If you want to say that you're stupid, you don't need to use all those words. You can just say "I'm stupid" and save us all that reading.
Uh stupid? Your guys (the Democrats) are inventing all sorts of novel ways to blow the presidential election. All you had to do was put up Al Gore, and walk into the white house. But instead, we Republicans got to enjoy a year of Democrats milking their rich wall street and hollywood donors for hundreds of millions of dollars so they can beat each other up, all to give us Barrack Hussein Obama.
Look, I'm an old, angry, Republican, and not one of these tree hugging types, but I think Greenpeace has a really good point.
I mean, check this out. When I was a kid, TV's were put into wooden cabinets. Steel was used for a lot of structural things. Plastic was considered cheap and the knock on Japan was that it was all "cheap plastic stuff".
Well, fast forward almost 40 years later and what do we find. Plastic stuff is really not all that recyclable, it comes from petroleum, so, when it really boils down to it, plastic actually really does suck as much as the old timers said that it did.
Why can't they make a video game enclosure or a computer enclosure out of some kind of wood? Or, make controllers out of some kind of steel? Wood is at least renewable and steel is the most recycled thing there is. It just seems to be madness to be making more plastic junk out there when we already have mountains of this stuff.
I'm sure a lot of environmentalists might be appalled, but, why are we trying to bring back or defend large predator species? Tigers eat people or eat things that people could eat, and they are faster and stronger than any naked man. Same can be said for lions, cheetahs, bears, gorillas, and more. We don't need -any- of these animals to be running around in any place except for on TV. It's just too dangerous!:-)
"we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.â
This post is so misguided and full of utter bullshit it isn't even funny. I'd like to see any figures to back up the nuclear claim, that is pure fabrication.
No, actually, I think you've been reading too much "moveon".
The war in Iraq has the LEAST amount of popular support now than it ever has, so your claim that "Americans are not against it" now are just ludicrous
That was a typo. I meant to write "now" rather than "not".
And the Democrats aren't out to screw the Iraqis because they are "arabs".
Well, actually, yes they are. I mean, the whole argument against a nation building project in Iraq was that arabs are too screwd up to have a democracy. And now, the criticism of the occupation is essentially that, its not worth Americans to save arabs from themselves. Why else the "Iraqi government performance targets"? Militarily, Al Qaeda is defeated, and now the militias are being defeated, its really only the process of national reconciliation that's left to do.
(well, unless you back McCain's "100 year war" plan) pissing off all the other Middle Eastern nations
Ah, now a few distortions of your own! Fancy that. McCain's comments described a situation in Iraq similar to that in Europe. Now honestly, I think the USA should withdraw all troops from everywhere and let Europe and Asia fend for themselves militarily, but, there's plenty of liberals who would argue that we need to stay committed to the defense of So. Korea and Europe in the interests of non-proliferation. Where do you stand?
That and not encouraging any young Muslims to become extreme radicals bent on doing harm to America.
Ah, appeasement. You know, if, after a decade of trying to make the Arabs happy, via saving muslims in Kosovo, working to a Palestian state, saving earthquake victims in Iran, gives us arabs happy enough to give us the USS Cole, the first WTC bombing, then 9/11, then, I'm not sure I really even care about whether or not they are happy any more. With that said, I would point out that right now, with oil prices at $120/bbl, the arabs ought to be pretty happy, and if you go and put Obama in, and he jacks up the dollar to drive down the price of oil, not only will he screw his own environmentalist followers, but he'll also condemn millions of arabs to poverty where right now they are becoming middle class. You tell me what will pisses them off more? If I was an Arab, I'd think Bush should be a Saint.
You sir, are either a republican mouthpiece out to badmouth the Democratic party, or a complete ignoramus who has no idea what is really going on in the US. (I would guess the latter.)
There's no need to badmouth the Democratic Party! They are the party for uniting every American except for that small smattering of people that work for oil companies, coal mines, and car companies, make over $100,000 a year, own guns or go to church.
Otherwise, I might as well state that all Americans are pro-war, and that they all wanted Afghanistan and Iraq to be bombarded.
Americans were pro-war in the immediate days after 9/11. Some polls taken just after the attacked suggested that the American people would have supported the use of nuclear weapons against the entire middle east by a margin of nearly 2-1. Viewed in that context, Bush's invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq were restrained compared to what the country was willing to support. Indeed, Democrats took a beating in the 2002 elections largely because of their perceived pacifist stance, and it was this beating that lead them to give Bush a legal blank check on Iraq.
