NASA prediction was solid based upon the data they had. As more data came in, predictions(forecasts, actually) were adjusted. Welcome to science, please stay for the ride.
Yeah, but they were still WRONG. That's the whole thing. Scientists that make good predictions are smart scientists, and the ones that are wrong, are stupid. Tough break, but everyone else is judged by the same standard. George Bush doesn't get a pass for guessing incorrectly on WMD, a CEO doesn't get a pass for bad financials, developers don't get a pass for making a bad timeline and budget estimate, and for that matter, neither does anyone else. Humanity is in the business of predicting the future, and we all pay the price when we guess wrong, and it shouldn't be any different for those idiots that predicted we'd have a ton of hurricanes, but none came.
In each and every case you site, the user can composite the items in a single unit of work, and move the thing as a whole, and that facility is entirely lacking in a desktop GUI.
The need to do that compositing tends to exist within an application, rather than across a desktop. There's probably applications now for each of the items on your list. Photoshop has layers, as do GIS applications, which can sorta select and see things that line up on top of another. Animation packages put frames next to each other so you can seperate them out, and so on.
From an engineering perspective, if you -really- wanted to use translucency for something at an OS level, you would need to have a few more things. Simply moving windows around on top of each other doesn't really buy you much. You need to have data shared between applications, a common way to represent that each application represents a slice of a larger data set, and finally, each application is looking at something that is stackable within that set. That way, you could fire up "my super paint", draw something, launch a word processor application, and put the super paint on top of the document by simply moving it across. Really, it would be a whole different kind of metaphor, where instead of cut and paste, you just moved one window on top of another that created an integrated thing.
Presently, the only people that even thought of windows applications as views into a shared data set were Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's OLE, for example, was sorta designed around the idea that one application could composite other applications... that's how if you drop an excel sheet into Word, when you double click, the word menus change to excel - you are actually running an Excel on a data stream that is sitting inside of a Word document.
Pretty cool stuff, but the Internet just killed it, as did a deserved reputation for being difficult to program. The MS guy that wrote the Bible on the topic (Kraig Brockschmidt), wound up taking off and moving into some sort of a commune. Today, there's not an ounce of support for anything like it in.NET, and, in a networked world, it's arguable whether or not you should even applications stepping on each other's data the way OLE originally envisioned.
Theoretically, though, with OLE plumbing in place, MS could create a new set of interfaces that allow child windows to be stacked on top of each other, and views to be coordinated, and do that. Think, multiple Active X controls on steroids, but with data aware methods to coordinate multiple layers.. then, you have to have it be out of process communications, to support different applications... like OLE was. (Active X controls were a sort of dumbed down version of OLE).
I don't even know if Linux has an analog to it...maybe KParts or Gnome's component stuff?
But the bottom line is, you gave a bunch of real world examples that work because the user can do some things that the translucent desktop gimmick really doesn't let them do. There's aggregation of views, selection, moving... a lot. Simply making a window see through doesn't even come close to satisfying the requirements of what you want to do. Thus, I stand still correct - translucent windows are a fraud.
So... even though you are totally wrong, and I am totally right, I thank you for the opportunity to elucidate my ideas further, in hopes of saving those who lack the superior insight that I seem to possess. [that is of course, tongue in cheek!]
Real Programmers Used Shapetables
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Forty Years of LOGO
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Apple II had a facility called shape tables that could do sorta what logo could do at the time. You typed in a bunch of vertices in hex, and then you could draw the shape transformed in several interesting ways.
Shapetables, I thought, were the bomb, but also, proved to be my first introduction to the lesson: there is always a better program than you.
I was in high school at the time, Firestone in Akron, and we had a teacher that fought for and got a really nice computer lab. He was great. He had a lot of prestige because a future shuttle astronaut was one of his students, and in general, the math department there was one of the best in the state.
Anyway, I spent hours hand coding my shape table for a little lunar lander video game I was writing, and I thought I was the cat's meow, and I was all about to show it to everyone, trumpeting my genius, and this other guy walks in with a pinball game written in assembly language.
