The other piece of blowback I'm waiting to see is when some other nation decides to incarcerate a US citizen(s), treat them like we're treating "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo, and then cite our own practices against us when we protest.
Along that line, I feel so lucky that someone on our side captured a copy of Terror's rules of engagements. How else could we have possibly known that Terror never fights on 2 fronts at the same time, thereby guaranteeing that we can, "Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." I just hope Terror doesn't choose to modify their rules of engagement without telling us first.
Dragons are merely invisible in the wavelengths visible to us. At other wavelengths they're perfectly visible... such as infrared... right before you get scorched to a crisp.
> I suppose if we can all agree to stay out of the other > guy's yard, we can get along. You do hardware, I'll do > software.:)
Wrong. I'll agree with "You do the hardware, I'll do the software," but it's important that both of you visit the other's yard frequently. From experience, there are worse things than the hardware guy throwing hardware and documentation over the wall, and going away to let the software guy do his thing. (Such as throwing the hardware over the wall with no documentation, and then leaving the company...) But not many. It's a heck of a lot better for the hardware guy to clue the software guy in during the design process, even to take feedback from him about things that can make his job easy or hard. Then the software guy should check back with the hardware guy after delivery to make sure their visions of the whole thing still mesh.
We bought The Manhole on a trip to MicroCenter in Columbus, OH. I think my son, now 22, was 4 at the time, which would have made it around 1990. At that time I probably would have been using my XT-286 with a Video7 FastWrite VGA, though it's possible that I might have traded out the motherboard for something faster by then. It seemed like I was buying a hardware upgrade a year back in those days, so I'd probably already moved from 20G to 40G, and maybe had both after upgrading the power supply. Oh yeah, running DOS.
I have "Manhole" on 5.25" disks, and would enjoy finding some way to run it on modern hardware/software, preferably under Linux. By the time I thought to try searching, the CD version had come and gone.
The "Bush is an idiot" meme is well played out, and as someone (Jon Stewart?) has said, his speeches generally sound like a book report.
But....
On NPR once I heard them covering a speech GWB gave somewhere in South America. While nowhere near the eloquence of Obama, that speech was also far better than his usual book-report style. I wonder if for some reason he's being dumbed-down by his handlers for the US audience, or was it just a different speech writer for the South American trip? If the former, I wonder what the reason is.
IMHO what's interesting and perhaps more disturbing is that the national lexicon has been subtly altered to the point where "liberal" and "leftist" are generally held as denigrating terms. Compound that with the fact that as you say, our entire political spectrum is huddled in the right half, as seen by the rest of the world.
IMHO Hillary is rather interesting as a VP possibility. The most important thing the President does is wield the bully pulpit, and I really don't think there are many, if any politicians today who speak as well and eloquently as Obama. He's the right one to hold the bully pulpit, to speak to Americans and others.
OTOH, there are also a lot of details to be handled. Much that goes on in Washington is as much about who you know as what you know. Hillary would absolutely shine at that.
Think of it as the Bush/Cheney working model, only done better, or at least more in the interest of more Americans.
> no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close
I seriously doubt that. Candidates used to be decided in smoke-filled rooms. On occasions, there were numerous ballots at the convention before settling on a candidate. For that matter, Abe Lincoln was a distant choice who became the candidate because all of the front-runners "bloodied" themselves so badly in the primaries. The entire process is much more transparent than it used to be, even including all of the super-delegate chicanery.
Perhaps a more appropriate wording might be: Since widespread media coverage, no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close.
He has established a position on a more transparent government. To make at least a beginning of making good on this, he can simply "do nothing" instead of taking extra steps to re-classify documents, or keep them classified longer than standard guidelines suggest. The current administration has been working overtime to keep things secret, and make more things secret. In this case, doing less is doing better. This is also an item that doesn't require acts of Congress, and isn't subject to that kind of gridlock. It's simple Executive operating procedures. It's also an important win for the US.
I guess it isn't so much "change" as it is "rolling back change," but I'll take it.
One other aspect about "more transparent government..." Once you install that "cloak of secrecy" at the top, it spreads down. It doesn't necessarily stay put where you wanted it. As a result, we've had quite a few disturbing revelations like Abu Ghraib as "lesser secrets" are exposed.
As BCW2 mentions, the Thresher wreckage was visited by Trieste, not that long after it happened. I remember reading about it and looking at the pictures in National Geographic magazine, as a kid. (In retrospect it seems that Picard and Trieste were National Geographic favorites, along with Cousteau.)