Of course, now that the war is approaching a trillion dollars and 4500 lives in cost, Americans are not against it. But, had Bush immediately brought home the troops from Iraq and left them to flounder in self ruin, he would have been hailed as a conquering hero. Indeed, the popular undercurrent of anti-war support among the Democrats is that the Iraqi people are not worth helping because they are arabs, therefor, we should withdraw and let them kill each other, as it still works out pretty good for us.
Indeed. Perhaps there should be a meme according to which the Jews are ridiculed for surrendering and letting themselves be herded off to camps, instead of nobly fighting to the death on their doorsteps as they ought to have? No, I didn't think so.
Actually, the Jews didn't surrender as much as they were lied to. In the one case where the Jews were aware of their fate, they actually did fight and die almost to a man before being herded off to concentration camps. Do read about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, before you make that claim! Indeed, I think the Warsaw ghetto withstood the Nazi assault all by itself for longer than Paris.
The real reason we hear Americans (and only Americans) making these bigoted comments is because Jacques Chirac used the UN veto against an attack on Iraq, thus making the subsequent invasion a war crime under the Nuremberg Principles.
The UN didn't veto anything and the Nuremberg principals were about waging a war for the purposes of a genocide.
The fact that Chirac has now been proven quite right, with WMDs and suchlike now known to be a pack of lies, does not seem to embarrass the bigots at all.
Saddam Hussein admitted that he would have reconstituted his arms programs as soon as the sanctions were lifting. So, even though he may not have had no WMD, he had them before, and would have gotten them again.
Americans are taught History in college as well. In addition, the open American economy, free of censorship, (unlike Germany) gives us an excellent view of all sides of the war.
France was not "taken over" in both world war, only 1. The "great war" the trench/battle limit went back and forth north of France, but nobody took over France.
A good portion of France was actually taken over during World War I. Likely, if it had not been for the timely assistance of their British allies, Paris would not have survived the initial German advances of 1914, just as Paris did not escape the disaster of the previous Franco-Prussian war.
For the second war, what did you expect them ? To die like a single man ? Are you for real ? Are you for real ? You are aware that "die in honor" is an outdated previous century concept, and all modern commander would accept surrendering ?
The British were prepared to do exactly that, and if you had had some history yourself, you might have noticed the Russians did -exactly- that.
There was no cowardiness shown by france during WW2,
So why did they hang Petain then? See, that's the thing, is that DeGaulle did NOT want to surrender despite the initial German successes. At the time of the surrender, the French actually had suffered one huge disaster with an army in Belgium and was well on the way to losing Paris, but, a number of other French units were certainly available and a line of battle could have been drawn around perhaps Southern France.
I invite you to read, though, Lord Alan Brooke's accounts of the war. He describes in vivid detail the state of the French army prior to World War II and during its opening stages (the so-called "Phoney War"). He describes French morale as low, the soldiers didn't even shave, didn't keep their weapons properly cleaned, didn't have any sort of cohesive unit discipline and when they showed up on the battlefield, except for those units under DeGaulle and one or two French commanders, they quickly broke ranks and booked.
. Jeez and I bet you will be one of the first to complain that french give you the finger.
The French have been giving the USA the finger for 200 years ever since we stiffed them after they bailed us out in our Revolutionary War, and they will probably be giving us the finger for another 200 years. But as long as they keep the Chardonnay and pastries coming we will always love the French. If the French were actually nice, well, it would be the end of the world, I'm sure.
Yep. 50 years of engineering on diesel/electric locomotives
For locomotives, yes, but, if you throw in submarines, hybrids are positively ancient! Actually, you need to go back more than 100 years!
John Holland build a gasoline / electric submarine for the US Navy in 1900. In a sense, the USS Holland is considered to be the first practical submarine for military purposes largely because of its innovative hybrid drive train. Designers would quickly switch from gasoline to diesel motors largely because gasoline fumes underwater were not cool.