All I could do was compliment the guy, because it was great. He had decent sound, fast graphics, smooth play. It was just great. Amazingly, I don't know where he went with it, because it was right up there with the commercial pinballs of the day. But still, talk about humiliation! I about died!
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things. But I think translucency is more to show that they can do something in 3d, done by people that have no real vision as to what to do with it.
Weird thing is the Russians are notorious for doing just this with their backup systems... Typically much more so than their US comrads:)
The Russians, in all seriousness, have a had a long and good reputation for building survival systems since World War II. A good example of this is in fighter aircraft. Whereas the USAF and Navy has its guys walk the runway picking up debris amidst a spotless airbase, in Russia, their runways and airbases are trashed.
Of course, not all American things are fragile. The A-10 ground attack aircraft, is one tough little bird. In general, American aircraft, despite their perceived weakness, have a long and storied tradition of bringing pilots home despite being shot up.
And, for the ultimate in toughness, no one has ever matched an Iowa class battleship.
Really, spacecraft should almost be designed by military people.
Maybe I'm just really tired, but it seems to me that if you varied the size and shape of the pores, you'd have a really simple way to do a wholesale analysis sample for complex molecules. You could have a "nose" for smelling in either liquid or air, allowing you to have a sensor that looked for all sorts of contaminants and gave immediate results.
Perhaps, if these plastics were non-toxic, you could even have a plug in test that gave an immediate bacteriological or viral assay of a blood sample. So, instead of relying on a bizarre and arbitrary set of symptoms of a patient to look for an illness, you could just scan their blood and get an immediate diagnosis from a computer, and then get antibiotics immediately.
Redundancy can equal safety and reliability, but all of the components designed to be redundant should all actually have different designs so that they have differing modes of failure. So, in the Challenger case, were the seals designed differently, they wouldn't have had the same failure mode for a given exposure.
To do this really well though, requires risk management software that I am not sure even exists. You'd have to simulate everything. The devil, as happened to Challenger, is that, there are so many variables, that you can't know apriori what your real mode of failure will be. To some extent, perhaps the best way to fly in space is to forget about excesses of safety altogether, and use the cost savings to fly more often. When something breaks, fix that.
Will it be cost-feasible to employ this plastic? In future as carbon trading opens up and becomes a market reality in more places, the answer will probably be yes
so, in other words, its not cost feasible now, but, we can raise taxes on CO2 emissions to make it that way.
The "Don't host anything in California Act" The "Not Available Online to California Residents Act"
and more...
Sorry, but in world of nearly a billion people online, California's market of 40 million isn't as much worth the pain in the ass they keep regulating it to be.
You look at what scientists are researching - robots to replace people, computers that can think like people, scanners to read our minds.... I mean, for what benefit? Corporate compliance? Government security? These things are being built solely for the sake of building them, and, the frankenstein world that will emerge from them makes the Dark Ages sound pretty and distant goddamned good. Let's see, burn the witch, or have my mind read to get a job. Sorry witch, but you're toast!
I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about the premise that bringing more people into a problem will somehow make it better. Usually, the biggest disasters that have befallen mankind have had a committee in it somewhere, and a lot of this collaboration stuff really just is a way of even forming bigger committees. At some point, anything genuinely great happens because an individual groks the whole thing and jumps to the center of the stage with an answer. Sure, Linux has a bunch of contributors, and that's cool, but if you look in a bit more closely, it's really a federation of projects driven by a bunch of maniacal owners and visionaries.
Re:It's about votes, not pandering.
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Blog Action Day
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· Score: 1
If you like them blowing smoke up your ass, that's up to you.
