fought by people who failed to learn from Prohibition.
3a. Somewhat agreed. This system lends itself to abuse in terms of determining what is and isn't a "cost of production".
4. Partially agreed. Agreed that the lawsuits must end--the purpose of the system must be to weed out doctors who are truly incompetent and a danger to the public; not to line lawyer's pockets. Disagreed that it should be a panel of physicians. There's too much danger of the fraternity members not wanting to punish eachother. The proper people for determining whether or not a doctor has an unacceptable rate of errors are actuaries--insurance company specialists who are already making these kinds of decisions, based on statistics. You don't need to be a physician to understand error rates, standard deviation, etc.
4a. Partially agreed, but you can't just arbitrarily force lower prices. Hospitals must publish one price list for all comers--no preference for any provider (see point 5, this is an inportant component to make the system work).
5. Agreed, but it has to be INSURANCE in the true sense of the word. What we have now are heavily administered BUYER'S CLUBS. In order to qualify as insurance, the plan should have A. An annual deductable considerablly higher than it is now. B. No such thing as a "network"--if the doctor is board certified, he's in your network. C. Zero paperwork at the point of service--the doctor bills you, and if the bill exceeds your deductable then, and ONLY then, you submit a claim. These are the hallmarks of an efficient INSURANCE program, as opposed to the horrible, unfair, infefficient BUYER'S CLUBS we have now.
5a. Disagreed. Too easy to skirt, and really sounds like it would just expand beurocracy and/or increase US hegemony.
6. Neither agree nor disagree. In essence, you are saying "heal the sick". We are already trying to do that.
7. Disagreed. We should get out of Iraq though--that's what's really busted our burn rate sky high. We never should have gone there.
7a. Neither agree nor disagree. Do you have any idea how many people have ridden into office saying they were going to cut government waste? It will rain donuts before this happens.
8. Disagree, unless you can come up with a reasonable definition for what constitutes a crime here.
9. Disagree. Forcing a bunch of companies with no expertise in a particular area to get involved with a specific type of research is a terrible waste of resources. What? Suddenly every drug company needs an HIV department? Either they'll be a sham, or this will drive the demand for HIV experts sky high, or simply drive firms out of the business. It's more efficient to use tax dollars to fund research carried out by companies that have voluntarily decided to specialize in this area. Even then, simply throwing money at this problem is not going to help. AIDS could be eliminated through many techniques that have nothing to do with drugs, which by improving the health and prolonging the lives of the infected, have actually lead to a rebound of infection rates in the West. I'm not saying we shouldn't treat people--it would be inhumane not to; but treatment that isn't coupled with prevention is ultimately more cruel than no treatment at all. Just ask anyone who got infected by a "healthy looking" partner who would have died years ago if there had been no treatment.
Oh come on. Everybody knows that Santa has kept up with the times. The sleigh and reindeer were used at first. At the dawn of the industrial revolution he switched most of his distribution network to rail. Hence the recurring motif of toy trains as a present--they were tchachkis(sp?) that rail executives gave ol Nic when they were competing for his business. He re-gifted a lot of them, the kids turned out to like them, and the idea got traction. The sleigh does, and continues, to make "good will" tours and show up in various random locations; but Santa contracts most of the delivery out to UPS and Fedex, and the list is maintained by a peer-reviewed volunteer staff who also maintain the "naughty or nice" database. I think it uses MySQL. Santa is up on all the latest tech. He ain't no Luddite, so sleep in heavenly peace tonight. Christmas will come.
Haha! that's so ridiculous. If I'm a terrorist I wouldn't spend years learning how to build fine mechanical time pieces. I'd... well... nevermind what I'd do. However, given our current climate of color-coded civil rights violations, it wouldn't surprise me if this hobby put me on the... wait for it... watch list. Oh.... groan. Sorry, but I tried really hard to avoid watch puns in my parent post.