Well, first, global warming was a scientific exploration of the relationship between climate and weather via the development of some butt ugly FORTRAN code. Then, it was something everyone had to be aware, then it became an orthodoxy. Now all of a sudden, fat people are worse because of global warming, and of course, its only a matter of time until movie makers, lawyers, or any other profession is under assault in some way, because of global warming. Just imagine how many union jobs, hanging on because cost was the driver, will be packed up and shipped to a non-CO2 country, because all of a sudden, its not just about cost, its about saving the planet...
BTW, I'm not saying that a hydrogen economy is a good idea. I am saying that if we were to try it, locomotives would be a better beneficiary than automobiles.
I've thought that myself. I mean, we talk about hybrid cars as if they are something new, but diesel trains have been hybrids now for quite a long time. The diesel serves to run a generator which drives traction motors. So, within that stack, we could replace the diesel engine with a fuel cell, and it ought to work like a champ.
. But this isn't a sales deal this is a tech issue and that is how the question was phrased.
How is it that we are on a board praising open systems such as Linux and yet we have so many argue the customers should not see their own data? What's the difference between what you are doing and what Microsoft does - "oh, leave the operating system to the professionals". It seems to me that if we expect our software to be open, it should only be in support of allowing our customer's data to be open too.
Trains still win the energy per transport mile efficiency contest though due to their nature
It's not just that, its that the rails have a much lower coefficient of friction than the paved road does. It does not take much at all to get a train rolling, hence, you can see a guy pulling a heavy train with his teeth as they do every now and then.
Just by way of comparison, the most popular steam engine, probably ever, in the USA, was the PRR K4s. This thing I think would pull 5 to 10 cars consisting of up to a few hundred people and with about not even 2000 horsepower. Yeah the thing burned coal and left smoke everywhere, but, in terms of CO2, it was pretty friendly compared to even a car of today. You figure, 2000 horsepower is about 5-10 of today's cars....
The trains in the city were electric, not steam/coal powered
No, it was a mix. You still needed to have steam trains to haul both freight and commuter traffic between city. Electric trains didn't have the power to make steep grades and so steamers would be still be used, for example, to K4s.
I had a bunch of pictures in a longer post explaining this in more detail, but slashdot's new stupid interface got the best of me and now its gone.
Anyway, the picture I'm trying to paint is this. Commuters circa the 1920s would probably take some sort of a electric train, be it subway or trolly to a central station. There, they would transfer to a steamer for travel between those cities that did not have electrified routes. So, to get somewhere, you would have walk a bit, take one form of transit, then get off, wait on a platform, then get another, and then from there go to another city, and repeat the same process. You had a big mix of ugly electric wires or dangerous third rails everywhere, and choking smoke from steam engines to do it. What's even worse is that, in that whole system, pressure from cars and worn infrastructure abused by the nationalizations of two wars basically meant that railroad service was pretty unreliable. Imagine how pissed you would be, for example, if your commuter train was late and you missed your intracity train.
So, when the car came out, its advantages were obvious to anyone who travelled. You only had to get into and exit your vehicle once. You stayed warm and dry the whole trip. You didn't have to walk to and from any stations and the only cost you needed to have to make a trip was gasoline (which was dirt cheap). By the time you get to the 1950s, Eisenhower was launching the interstates, New Jersey and other states were building their turnpikes, and everyone who had any brain was buying a car.
The great irony is that, as much as we say the coal fired locomotive was evil and polluting, to this day, a steam engine pulling 100 passengers built even with 1920s designs would emit about the same CO2 as not much more than 4 or 5 modern cars. A K4s (the most common steam passenger engine on the PRR circa the golden era) only had about a two thousand horespower, if that, and even today a modern locomotive diesel is about 4000 hp. Trains a pretty good deal, environmentally.
If we had a "clean coal" steamer service, we'd be way ahead of the curve...
Just say no and hope that it sticks. Seriously. I find that so many people in the workforce noadays don't know how to say that simple word. No.
Hey, I have a consulting firm that would be willing to work with the client to ensure they have that database access.:-)
What we could do is give them the query access via their own public synonym space, and build it into our SLA that we are not responsible for downtime due to their querying. We would also bundle some support costs into the agreement.
What you should do, though, as you give it up, is that, you should get the right to waive performance guarantees you have in your SLA with them, because of their querying. Also, get your support costs for handholding them worked into the deal.
That's fair. If the customer is monkeying with their database, and their site goes down because they did a massive cartesian join, then, you can't help that now, can you?