I agree with this. Change comes from the bottom up. Candidates are whores and they will follow wherever they think the people lead. Really, the biggest challenge for the environment is to unlink it politically from the socialists that also tend to advocate environmental issues. If you come off like a commie telling a conservative that "yet again, evil fascist corporate america is ruining mother nature with its polluting christian crap", then, you aren't going to get anywhere. On the other hand, if you tell a conservative that a power plant is polluting the forest where he grew up hunting with his grandfather, then, he's probably going to be right there with you on that issue. Conservatives (faux ones in Wash excepted), are rural people, by their very nature, and appeals that target how the pollution affects their heritage are very powerful.
When Libs are At Their Best...
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Blog Action Day
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· Score: 1
It's not from doing stuff like this. It's in the arts. You get a bunch of people marching and forming their little lib armies, and all that does is tick people off. But, when you get some talented lib lay it out for you in a story or a song or a classroom, and does it in a way that can reach you, people buy into that a lot more.
The bottom line is, putting up mass protests and collectively forming these big save the earth religions isn't going to save the earth. Handing money to somebody else to go save the earth isn't going to save the earth. It's going to be commercials like the famous Crying Indian of the 1970s, documentaries, education, and more that will cause people to believe that they are personally responsible for the environment around them and have a stake in it. If libs are right that democracies can't be established at the barrel of a gun, then it is also true that nothing can be established by the barrel of the gun... that all laws require some form of consent by the populace.
Therefor, laws don't make people stop polluting, but education will.
When I voted in 2004, I voted in a poor neighborhood in FL. I was an early voter, and I had a 2 hour wait.
Yeah, because you have a lot of stupid people in line that didn't know how to vote. Poor people are always slow about everything... that's why they are poor!
Their was tons of voter disenfranchisement, specifically of black people, in the 2000 election
No there wasn't. You just have to remember that you aren't allowed to vote twice!
Debunked. Site is down at the moment for some reason.
That's not debunked at all. It's just more rationalizations... It's really simple : you have hundreds of millions of people getting killed by a mosquito, something that kills them, and you banned it. All the other crap you have is obfuscation so that you can wash your hands of killing a billion people to make yourself feel good about the planet.
Did you just say the Iraq war effort should be compared to the continual (and probably neverending) efforts to reduce drug use and rehabilitate prisoners?
The claim that we should terminate the Iraq war immediately because it is an unwinnable thing has already been made. So, all I'm saying is, let's get rid of all of these unwinnable things that will never end. If we have to eat crow and bail on Iraq because "Democracy can't be won by the barrel of a gun", then lets get real and attach: "prison rehabilitation doesn't work", and "drug rehab programs don't work", just cancel them.
The condemnation of Moveon has nothing to do with questioning someone in the military, but anyone who dares to question the bullshit of the right wing
No, the immediate issue at hand is that MoveOn took legal action to prevent condemnation of itself. Want to insult Bush, Cheney, etc, go right ahead. It's proof that the USA has a superior system that we agree that we can trash our leaders and our generals at will. But, if you are in a political sphere, and dishing it out, you ought to be able to take it as well, and MoveOn didn't.
You mean those two supposed critics of the war, that Dick Cheney called no friends of the administration, that have been big war backers from the start?
Oh, look at you go.... doing the same discrediting tactics that you are so bitter about being handed to the likes of Kerry and Cleland. Please, spare me your righteousness. It's such a fraud.
Which Democrats are calling for a ban on personal weapons, exactly? And of the current candidates for president, which one has backed gun control any time recently? I'll give you a hint: the candidate is from New York, and isn't Hillary Clinton.
Look at you splitting hairs to lie. What's a "personal weapon" to you. The fact of the matter is, the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party banned semi-automatic weapons, and would do so again. The only reason that they don't, is because they lost Ohio twice for doing so, and they don't want to blow that again.
Reagan and the Bushes have ensured the necessity of the largest tax increases in the history of this country. It's just a matter of when they go into effect.
No, you could always choose to cut government spending.
So what part of our current system do you like best? That we spend twice as much per patient as other industrialized nations for worse care? That insurance companies take your expensive premiums and use the money to try and find ways to deny you care? Or the fact that Cuba is catching up to us in health care despite spending 1/30th as much per patient?