I'm not interested in watch making as a profession--I've been thinking of getting into it as a hobby. I've surfed around and looked at some of the tools you need--little lathes and other specialized tools that are hard to find because it's a "dying" art. That's what makes me find it interesting--it's technology, but because it doesn't require a multi-million dollar fabrication facility, it's potentially accessable to a hobbiest. Also, time pieces can be works of art, not just tech. It's funny, I don't even like to wear a watch, but the idea of having a miniature machine-shop in my apartment appeals to me on some level. After posting this, I will probably not follow through again though... it's just another one of those things that I think would be cool.
Sorry. Car thieves who steal autos with the keys left in the ignition still go to jail. Everybody knows cars aren't there for the taking. If you see something pretty on a web site, browse back to the root page, read the TOS, and see that direct links are prohibited, you are in violation of the TOS. IANAL, but that sounds like a civil matter as opposed to criminal, but the concept is the same. An open door does not give you permission to enter my house.
Will Jar-Jar be in this? Maybe they can tell us the monolith is really just here to ignite Jupiter. Will they add CGI? As someone who lived in the Cold War era, I can tell you that a CGI Soviet Union would have been much more threatening.
During the winter months, I like to leave my laptop running on A/C at night. I get the convenience of not having to wait for it to boot up in the morning, Windows update runs, and I figure it helps with the heating in some infinitesimal ammount. My apartment is all-electric, so the heater and the A/C is probably the number one consumer. It's a small place with a fully enclosed washer/dryer. When I dry clothes, I turn the heaters off because the warm air from the dryer is filtered back into the apartment. The dryer is a fancy heater, but it only runs a little bit each week. The heaters run all night. From a thermodynamic perspective though, everything is just a fancy heater.
I think the president has less to do with the economy (but not nothing). Also, I think our economic problems are only starting to emerge; but they go back further than that. Alan Greenspan is said to have had a very close relationship with Bill Clinton. Some have argued that he was reluctant to prick the dot-com bubble and create a potential recession under Clinton--he should have raised rates much earlier. The fake wealth created by dot-com I found its way into the real estate market. Interest rates that were lowered after 911 combined to fuel the real estate bubble. That bubble being toppy, the money fled to the last refuge--commodities such as gold, signaling the weakness in the dollar we're seeing.
The Iraq war is intertwined with the economy of course, because in addition to the needless killing there is needless spending. The only reason we don't see higher inflation numbers is because non-rental housing and energy are excluded from government figures. The real rate of inflation is considerably higher than the government reported rates, and this is being reflected in currency markets and the economic policies of foreign powers who know better than to believe some government report.
GWB is not so much stupid as he is foolish; not so much lacking in IQ as he lacks EQ. He was too willing to be lead by party ideologues and "yes men". He doesn't seem to have his own philosophy. He's too much of a "company man", the "company" being the right-wing "Christian" fundamentalists in his party. He probably has slightly above average IQ, but in the presidency you want someone who is both smart and wise. You don't want a slighly above average man in there. You want a superlative person, and superlative people usually have some independant thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
which is more funny? I dunno...
Well, if the vacuum and lack of bacteria isn't important, then maybe they could give free stone targets to shooting ranges, with the stipulation that the dust be collected and given back. All kinds of problems with that too. Bullets are probably less energetic than meteors, and maybe you need meteors of various sizes. If it turns out they actually need to reproduce the process, that sounds like a really cool machine. You'd need to have one heck of a containment system for fragments produced by rocks colliding at astronomical speeds.
Real Estate. I thought Greenland was owned by Denmark, but apparently it's autonomous now. AFAIK, nobody has surveyed the land, and even if the ice melted today it would probably be a nasty unstable place for a while, but you know some Lex Luthor type has to be smacking his lips at the prospect of an ice sheet collapse and a temperate polar climate.
It's quite abundant, and I'm sure there are some places in the Phillipines or maybe even our own Mt. St. Helens area where they've still got excess and would be happy to get rid of it. If that doesn't fit the bill, how hard is it to find rocks of the same composition as the moon, and grind them up?