Trains used to be everywhere in the city because it was the only mode of transportation available. You have to remember that at the time diesel was becoming available and the internal combustion engine was being to overwhelm the steam engine. You should see some pictures of the railroad yards in downtown Philadelphia back when the PRR was at its peak. Everything was covered in black coal soot and people living in the cities just hated the steam engine but tolerated it as a necessary evil. Railroads, now viewed nostalgically today, were back then viewed with the same sort of hatred as Microsoft is by slashdot fans.
Yes, its true, back in the day, the greedy corporation was in fact the steam train operators that ran the steam railroads. To some extent, people viewed the likes of GM as a form of liberation from a railroad monopoly, just as much as people cheered Microsoft when they supplanted IBM and cheer now tiny Linux service companies as they threaten to supplant Microsoft. Basically, what we are doing is evolution through corporate service. Once we've realized in our minds whatever good can be ascribed to a company, we get rid of it.
To get back to point, its all too easy to see that, as soon as GM and Ford salespeople walked into cities talking up the virtues of buses over trains, they weren't exactly walking into a hostile environment. A bunch of cities even helped things along by passing ordinances effectively banning steam engines and then later on, even regular trains, for various health and safety reasons. The car, of all things, were not just a symbol of freedom from the evil railroad corporation, not just a symbol of private ownership, but they were actually -better for the environment too-!
That just cracks me up. That and, the likes of Ivy League Univ of PA.
If you ARE capable of addressing my point, please do so.
I can't take you seriously. You think communism causes earthquakes!
CHINESE POLICY DID NOT CAUSE THE DISASTER, BUT IT DID MAKE THE OUTCOME SUBSTANTIALLY WORSE THAN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN OTHERWISE. I've said that, with no equivocation, several times.
Oh, this is what you are rambling about. The thing is, you made this statement without making a single supporting piece of evidence for it. Not one. All you have is an opinion that you keep shouting and you've offered nothing to back it up. In fact, when I pointed out that there are places in the USA where a nearly 8.0 richter would be just as devastating, if not worse, and you still stick to your story. After all, if the USA is democratic, and Chinese communist, then, the USA should be immune from the disaster of that scale. However, it isn't, and you know it.
You lost the debate right there, and the rest of this discussion is you just trying be a big old dumb redneck bully to get your point across.
So please, do you even have an explanation?
Why, oh why, pre-tell, does communism make an earthquake worse. Are there less troops to respond? Well, the PLA is bigger than our army. They put 50k soldiers into the disaster area on day 1 while, how many people did we put into New Orleans post Katrina? Hell, the head of China went out of his way to go to the disaster site in person on day 1, and he's been there several times, but our own President Bush couldn't even be bothered to get his rear off of AirForce 1.
The thing is, most governments, regardless of economic system, if they have any money and any organization, can cope well with disasters. In fact, totalitarian regimes are often better at disaster recovery and use disaster recovery to justify their existence, more so than the Democratic regimes. It's that, totalitarian regimes have total command and control and can marshal resources in a way that democracies can't.
Actually there is plenty of educational software for Linux
It's all crap compared to what's out there for Windows. I'm sorry. I have a Linux box at home, now Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and the choices for children suck. In general, Linux games and entertainment software suck. It seems like every title in Linux entertainment begins with "Clone of"...
There's just not the creativity to go with the geeky good stuff and there never will be.
And, why should there be?
Linux is an academic and business system whose developers get paid by virtue of the consulting and research business they do. It's sort of a cost sharing compact among developers as they do their jobs. But, gaming and entertainment systems are really solo, artistic statements, (or should be), and so there's really little financial incentive to bring an FOSS game out there.
Now's your chance to break out your favorite shotgun or rifle. Line them up and blast away. But make a video of the whole thing and post it on youtube so we can see it. Everyone likes watching things blow up.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to say that you're stupid, you don't need to use all those words. You can just say "I'm stupid" and save us all that reading.
Uh stupid? Your guys (the Democrats) are inventing all sorts of novel ways to blow the presidential election. All you had to do was put up Al Gore, and walk into the white house. But instead, we Republicans got to enjoy a year of Democrats milking their rich wall street and hollywood donors for hundreds of millions of dollars so they can beat each other up, all to give us Barrack Hussein Obama.