There weren't all that many pictures in the article, and with the limited mobility of Trieste the investigation may not have been very thorough. Perhaps they wanted more detailed investigation by Ballard. But if it was that important, it's surprising that they waited until 1985 to do the detailed checks.
The most important skill for a politician at this level is the ability to pick the right people. People who are more competent at their specializations that he is. People he can trust to deliver worthwhile information and opinions to him, including "No!" as needed. It could be said that this has been both Carter's and GWB's failing, the former for not building and trusting a sufficiently competent team, the latter for building a team of "True Believers" without enough dissent.
While the subject of the article is in no way sufficient to say that Obama is a good candidate or would be a good President, it is a necessary part of that. He is seeking competent assistance, and I didn't see "true belief" in the list of qualifications, as it was in building the Emerald City.
A few weeks back they were doing "body-count arithmetic" from the pulpit, trumping ANYTHING, including the Iraq war, with the 50e6, "children murdered by abortion." Not even commenting on abortion itself, the way this stand has been presented has taken it into the territory of, "The ends justify the means."
If we're going to use body-count arithmetic, supporting the current administration (and likely extension of its policies for another term) in hopes of overturning Roe vs Wade includes supporting the expanded use of the death penalty, the Iraq war, an increased likelihood of an Iran war, AND deliberate denial of anthropogenic effects on the life-sustaining capacity of the Earth. I'm not talking exclusively global warming, but overfishing, hive-collapse, birth-control suppression, tight-linking of fuel and food prices, etc, and we're likely to see a body-count well above 50e6 - real trillions-of-cells bodies, not just blastopods and embryos.
Nor am I saying that abortion is good, but IMHO there are worse things, and Overturning Roe Vs. Wade is not the "Pearl of Great Price" that is worth sacrificing EVERYTHING for. I like Bill Clinton's words, "Safe, but seldom."
At the basis of all of this, we've lost track of what science really is. We have far too large a tendency to confuse science with "ooh! shiny!" and other trappings of technology. (see my sig) If I wanted to sum science up in one sentence:
Be prepared to be astounded by nature and the universe, and perhaps have your beliefs overturned.
If you're not prepared to accept the latter, you're not doing science.
It was also a feature in the novel, "Doorways in the Sand" by Roger Zelazny.
SPOILER ALERT
The protagonist has an alien entity riding (mostly benignly) inside him that needed to be rotated in the 4th dimension in order to become fully functional. It's a really bizarre and fun book, so it's not worth going any further than that with isolated plot-oids.
I don't think I disagreed with what you say. I just didn't know a number to assign to the speculation. The key part here is that we have "survived" $135/bbl oil now - it has become an annoying, but permissible price. I suspect that when the speculation bubble pops, the pent-up demand in the Far East will drive the price right back into that range, very quickly.
Of course the highest dollar/MWH recipient on that chart is "refined coal", as it is on the chart on page 14 (tax relief) and page 10. The other "heavy getter" is alcohol, according to those charts.
I'd like to know how much good has come out of "refined coal", given that it has gotten so much. I seem to remember hearing in the past few months about a "clean coal" power plant getting canceled. There's also a lot of noise about the evils of using food crops for ethanol. In terms of dollar contributions, (not dollar/MWH) those two dwarf everything else combined, except low-income heating assistance. Seems to me that lobbying capability plays a role, here.
I wonder how much of that $135/bbl is true consumption supply and demand, and how much is investment supply and demand. (ie, speculation) While I would guess that a fair amount of the current price spike is speculation, as masses of money move out of the "financial instruments" of subprime mortgages and into commodities, I still think that there is a a large amount of "unrealized demand" in India and China that will fill in as speculation subsides.
In other words, I think that we're in the midst of a speculation-driven bubble. But as that bubble starts to pop, new demand will come in and keep the price from falling too far.
>the poster is right cost per watt is the measure people should be using, >conversion efficency imo is perpetrated as a marketing tool by the >traditional silicon solar companies
In other words:
Conversion efficiency is to solar panels as clock speed is to processors.
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The other piece of blowback I'm waiting to see is when some other nation decides to incarcerate a US citizen(s), treat them like we're treating "unlawful combatants" at Gitmo, and then cite our own practices against us when we protest.
Along that line, I feel so lucky that someone on our side captured a copy of Terror's rules of engagements. How else could we have possibly known that Terror never fights on 2 fronts at the same time, thereby guaranteeing that we can, "Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here." I just hope Terror doesn't choose to modify their rules of engagement without telling us first.