So, I suppose you want to fix that by replacing that with a system where a pair of doctors have to live check to check and can't afford an apartment in Germany. Honestly, there's not a single shred of truth in the above statement. Not a one. Everyone who comes to the USA and has insurance remarks that you do not have to wait in line to get health care.
Irrelevant.
No, not at all irrelevant. The claim is made that MoveOn is pro-American, and I ask you to name me one Pro-American thing that they do. Show me one thing where MoveOn advocates this country doing anything to gain relative to the world.
Then we're going to need another 400,000 troops
We have them. The Iraqi people themselves.. fighting AQ, which has been the plan all along.
That's alright son, just go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. Soon, the pain of being that damn stupid will all go away...
What exactly does MoveOn and other morons like you advocate to make you think you are so smart. Let's see, you don't want America to win any wars. You don't want American companies to beat world competitors. You don't want Americans to have a richer life - in fact, you argue that we should have less so that we can share with the world. Seriously, what part of that plan would you not be stupid to follow. Support you, and get less. That's about as stupid as you can possibly get. If I might be drinking kool-aid, but you are surely drinking the electric stuff.
That doesn't make any sense. The megawatt is a unit of power, not energy
It's the case where market speak triumphs. Utilities use megawatts without the unit of time, where it is usually implied. Sometimes it implies instantaneous energy - like, the nuke plant has a peak output capacity of 400 megawatts for any given instant. Other times, the time is implied based upon the trading desk that trades it. A spot trader might buy a megawatt hour - or, a the integral of a megawatts worth of power over an hour.... or a longer range trader might do a megawatt day, month, or year - for a day's worth of power, month or year, respectively. Then, to get it even funkier, they might do it completely arbitrary. Like, on-peak in the USA is, if I remember 8am-10pm eastern, so they call that 8x22 and so you would say 1000 megawatts 8x22 september 1st - september 7th.
That's 17%. On exactly what planet is 17 out of 100 considered any sort of success?
You are absolutely right! Hey, public drug treatment centers have a lower rate of success, should we close them? Or, how about educational programs in prisons? The vast majority of cons in prison go back into prison. Why waste all that money? For that matter, why have any rehabilitation, becuase, its not much more successful than the 17%. OH, and lookie here, look at how few people really do succeeded despite inner city improvement programs. Why not shut those down? In fact, even this Kyoto treaty you guys keep pushing has a lower success rate. You keep arguing for the US to join Kyoto, when, I doubt 7% of the Kyoto countries will really hit their targets without moving the 1990 baseline and clever accounting tricks (as Europe keeps doing). So obviously that's a failure and we shouldn't even bother with that. Has the United Nations stopped 17% of wars that have broken out? Not really. It doesn't do anything. So, we should stop that...
I agree completely. Let's bring the troops home out of IRaq, right now, as 17% is a total failure, and then let's shut down every federal program that does not have a 17% success rate.
If we give the Pentagon a giant space laser, why do we have to send troops at all? At very least we should be able to cancel any further developement on bombers with this thing.
Well, if we didn't plan on occupying a region, you would be correct. I agree with you on the bombers. No need for manned combat aircraft when you have a giant death ray overhead. I think the F-22 will be the last class of manned fighter we'll ever build.
Being pro-American is NOT equal to American exceptionalism. Being pro-American also does NOT mean other countries have to be crushed so that we can dominate. What sort of high school bully environment did you use to form your view of the world?
Like I said, you don't want America to be the best.
Unfortunately the idiot sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has not done any of these things. You can't just cut taxes, spout some words about freedom, and hope that things will magically work out.