If the very first Xbox controller was made out of steel it would be like holding a small Buick in your lap
Well, it would help you strengthen your forearms and biceps! Instead of body by Bowflex, we'd all have body by X-Box....
Look, I'm an old, angry, Republican, and not one of these tree hugging types, but I think Greenpeace has a really good point.
I mean, check this out. When I was a kid, TV's were put into wooden cabinets. Steel was used for a lot of structural things. Plastic was considered cheap and the knock on Japan was that it was all "cheap plastic stuff".
Well, fast forward almost 40 years later and what do we find. Plastic stuff is really not all that recyclable, it comes from petroleum, so, when it really boils down to it, plastic actually really does suck as much as the old timers said that it did.
Why can't they make a video game enclosure or a computer enclosure out of some kind of wood? Or, make controllers out of some kind of steel? Wood is at least renewable and steel is the most recycled thing there is. It just seems to be madness to be making more plastic junk out there when we already have mountains of this stuff.
I'm sure a lot of environmentalists might be appalled, but, why are we trying to bring back or defend large predator species? Tigers eat people or eat things that people could eat, and they are faster and stronger than any naked man. Same can be said for lions, cheetahs, bears, gorillas, and more. We don't need -any- of these animals to be running around in any place except for on TV. It's just too dangerous! :-)
I envision lots of FAA inspectors looking at a lot of half healed parts by the crater, instead of parts not healed at all.
"we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.â
I guess in Iraq, its too high, huh?
This post is so misguided and full of utter bullshit it isn't even funny. I'd like to see any figures to back up the nuclear claim, that is pure fabrication.
No, actually, I think you've been reading too much "moveon".
The war in Iraq has the LEAST amount of popular support now than it ever has, so your claim that "Americans are not against it" now are just ludicrous
That was a typo. I meant to write "now" rather than "not".
And the Democrats aren't out to screw the Iraqis because they are "arabs".
Well, actually, yes they are. I mean, the whole argument against a nation building project in Iraq was that arabs are too screwd up to have a democracy. And now, the criticism of the occupation is essentially that, its not worth Americans to save arabs from themselves. Why else the "Iraqi government performance targets"? Militarily, Al Qaeda is defeated, and now the militias are being defeated, its really only the process of national reconciliation that's left to do.
(well, unless you back McCain's "100 year war" plan) pissing off all the other Middle Eastern nations
Ah, now a few distortions of your own! Fancy that. McCain's comments described a situation in Iraq similar to that in Europe. Now honestly, I think the USA should withdraw all troops from everywhere and let Europe and Asia fend for themselves militarily, but, there's plenty of liberals who would argue that we need to stay committed to the defense of So. Korea and Europe in the interests of non-proliferation. Where do you stand?
That and not encouraging any young Muslims to become extreme radicals bent on doing harm to America.
Ah, appeasement. You know, if, after a decade of trying to make the Arabs happy, via saving muslims in Kosovo, working to a Palestian state, saving earthquake victims in Iran, gives us arabs happy enough to give us the USS Cole, the first WTC bombing, then 9/11, then, I'm not sure I really even care about whether or not they are happy any more. With that said, I would point out that right now, with oil prices at $120/bbl, the arabs ought to be pretty happy, and if you go and put Obama in, and he jacks up the dollar to drive down the price of oil, not only will he screw his own environmentalist followers, but he'll also condemn millions of arabs to poverty where right now they are becoming middle class. You tell me what will pisses them off more? If I was an Arab, I'd think Bush should be a Saint.
You sir, are either a republican mouthpiece out to badmouth the Democratic party, or a complete ignoramus who has no idea what is really going on in the US. (I would guess the latter.)
There's no need to badmouth the Democratic Party! They are the party for uniting every American except for that small smattering of people that work for oil companies, coal mines, and car companies, make over $100,000 a year, own guns or go to church.
You do realize of course that if it were not for France the United States would exist and most likely you would be part of Canada.
Hey, the French chopped off the head of the guy that saved the USA. What more do you need?
Otherwise, I might as well state that all Americans are pro-war, and that they all wanted Afghanistan and Iraq to be bombarded.