Excuse me? Low risk? Astronauts killed during Apollo program, 3 during the Apollo-1 fire, right? No losses in space until the Shuttle program. 7 killed just recently. Risk doesn't make the space program exciting. If I wanted that, I'd watch NASCAR. Exploration and discovery make the space program exciting. The development of new technology required to do that is exciting. That's why we need to write off the Shuttle experiecne ASAP and get back to the Moon and then on to Mars. The problems we will have to overcome to get there will be exciting, and it can be very exciting without a single fatality.
FWIW, I'm in the gap--too young to really remember Apollo, and I don't care about the stinkin' iPod. No sealed unit appliance is terriby interesting.
People with desktops need offsite backup to preserve their data. People with web apps need onsite backup, or "othersite" backup. This is certainly one of the reasons I don't like the web app thing so much. It's no big deal for me to ZIP or tar-gzip my desktop data, and transfer it someplace. Pulling down data from some of these web apps in a standard format is less straightforward. So. These things really ought to have a "download all your data" option. Not sure what format you'd want to use. For Gmail, maybe Berkely DB format would be sufficient.
As he lay dying in the gutter, the officer consoled him: "manslaughter != murder".
"Murder requires intent. That guy only meant to knock you out, maybe give you a black eye". "Oh. I feel much better", he gasped. His eyes closed.
Say it with me: "Apple is a hardware company."
Duh. So is Intel. That's OK though, because Intel works at the wholesale level. The statement is an incomplete truth: "Apple is a consumer hardware company". Having competing consumer hardware companies for say... CD players or radios is fine. They all play standard CDs and receive standard AM/FM signals (except for the new satellite radios, which are evil).
Why is this distinction important? Because with PC hardware as an industry standard, which IBM did the inadvertant public service of allowing to escape its clutches, is what enables the FREEDOM to devlep an OS like Linux, which so many on Slashdot hold to be so bloody sacred. If the Apple business model were to prevail, if there were several incompatable PC hardware vendors vying for our attention, this has the potential to make the effort to develop something like Linux N times harder, where N is the number of hardware vendors.
I don't care what you say. This is NOT a troll. It's an important point. Mark my words, 10 years from now we could be looking back on these times as the good old days, before the clones were effectively killed by competing hardware platforms and game consoles. The open specification for IBM hardware was a happy corporate mistake, just like the simple elegance of analog AM/FM, and you can just see the corporations trying to "fix" that "flaw" in these systems.
Oh, and how is Apple's DRM 1/10th as bad? Isn't being "a little bit DRM'd" kind of like being "a little bit pregnant"?
...is that I will continue to not care about it. The whole "compete by selling different kinds of hardware" model reminds me of the 8-bit days. It was bad enough when you had to port to multiple 8-bit machines. The only thing that's worse is game consoles. You have to pick which one you want to port to, *and* you have to be a company that's big enough to pay an arm and a leg to the console company for the privelege of developing on their machine. Oh please, mr. console maker, oh please let me write software for you. I'll kiss your boots. Oh, please, pretty please.
If Apple released OS-X for commodity PC hardware and competed againts MS, then I'd start caring. Or, if they allowed Mac clones, I'd start caring. Othwerwise, they can tank and I won't shed a tear. I just don't get how everyone can hate MS so much, and look the other way at Apple's proprietary hardware and DRM.
Too bad they can't train rats to do this. They're ubiquitous in cities, they run off readily available biomass fuel, and they automaticly replace themselves when they wear out. Of course, I'm being facetious. Really, it would be nice if the robots could be programmed to kill rats too.