Um, it would be nice if you could spare the rhetoric and check your numbers a bit. Bush has the most liberal president since Lyndon Johnson. Not even your prized Bill Clinton sought and got the kind of increases in spending in education, health care, and scientific research that Bush has. Despite left wing lies to the contrary, virtually every category of federal technical spending has greatly outpaced the rate of inflation. Indeed, for all of the talk about Bush having a war on science, he's spent far more on it than Clinton even dreamed. Even excluding military and entitlement spending, Bush has presided over the biggest expansion of federal investment in decades.
Let's just run down some of the economically strategic things Bush has funded: coal to liquids, carbon sequestration from coal, ethanol from corn, ethanol from non-corn sources such as switchgrass, new kinds of nuclear power, participation in ITER's fusion research, our own local fusion research such as the sort going on at Los Alamos, and more. Bush is spending a mountain on energy. In fact, I would not be surprised if a lot of these solar cell breakthroughs that have been reported over the last few weeks are federally funded - meaning the Bush Administration somewhere along the way is pumping money into solar cells too. Clinton, by contrast, basically did nothing for alternative energy.
Despite much criticism, Bush has turned missile defense into a workable reality. One could theoretically make the argument that it doesn't matter if a rogue state gets a simple missile, if we could shoot it down. If anything prevented a war with Iran, it was that we have been shooting down ICBMs in test. We have ships that can do boost phase interceptions with an upgraded AEGIS system, a theater ballistic missile interception capability, interception of even RPG and mortars rockets with lasers, and we also finally have a system that can do high altitude interception of ICBMS with kinetic vehicles. Sure, this is a military thing, but, there's a huge number of spinoffs as well. First off, lasers have gotten a lot more powerful, a key thing needed to make space based solar power a reality. Secondly, you have all sorts of the new materials needed to make something steerable at mach 17, paving open the way to practical someday space plane.
Bush will just about have the space station wrapped up at the end of his term, and put the USA firmly down the path of going back to the moon. He has sent the FIRST probe to go and get more pictures of Pluto than the six pixels Hubble gets. He is sending probes to investigate the Asteroid Ceres... paving the way to get resources from space rather than fight for them at home.
Under Bush, funding for public schools is higher than it has ever been. Similarly, Bush has increased as much as possible the number of H1-B visas to allow the best and brightest from around the world to come to the United States. Had Bush's vision for immigration reform been not so foolishly derailed by his own party, the USA would have had immigration guidelines that rank countries not based on their social need, but, based on economic need to the USA... so rather than stacking things in favor of farmers from poor countries, we would stack things in favor of Phds from richer countries.
Bush's capital gains and income tax cuts proved to be the precise tonic needed to keep the economy rolling. Whereas Clinton's economy was powered essentially by financial speculation and marketing, Bush's economy is m
I know this may sound crazy, but the achilles heel of the US military is its fuel. Forget about the obvious guzzlers - like gas turbine warships and fighter jets, just look at the US Army, where its lightest and most fuel efficient fighting vehicle is a frigging Hummer. And then radios and combat centers and all of the communications, artillery and other infrastructure require generators, and hence even more fuel. I think the US Army blows through more fuel today in a month then the whole Army did during all of World War II. It's really a staggering problem... you have to have a lot of infrastructure to move all that fuel around, and all that infrastructure comes at a heavy, heavy price.
If you could have some sort of space based system beaming massive amounts of energy down to the ground, you could theoretically have a mobile receiving station, you could think about electric powered transport to replace things like Hummers, power all the command and control electronics, and probably also do electromagnetic artillery rather than conventional artillery. I imagine you'd have to have some seriously powerful batteries to move a tank with an electric motor, but, you even still, the weight savings in all the other stuff could at least help keep your MBTs moving. Perhaps you could, domestically, produce tank and jet fuel with coal to liquids, and still ship -that- via normal transport, in the interim. Or, you rethink your army so that you basically have a lighter force but with genuinely awesome artillery to back it up... if all you had to do was transport kinetic slugs, and not heavy shells, you could throw a lot more destructive power at an enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA prediction was solid based upon the data they had. As more data came in, predictions(forecasts, actually) were adjusted. Welcome to science, please stay for the ride.