Americans were pro-war in the immediate days after 9/11. Some polls taken just after the attacked suggested that the American people would have supported the use of nuclear weapons against the entire middle east by a margin of nearly 2-1. Viewed in that context, Bush's invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq were restrained compared to what the country was willing to support. Indeed, Democrats took a beating in the 2002 elections largely because of their perceived pacifist stance, and it was this beating that lead them to give Bush a legal blank check on Iraq.
Of course, now that the war is approaching a trillion dollars and 4500 lives in cost, Americans are not against it. But, had Bush immediately brought home the troops from Iraq and left them to flounder in self ruin, he would have been hailed as a conquering hero. Indeed, the popular undercurrent of anti-war support among the Democrats is that the Iraqi people are not worth helping because they are arabs, therefor, we should withdraw and let them kill each other, as it still works out pretty good for us.
Indeed. Perhaps there should be a meme according to which the Jews are ridiculed for surrendering and letting themselves be herded off to camps, instead of nobly fighting to the death on their doorsteps as they ought to have? No, I didn't think so.
Actually, the Jews didn't surrender as much as they were lied to. In the one case where the Jews were aware of their fate, they actually did fight and die almost to a man before being herded off to concentration camps. Do read about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, before you make that claim! Indeed, I think the Warsaw ghetto withstood the Nazi assault all by itself for longer than Paris.
The real reason we hear Americans (and only Americans) making these bigoted comments is because Jacques Chirac used the UN veto against an attack on Iraq, thus making the subsequent invasion a war crime under the Nuremberg Principles.
The UN didn't veto anything and the Nuremberg principals were about waging a war for the purposes of a genocide.
The fact that Chirac has now been proven quite right, with WMDs and suchlike now known to be a pack of lies, does not seem to embarrass the bigots at all.
Saddam Hussein admitted that he would have reconstituted his arms programs as soon as the sanctions were lifting. So, even though he may not have had no WMD, he had them before, and would have gotten them again.
they get history taught in college there.
Americans are taught History in college as well. In addition, the open American economy, free of censorship, (unlike Germany) gives us an excellent view of all sides of the war.
France was not "taken over" in both world war, only 1. The "great war" the trench/battle limit went back and forth north of France, but nobody took over France.
A good portion of France was actually taken over during World War I. Likely, if it had not been for the timely assistance of their British allies, Paris would not have survived the initial German advances of 1914, just as Paris did not escape the disaster of the previous Franco-Prussian war.
For the second war, what did you expect them ? To die like a single man ? Are you for real ? Are you for real ? You are aware that "die in honor" is an outdated previous century concept, and all modern commander would accept surrendering ?
The British were prepared to do exactly that, and if you had had some history yourself, you might have noticed the Russians did -exactly- that.
There was no cowardiness shown by france during WW2,
So why did they hang Petain then? See, that's the thing, is that DeGaulle did NOT want to surrender despite the initial German successes. At the time of the surrender, the French actually had suffered one huge disaster with an army in Belgium and was well on the way to losing Paris, but, a number of other French units were certainly available and a line of battle could have been drawn around perhaps Southern France.
I invite you to read, though, Lord Alan Brooke's accounts of the war. He describes in vivid detail the state of the French army prior to World War II and during its opening stages (the so-called "Phoney War"). He describes French morale as low, the soldiers didn't even shave, didn't keep their weapons properly cleaned, didn't have any sort of cohesive unit discipline and when they showed up on the battlefield, except for those units under DeGaulle and one or two French commanders, they quickly broke ranks and booked.
. Jeez and I bet you will be one of the first to complain that french give you the finger.
The French have been giving the USA the finger for 200 years ever since we stiffed them after they bailed us out in our Revolutionary War, and they will probably be giving us the finger for another 200 years. But as long as they keep the Chardonnay and pastries coming we will always love the French. If the French were actually nice, well, it would be the end of the world, I'm sure.
Yep. 50 years of engineering on diesel/electric locomotives
For locomotives, yes, but, if you throw in submarines, hybrids are positively ancient! Actually, you need to go back more than 100 years!
John Holland build a gasoline / electric submarine for the US Navy in 1900. In a sense, the USS Holland is considered to be the first practical submarine for military purposes largely because of its innovative hybrid drive train. Designers would quickly switch from gasoline to diesel motors largely because gasoline fumes underwater were not cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Holland_(SS-1)
Well, first, global warming was a scientific exploration of the relationship between climate and weather via the development of some butt ugly FORTRAN code. Then, it was something everyone had to be aware, then it became an orthodoxy. Now all of a sudden, fat people are worse because of global warming, and of course, its only a matter of time until movie makers, lawyers, or any other profession is under assault in some way, because of global warming. Just imagine how many union jobs, hanging on because cost was the driver, will be packed up and shipped to a non-CO2 country, because all of a sudden, its not just about cost, its about saving the planet...