Yep, I'm sure this could be highly modified for civilian use. Obviously all the steps relating to the camera can be eliminated. I wonder how many passengers it could accomodate by removing the recon equipment. I imagine fuel and engine takes up almost all available space. I recall seeing a TV interview with a crew, and they remarked they were too busy to enjoy the views! Now, maybe this was because they were wrapped up making sure the pictures got taken, and didn't get shot down; but maybe the thing requires a crew of two even without that. Let's say that it can fly with just a pilot and no copilot/navigator. That leaves at least one passenger, and whatever you can squeeze in by removing the recon equipment. Two passengers? three? I don't know. I haven't run across anything that described carryig capability. A really moot point of course, since many of the original air frames are stuck in some unusual locations. One of them is wedged into the lobby of an office building, many are tourist attractions. Lots of luck convincing these locations to give up their show pieces, and then you have to buy it and refurbish it. Some of them were actually cut apart and re-assembled. Can they be safely re-assembled? Lots of questions. Probably much better off just building from scratch.
It's funny you mentioned that. Just the other day I was surfing around and came across this. Now of course, like the man says, it could be done faster; but how many executive dollars does it take to equal genuine Cold War, officer barking in your ear, do-or-die mission pressure? Nevermind the nasty chemicals and mid-air refueling procedure the thing went through (thing actually leaks fuel until the skin heats up and seals the tanks!). It's not as bad as a shuttle, of course, but still. Ouch.
Well, if you're going to pull this discussion outside the scope of improving mileage, then nevermind the gas tax. We need to discourage sprawl. Bring back residential-commercial zoning with sane limits on nasty commercial usages. Chemical plants and cement mills don't belong at the end of the block, but convenience stores do! The compartmentalized development where "officers are here, stores are there, your house is someplace else" is a nightmare. I've had this fantasy of going back to the neighborhood where I grew up, condemning everything within a block of the elementary school in the center of the development, placing 3-5 story mixed use construction there, and getting light rail there. It will rain donuts before that happens.
...is something like a Nielsen rating for mileage. Pay some people to put a black box in their car that records the mileage. For new models, you just publish the EPA "laboratory" mileage. For cars with a year or more of real-world driving, they could post "actual" mileage. One big problem however, is that you might not be able to get enough people to sign up. You need enough people to sort out the lemons (although if mileage lemons are produced, that's important to know).
Kudos to the EPA for taking this a step closer to the real world.
Now, it wouldn't carry the same weight as a controlled data-gathering or testing effort, but is anybody aware of a mileage website, where people just enter their mileage for various makes and models? Sounds like something GasBuddy could add as a feature.
I've been saying for a while now, "in order for Big Brother to be a problem, he has to care about you". While a lot of the things I've said online have been embarassing in retrospect, I haven't confessed to anything that could land me in jail, and I haven't done anything that will land me in jail. Beyond some anonymous person smirking at what an idiot they think I am, or perhaps a friend thinking I'm a bit odd, there are no real consequences to this stuff. Also, people first would have to know me, and do a lot of data mining. This would be especially complicated by the numerous handles I've used over the years, and the possibility that someone might steal my handle, and the fact that there's actually someone with my name out there too. It's not like I'm Joe Smith either. I have a fairly unusual name in real life. If you are Joe Smith, BB's job is even harder. At some point, all this information has to be processed by a human being, and if it's merely embarassing, what's the big deal?
This kind of stuff is usually only a problem if you're running for office. In the previous generation it was "did he smoke pot", well... duh! A whole bunch of them smoked pot, and then they all turn around and use it against eachother. What a bunch of dolts. Today's generation doesn't care if you're gay, or like to do it with stuffed animals, or have done drugs, etc. Good grief. In part of my city, they don't even care if you are still smoking crack, they will still elect you (I live in DC).
Oh come on. Everybody knows that Santa has kept up with the times. The sleigh and reindeer were used at first. At the dawn of the industrial revolution he switched most of his distribution network to rail. Hence the recurring motif of toy trains as a present--they were tchachkis(sp?) that rail executives gave ol Nic when they were competing for his business. He re-gifted a lot of them, the kids turned out to like them, and the idea got traction. The sleigh does, and continues, to make "good will" tours and show up in various random locations; but Santa contracts most of the delivery out to UPS and Fedex, and the list is maintained by a peer-reviewed volunteer staff who also maintain the "naughty or nice" database. I think it uses MySQL. Santa is up on all the latest tech. He ain't no Luddite, so sleep in heavenly peace tonight. Christmas will come.