Yeah, but they were still WRONG. That's the whole thing. Scientists that make good predictions are smart scientists, and the ones that are wrong, are stupid. Tough break, but everyone else is judged by the same standard. George Bush doesn't get a pass for guessing incorrectly on WMD, a CEO doesn't get a pass for bad financials, developers don't get a pass for making a bad timeline and budget estimate, and for that matter, neither does anyone else. Humanity is in the business of predicting the future, and we all pay the price when we guess wrong, and it shouldn't be any different for those idiots that predicted we'd have a ton of hurricanes, but none came.
Al Gore, inventor of the Internet, is now the defendant in a 400 billion dollar lawsuit filed by RIA.
In each and every case you site, the user can composite the items in a single unit of work, and move the thing as a whole, and that facility is entirely lacking in a desktop GUI.
.NET, and, in a networked world, it's arguable whether or not you should even applications stepping on each other's data the way OLE originally envisioned.
.maybe KParts or Gnome's component stuff?
The need to do that compositing tends to exist within an application, rather than across a desktop. There's probably applications now for each of the items on your list. Photoshop has layers, as do GIS applications, which can sorta select and see things that line up on top of another. Animation packages put frames next to each other so you can seperate them out, and so on.
From an engineering perspective, if you -really- wanted to use translucency for something at an OS level, you would need to have a few more things. Simply moving windows around on top of each other doesn't really buy you much. You need to have data shared between applications, a common way to represent that each application represents a slice of a larger data set, and finally, each application is looking at something that is stackable within that set. That way, you could fire up "my super paint", draw something, launch a word processor application, and put the super paint on top of the document by simply moving it across. Really, it would be a whole different kind of metaphor, where instead of cut and paste, you just moved one window on top of another that created an integrated thing.
Presently, the only people that even thought of windows applications as views into a shared data set were Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft's OLE, for example, was sorta designed around the idea that one application could composite other applications... that's how if you drop an excel sheet into Word, when you double click, the word menus change to excel - you are actually running an Excel on a data stream that is sitting inside of a Word document.
Pretty cool stuff, but the Internet just killed it, as did a deserved reputation for being difficult to program. The MS guy that wrote the Bible on the topic (Kraig Brockschmidt), wound up taking off and moving into some sort of a commune. Today, there's not an ounce of support for anything like it in
Theoretically, though, with OLE plumbing in place, MS could create a new set of interfaces that allow child windows to be stacked on top of each other, and views to be coordinated, and do that. Think, multiple Active X controls on steroids, but with data aware methods to coordinate multiple layers.. then, you have to have it be out of process communications, to support different applications... like OLE was. (Active X controls were a sort of dumbed down version of OLE).
I don't even know if Linux has an analog to it..
But the bottom line is, you gave a bunch of real world examples that work because the user can do some things that the translucent desktop gimmick really doesn't let them do. There's aggregation of views, selection, moving... a lot. Simply making a window see through doesn't even come close to satisfying the requirements of what you want to do. Thus, I stand still correct - translucent windows are a fraud.
So... even though you are totally wrong, and I am totally right, I thank you for the opportunity to elucidate my ideas further, in hopes of saving those who lack the superior insight that I seem to possess. [that is of course, tongue in cheek!]
Apple II had a facility called shape tables that could do sorta what logo could do at the time. You typed in a bunch of vertices in hex, and then you could draw the shape transformed in several interesting ways.
Shapetables, I thought, were the bomb, but also, proved to be my first introduction to the lesson: there is always a better program than you.
I was in high school at the time, Firestone in Akron, and we had a teacher that fought for and got a really nice computer lab. He was great. He had a lot of prestige because a future shuttle astronaut was one of his students, and in general, the math department there was one of the best in the state.
Anyway, I spent hours hand coding my shape table for a little lunar lander video game I was writing, and I thought I was the cat's meow, and I was all about to show it to everyone, trumpeting my genius, and this other guy walks in with a pinball game written in assembly language.