BTW, I'm not saying that a hydrogen economy is a good idea. I am saying that if we were to try it, locomotives would be a better beneficiary than automobiles.
I've thought that myself. I mean, we talk about hybrid cars as if they are something new, but diesel trains have been hybrids now for quite a long time. The diesel serves to run a generator which drives traction motors. So, within that stack, we could replace the diesel engine with a fuel cell, and it ought to work like a champ.
. But this isn't a sales deal this is a tech issue and that is how the question was phrased.
How is it that we are on a board praising open systems such as Linux and yet we have so many argue the customers should not see their own data? What's the difference between what you are doing and what Microsoft does - "oh, leave the operating system to the professionals". It seems to me that if we expect our software to be open, it should only be in support of allowing our customer's data to be open too.
Celestia [shatters.net] is insufficiently original or educational for you?
Great, you've got one. George Bush has done one thing right too, but are you going to vote Republican?
Trains still win the energy per transport mile efficiency contest though due to their nature
It's not just that, its that the rails have a much lower coefficient of friction than the paved road does. It does not take much at all to get a train rolling, hence, you can see a guy pulling a heavy train with his teeth as they do every now and then.
Just by way of comparison, the most popular steam engine, probably ever, in the USA, was the PRR K4s. This thing I think would pull 5 to 10 cars consisting of up to a few hundred people and with about not even 2000 horsepower. Yeah the thing burned coal and left smoke everywhere, but, in terms of CO2, it was pretty friendly compared to even a car of today. You figure, 2000 horsepower is about 5-10 of today's cars....
The trains in the city were electric, not steam/coal powered
No, it was a mix. You still needed to have steam trains to haul both freight and commuter traffic between city. Electric trains didn't have the power to make steep grades and so steamers would be still be used, for example, to K4s.
I had a bunch of pictures in a longer post explaining this in more detail, but slashdot's new stupid interface got the best of me and now its gone.
Anyway, the picture I'm trying to paint is this. Commuters circa the 1920s would probably take some sort of a electric train, be it subway or trolly to a central station. There, they would transfer to a steamer for travel between those cities that did not have electrified routes. So, to get somewhere, you would have walk a bit, take one form of transit, then get off, wait on a platform, then get another, and then from there go to another city, and repeat the same process. You had a big mix of ugly electric wires or dangerous third rails everywhere, and choking smoke from steam engines to do it. What's even worse is that, in that whole system, pressure from cars and worn infrastructure abused by the nationalizations of two wars basically meant that railroad service was pretty unreliable. Imagine how pissed you would be, for example, if your commuter train was late and you missed your intracity train.
So, when the car came out, its advantages were obvious to anyone who travelled. You only had to get into and exit your vehicle once. You stayed warm and dry the whole trip. You didn't have to walk to and from any stations and the only cost you needed to have to make a trip was gasoline (which was dirt cheap). By the time you get to the 1950s, Eisenhower was launching the interstates, New Jersey and other states were building their turnpikes, and everyone who had any brain was buying a car.
The great irony is that, as much as we say the coal fired locomotive was evil and polluting, to this day, a steam engine pulling 100 passengers built even with 1920s designs would emit about the same CO2 as not much more than 4 or 5 modern cars. A K4s (the most common steam passenger engine on the PRR circa the golden era) only had about a two thousand horespower, if that, and even today a modern locomotive diesel is about 4000 hp. Trains a pretty good deal, environmentally.
If we had a "clean coal" steamer service, we'd be way ahead of the curve...
Just say no and hope that it sticks. Seriously. I find that so many people in the workforce noadays don't know how to say that simple word. No.
:-)
Hey, I have a consulting firm that would be willing to work with the client to ensure they have that database access.
What we could do is give them the query access via their own public synonym space, and build it into our SLA that we are not responsible for downtime due to their querying. We would also bundle some support costs into the agreement.
Customer is paying the bills, get it?