Dragons are merely invisible in the wavelengths visible to us. At other wavelengths they're perfectly visible...
such as infrared...
right before you get scorched to a crisp.
> I suppose if we can all agree to stay out of the other :)
> guy's yard, we can get along. You do hardware, I'll do
> software.
Wrong. I'll agree with "You do the hardware, I'll do the software," but it's important that both of you visit the other's yard frequently. From experience, there are worse things than the hardware guy throwing hardware and documentation over the wall, and going away to let the software guy do his thing. (Such as throwing the hardware over the wall with no documentation, and then leaving the company...) But not many. It's a heck of a lot better for the hardware guy to clue the software guy in during the design process, even to take feedback from him about things that can make his job easy or hard. Then the software guy should check back with the hardware guy after delivery to make sure their visions of the whole thing still mesh.
We bought The Manhole on a trip to MicroCenter in Columbus, OH. I think my son, now 22, was 4 at the time, which would have made it around 1990. At that time I probably would have been using my XT-286 with a Video7 FastWrite VGA, though it's possible that I might have traded out the motherboard for something faster by then. It seemed like I was buying a hardware upgrade a year back in those days, so I'd probably already moved from 20G to 40G, and maybe had both after upgrading the power supply. Oh yeah, running DOS.
I have "Manhole" on 5.25" disks, and would enjoy finding some way to run it on modern hardware/software, preferably under Linux. By the time I thought to try searching, the CD version had come and gone.
The "Bush is an idiot" meme is well played out, and as someone (Jon Stewart?) has said, his speeches generally sound like a book report.
But....
On NPR once I heard them covering a speech GWB gave somewhere in South America. While nowhere near the eloquence of Obama, that speech was also far better than his usual book-report style. I wonder if for some reason he's being dumbed-down by his handlers for the US audience, or was it just a different speech writer for the South American trip? If the former, I wonder what the reason is.
The US has one of the highest prison populations in the world, IIRC at something between 1% and 2%.
Clearly we're only imprisoning 1/10 of what we should, and the rest of the world should get on the stick.
> We have no "left" party in the United States.
IMHO what's interesting and perhaps more disturbing is that the national lexicon has been subtly altered to the point where "liberal" and "leftist" are generally held as denigrating terms. Compound that with the fact that as you say, our entire political spectrum is huddled in the right half, as seen by the rest of the world.
IMHO Hillary is rather interesting as a VP possibility. The most important thing the President does is wield the bully pulpit, and I really don't think there are many, if any politicians today who speak as well and eloquently as Obama. He's the right one to hold the bully pulpit, to speak to Americans and others.
OTOH, there are also a lot of details to be handled. Much that goes on in Washington is as much about who you know as what you know. Hillary would absolutely shine at that.
Think of it as the Bush/Cheney working model, only done better, or at least more in the interest of more Americans.
> no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close
I seriously doubt that. Candidates used to be decided in smoke-filled rooms. On occasions, there were numerous ballots at the convention before settling on a candidate. For that matter, Abe Lincoln was a distant choice who became the candidate because all of the front-runners "bloodied" themselves so badly in the primaries. The entire process is much more transparent than it used to be, even including all of the super-delegate chicanery.
Perhaps a more appropriate wording might be: Since widespread media coverage, no primary in the US history has the outcome ever been so close.
He has established a position on a more transparent government. To make at least a beginning of making good on this, he can simply "do nothing" instead of taking extra steps to re-classify documents, or keep them classified longer than standard guidelines suggest. The current administration has been working overtime to keep things secret, and make more things secret. In this case, doing less is doing better. This is also an item that doesn't require acts of Congress, and isn't subject to that kind of gridlock. It's simple Executive operating procedures. It's also an important win for the US.
I guess it isn't so much "change" as it is "rolling back change," but I'll take it.
One other aspect about "more transparent government..." Once you install that "cloak of secrecy" at the top, it spreads down. It doesn't necessarily stay put where you wanted it. As a result, we've had quite a few disturbing revelations like Abu Ghraib as "lesser secrets" are exposed.
Or to finish out the matrix,
It falls Beautifully...
It falls Truly...
(Some of use might prefer Truth and Beauty to Top and Bottom.)
As BCW2 mentions, the Thresher wreckage was visited by Trieste, not that long after it happened. I remember reading about it and looking at the pictures in National Geographic magazine, as a kid. (In retrospect it seems that Picard and Trieste were National Geographic favorites, along with Cousteau.)