All I could do was compliment the guy, because it was great. He had decent sound, fast graphics, smooth play. It was just great. Amazingly, I don't know where he went with it, because it was right up there with the commercial pinballs of the day. But still, talk about humiliation! I about died!
If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things. But I think translucency is more to show that they can do something in 3d, done by people that have no real vision as to what to do with it.
Weird thing is the Russians are notorious for doing just this with their backup systems... Typically much more so than their US comrads :)
The Russians, in all seriousness, have a had a long and good reputation for building survival systems since World War II. A good example of this is in fighter aircraft. Whereas the USAF and Navy has its guys walk the runway picking up debris amidst a spotless airbase, in Russia, their runways and airbases are trashed.
Of course, not all American things are fragile. The A-10 ground attack aircraft, is one tough little bird. In general, American aircraft, despite their perceived weakness, have a long and storied tradition of bringing pilots home despite being shot up.
And, for the ultimate in toughness, no one has ever matched an Iowa class battleship.
Really, spacecraft should almost be designed by military people.
Maybe I'm just really tired, but it seems to me that if you varied the size and shape of the pores, you'd have a really simple way to do a wholesale analysis sample for complex molecules. You could have a "nose" for smelling in either liquid or air, allowing you to have a sensor that looked for all sorts of contaminants and gave immediate results.
Perhaps, if these plastics were non-toxic, you could even have a plug in test that gave an immediate bacteriological or viral assay of a blood sample. So, instead of relying on a bizarre and arbitrary set of symptoms of a patient to look for an illness, you could just scan their blood and get an immediate diagnosis from a computer, and then get antibiotics immediately.
Redundancy can equal safety and reliability, but all of the components designed to be redundant should all actually have different designs so that they have differing modes of failure. So, in the Challenger case, were the seals designed differently, they wouldn't have had the same failure mode for a given exposure.
To do this really well though, requires risk management software that I am not sure even exists. You'd have to simulate everything. The devil, as happened to Challenger, is that, there are so many variables, that you can't know apriori what your real mode of failure will be. To some extent, perhaps the best way to fly in space is to forget about excesses of safety altogether, and use the cost savings to fly more often. When something breaks, fix that.
And why are you complaining? The bill was vetoed. Do you always find something to complain about?
Only when the Red Sox pull within 2 runs of the Indians. But, the Indians hung on to win, and I'm happy. Go Indians!
Any improvement in desalination is a welcome one. We need big desalination plants around the world to feasibly meet demands for fresh water.
Will it be cost-feasible to employ this plastic? In future as carbon trading opens up and becomes a market reality in more places, the answer will probably be yes
so, in other words, its not cost feasible now, but, we can raise taxes on CO2 emissions to make it that way.
The "Don't host anything in California Act"
The "Not Available Online to California Residents Act"
and more...
Sorry, but in world of nearly a billion people online, California's market of 40 million isn't as much worth the pain in the ass they keep regulating it to be.
You look at what scientists are researching - robots to replace people, computers that can think like people, scanners to read our minds.... I mean, for what benefit? Corporate compliance? Government security? These things are being built solely for the sake of building them, and, the frankenstein world that will emerge from them makes the Dark Ages sound pretty and distant goddamned good. Let's see, burn the witch, or have my mind read to get a job. Sorry witch, but you're toast!
I have to admit that I'm a bit skeptical about the premise that bringing more people into a problem will somehow make it better. Usually, the biggest disasters that have befallen mankind have had a committee in it somewhere, and a lot of this collaboration stuff really just is a way of even forming bigger committees. At some point, anything genuinely great happens because an individual groks the whole thing and jumps to the center of the stage with an answer. Sure, Linux has a bunch of contributors, and that's cool, but if you look in a bit more closely, it's really a federation of projects driven by a bunch of maniacal owners and visionaries.
If you like them blowing smoke up your ass, that's up to you.