What you should do, though, as you give it up, is that, you should get the right to waive performance guarantees you have in your SLA with them, because of their querying. Also, get your support costs for handholding them worked into the deal.
That's fair. If the customer is monkeying with their database, and their site goes down because they did a massive cartesian join, then, you can't help that now, can you?
Trains used to be everywhere in the city because it was the only mode of transportation available. You have to remember that at the time diesel was becoming available and the internal combustion engine was being to overwhelm the steam engine. You should see some pictures of the railroad yards in downtown Philadelphia back when the PRR was at its peak. Everything was covered in black coal soot and people living in the cities just hated the steam engine but tolerated it as a necessary evil. Railroads, now viewed nostalgically today, were back then viewed with the same sort of hatred as Microsoft is by slashdot fans.
Yes, its true, back in the day, the greedy corporation was in fact the steam train operators that ran the steam railroads. To some extent, people viewed the likes of GM as a form of liberation from a railroad monopoly, just as much as people cheered Microsoft when they supplanted IBM and cheer now tiny Linux service companies as they threaten to supplant Microsoft. Basically, what we are doing is evolution through corporate service. Once we've realized in our minds whatever good can be ascribed to a company, we get rid of it.
To get back to point, its all too easy to see that, as soon as GM and Ford salespeople walked into cities talking up the virtues of buses over trains, they weren't exactly walking into a hostile environment. A bunch of cities even helped things along by passing ordinances effectively banning steam engines and then later on, even regular trains, for various health and safety reasons. The car, of all things, were not just a symbol of freedom from the evil railroad corporation, not just a symbol of private ownership, but they were actually -better for the environment too-!
That just cracks me up. That and, the likes of Ivy League Univ of PA.
If you ARE capable of addressing my point, please do so.
I can't take you seriously. You think communism causes earthquakes!
CHINESE POLICY DID NOT CAUSE THE DISASTER, BUT IT DID MAKE THE OUTCOME SUBSTANTIALLY WORSE THAN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN OTHERWISE. I've said that, with no equivocation, several times.
Oh, this is what you are rambling about. The thing is, you made this statement without making a single supporting piece of evidence for it. Not one. All you have is an opinion that you keep shouting and you've offered nothing to back it up. In fact, when I pointed out that there are places in the USA where a nearly 8.0 richter would be just as devastating, if not worse, and you still stick to your story. After all, if the USA is democratic, and Chinese communist, then, the USA should be immune from the disaster of that scale. However, it isn't, and you know it.
You lost the debate right there, and the rest of this discussion is you just trying be a big old dumb redneck bully to get your point across.
So please, do you even have an explanation?
Why, oh why, pre-tell, does communism make an earthquake worse. Are there less troops to respond? Well, the PLA is bigger than our army. They put 50k soldiers into the disaster area on day 1 while, how many people did we put into New Orleans post Katrina? Hell, the head of China went out of his way to go to the disaster site in person on day 1, and he's been there several times, but our own President Bush couldn't even be bothered to get his rear off of AirForce 1.
The thing is, most governments, regardless of economic system, if they have any money and any organization, can cope well with disasters. In fact, totalitarian regimes are often better at disaster recovery and use disaster recovery to justify their existence, more so than the Democratic regimes. It's that, totalitarian regimes have total command and control and can marshal resources in a way that democracies can't.
How do you defend yourself against a woman who's beating you with pots and pans, brooms and the like?
Take the pots and pans ands brooms away from her, and tell her to quit breaking all the stuff because she's got a lot of cooking and cleaning to do.
Actually there is plenty of educational software for Linux
It's all crap compared to what's out there for Windows. I'm sorry. I have a Linux box at home, now Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and the choices for children suck. In general, Linux games and entertainment software suck. It seems like every title in Linux entertainment begins with "Clone of"...
There's just not the creativity to go with the geeky good stuff and there never will be.
And, why should there be?
Linux is an academic and business system whose developers get paid by virtue of the consulting and research business they do. It's sort of a cost sharing compact among developers as they do their jobs. But, gaming and entertainment systems are really solo, artistic statements, (or should be), and so there's really little financial incentive to bring an FOSS game out there.
Now's your chance to break out your favorite shotgun or rifle. Line them up and blast away. But make a video of the whole thing and post it on youtube so we can see it. Everyone likes watching things blow up.