There weren't all that many pictures in the article, and with the limited mobility of Trieste the investigation may not have been very thorough. Perhaps they wanted more detailed investigation by Ballard. But if it was that important, it's surprising that they waited until 1985 to do the detailed checks.
The most important skill for a politician at this level is the ability to pick the right people. People who are more competent at their specializations that he is. People he can trust to deliver worthwhile information and opinions to him, including "No!" as needed. It could be said that this has been both Carter's and GWB's failing, the former for not building and trusting a sufficiently competent team, the latter for building a team of "True Believers" without enough dissent.
While the subject of the article is in no way sufficient to say that Obama is a good candidate or would be a good President, it is a necessary part of that. He is seeking competent assistance, and I didn't see "true belief" in the list of qualifications, as it was in building the Emerald City.
A few weeks back they were doing "body-count arithmetic" from the pulpit, trumping ANYTHING, including the Iraq war, with the 50e6, "children murdered by abortion." Not even commenting on abortion itself, the way this stand has been presented has taken it into the territory of, "The ends justify the means."
If we're going to use body-count arithmetic, supporting the current administration (and likely extension of its policies for another term) in hopes of overturning Roe vs Wade includes supporting the expanded use of the death penalty, the Iraq war, an increased likelihood of an Iran war, AND deliberate denial of anthropogenic effects on the life-sustaining capacity of the Earth. I'm not talking exclusively global warming, but overfishing, hive-collapse, birth-control suppression, tight-linking of fuel and food prices, etc, and we're likely to see a body-count well above 50e6 - real trillions-of-cells bodies, not just blastopods and embryos.
Nor am I saying that abortion is good, but IMHO there are worse things, and Overturning Roe Vs. Wade is not the "Pearl of Great Price" that is worth sacrificing EVERYTHING for. I like Bill Clinton's words, "Safe, but seldom."
At the basis of all of this, we've lost track of what science really is. We have far too large a tendency to confuse science with "ooh! shiny!" and other trappings of technology. (see my sig) If I wanted to sum science up in one sentence:
Be prepared to be astounded by nature and the universe, and perhaps have your beliefs overturned.
If you're not prepared to accept the latter, you're not doing science.
Then nature "offers" to release a gigaton or so of methane hydrates unless the ruling is overturned.
As long as you don't have large-scale space transportation, colonies, etc, you can't beat Planet Earth.
My anti-theft devices are better - old cars, both with >100,000 miles on them. Boring too, a Taurus and a minivan. Nobody would want to steal them.
It was also a feature in the novel, "Doorways in the Sand" by Roger Zelazny.
SPOILER ALERT
The protagonist has an alien entity riding (mostly benignly) inside him that needed to be rotated in the 4th dimension in order to become fully functional. It's a really bizarre and fun book, so it's not worth going any further than that with isolated plot-oids.
Then what about the *BSD port of Mono, which is basically a re-implementation of .net?
Does Netcraft recognize/use the term doubly-dying?
I don't think I disagreed with what you say. I just didn't know a number to assign to the speculation. The key part here is that we have "survived" $135/bbl oil now - it has become an annoying, but permissible price. I suspect that when the speculation bubble pops, the pent-up demand in the Far East will drive the price right back into that range, very quickly.
Of course the highest dollar/MWH recipient on that chart is "refined coal", as it is on the chart on page 14 (tax relief) and page 10. The other "heavy getter" is alcohol, according to those charts.
I'd like to know how much good has come out of "refined coal", given that it has gotten so much. I seem to remember hearing in the past few months about a "clean coal" power plant getting canceled. There's also a lot of noise about the evils of using food crops for ethanol. In terms of dollar contributions, (not dollar/MWH) those two dwarf everything else combined, except low-income heating assistance. Seems to me that lobbying capability plays a role, here.
I wonder how much of that $135/bbl is true consumption supply and demand, and how much is investment supply and demand. (ie, speculation) While I would guess that a fair amount of the current price spike is speculation, as masses of money move out of the "financial instruments" of subprime mortgages and into commodities, I still think that there is a a large amount of "unrealized demand" in India and China that will fill in as speculation subsides.
In other words, I think that we're in the midst of a speculation-driven bubble. But as that bubble starts to pop, new demand will come in and keep the price from falling too far.
>the poster is right cost per watt is the measure people should be using,
>conversion efficency imo is perpetrated as a marketing tool by the
>traditional silicon solar companies
In other words:
Conversion efficiency is to solar panels as clock speed is to processors.