Oh sure, because world socialist publications are renowned for their objectivity.
Haha! that's so ridiculous. If I'm a terrorist I wouldn't spend years learning how to build fine mechanical time pieces. I'd... well... nevermind what I'd do. However, given our current climate of color-coded civil rights violations, it wouldn't surprise me if this hobby put me on the... wait for it... watch list. Oh.... groan. Sorry, but I tried really hard to avoid watch puns in my parent post.
I'm not interested in watch making as a profession--I've been thinking of getting into it as a hobby. I've surfed around and looked at some of the tools you need--little lathes and other specialized tools that are hard to find because it's a "dying" art. That's what makes me find it interesting--it's technology, but because it doesn't require a multi-million dollar fabrication facility, it's potentially accessable to a hobbiest. Also, time pieces can be works of art, not just tech. It's funny, I don't even like to wear a watch, but the idea of having a miniature machine-shop in my apartment appeals to me on some level. After posting this, I will probably not follow through again though... it's just another one of those things that I think would be cool.
Sorry. Car thieves who steal autos with the keys left in the ignition still go to jail. Everybody knows cars aren't there for the taking. If you see something pretty on a web site, browse back to the root page, read the TOS, and see that direct links are prohibited, you are in violation of the TOS. IANAL, but that sounds like a civil matter as opposed to criminal, but the concept is the same. An open door does not give you permission to enter my house.
Other than the early start and long duration, this isn't too different from the compulsory service that some countries have.
Will Jar-Jar be in this? Maybe they can tell us the monolith is really just here to ignite Jupiter. Will they add CGI? As someone who lived in the Cold War era, I can tell you that a CGI Soviet Union would have been much more threatening.
Way to go, Hollywood. I can hardly wait.
During the winter months, I like to leave my laptop running on A/C at night. I get the convenience of not having to wait for it to boot up in the morning, Windows update runs, and I figure it helps with the heating in some infinitesimal ammount. My apartment is all-electric, so the heater and the A/C is probably the number one consumer. It's a small place with a fully enclosed washer/dryer. When I dry clothes, I turn the heaters off because the warm air from the dryer is filtered back into the apartment. The dryer is a fancy heater, but it only runs a little bit each week. The heaters run all night. From a thermodynamic perspective though, everything is just a fancy heater.
I think the president has less to do with the economy (but not nothing). Also, I think our economic problems are only starting to emerge; but they go back further than that. Alan Greenspan is said to have had a very close relationship with Bill Clinton. Some have argued that he was reluctant to prick the dot-com bubble and create a potential recession under Clinton--he should have raised rates much earlier. The fake wealth created by dot-com I found its way into the real estate market. Interest rates that were lowered after 911 combined to fuel the real estate bubble. That bubble being toppy, the money fled to the last refuge--commodities such as gold, signaling the weakness in the dollar we're seeing.
The Iraq war is intertwined with the economy of course, because in addition to the needless killing there is needless spending. The only reason we don't see higher inflation numbers is because non-rental housing and energy are excluded from government figures. The real rate of inflation is considerably higher than the government reported rates, and this is being reflected in currency markets and the economic policies of foreign powers who know better than to believe some government report.
GWB is not so much stupid as he is foolish; not so much lacking in IQ as he lacks EQ. He was too willing to be lead by party ideologues and "yes men". He doesn't seem to have his own philosophy. He's too much of a "company man", the "company" being the right-wing "Christian" fundamentalists in his party. He probably has slightly above average IQ, but in the presidency you want someone who is both smart and wise. You don't want a slighly above average man in there. You want a superlative person, and superlative people usually have some independant thinking.