I agree with this. Change comes from the bottom up. Candidates are whores and they will follow wherever they think the people lead. Really, the biggest challenge for the environment is to unlink it politically from the socialists that also tend to advocate environmental issues. If you come off like a commie telling a conservative that "yet again, evil fascist corporate america is ruining mother nature with its polluting christian crap", then, you aren't going to get anywhere. On the other hand, if you tell a conservative that a power plant is polluting the forest where he grew up hunting with his grandfather, then, he's probably going to be right there with you on that issue. Conservatives (faux ones in Wash excepted), are rural people, by their very nature, and appeals that target how the pollution affects their heritage are very powerful.
It's not from doing stuff like this. It's in the arts. You get a bunch of people marching and forming their little lib armies, and all that does is tick people off. But, when you get some talented lib lay it out for you in a story or a song or a classroom, and does it in a way that can reach you, people buy into that a lot more.
The bottom line is, putting up mass protests and collectively forming these big save the earth religions isn't going to save the earth. Handing money to somebody else to go save the earth isn't going to save the earth. It's going to be commercials like the famous Crying Indian of the 1970s, documentaries, education, and more that will cause people to believe that they are personally responsible for the environment around them and have a stake in it. If libs are right that democracies can't be established at the barrel of a gun, then it is also true that nothing can be established by the barrel of the gun... that all laws require some form of consent by the populace.
Therefor, laws don't make people stop polluting, but education will.
When I voted in 2004, I voted in a poor neighborhood in FL. I was an early voter, and I had a 2 hour wait.
Yeah, because you have a lot of stupid people in line that didn't know how to vote. Poor people are always slow about everything... that's why they are poor!
Their was tons of voter disenfranchisement, specifically of black people, in the 2000 election
No there wasn't. You just have to remember that you aren't allowed to vote twice!
Debunked. Site is down at the moment for some reason.
That's not debunked at all. It's just more rationalizations... It's really simple : you have hundreds of millions of people getting killed by a mosquito, something that kills them, and you banned it. All the other crap you have is obfuscation so that you can wash your hands of killing a billion people to make yourself feel good about the planet.
Did you just say the Iraq war effort should be compared to the continual (and probably neverending) efforts to reduce drug use and rehabilitate prisoners?
The claim that we should terminate the Iraq war immediately because it is an unwinnable thing has already been made. So, all I'm saying is, let's get rid of all of these unwinnable things that will never end. If we have to eat crow and bail on Iraq because "Democracy can't be won by the barrel of a gun", then lets get real and attach: "prison rehabilitation doesn't work", and "drug rehab programs don't work", just cancel them.
The condemnation of Moveon has nothing to do with questioning someone in the military, but anyone who dares to question the bullshit of the right wing
No, the immediate issue at hand is that MoveOn took legal action to prevent condemnation of itself. Want to insult Bush, Cheney, etc, go right ahead. It's proof that the USA has a superior system that we agree that we can trash our leaders and our generals at will. But, if you are in a political sphere, and dishing it out, you ought to be able to take it as well, and MoveOn didn't.
You mean those two supposed critics of the war, that Dick Cheney called no friends of the administration, that have been big war backers from the start?
Oh, look at you go.... doing the same discrediting tactics that you are so bitter about being handed to the likes of Kerry and Cleland. Please, spare me your righteousness. It's such a fraud.
Which Democrats are calling for a ban on personal weapons, exactly? And of the current candidates for president, which one has backed gun control any time recently? I'll give you a hint: the candidate is from New York, and isn't Hillary Clinton.
Look at you splitting hairs to lie. What's a "personal weapon" to you. The fact of the matter is, the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party banned semi-automatic weapons, and would do so again. The only reason that they don't, is because they lost Ohio twice for doing so, and they don't want to blow that again.
Reagan and the Bushes have ensured the necessity of the largest tax increases in the history of this country. It's just a matter of when they go into effect.
No, you could always choose to cut government spending.
So what part of our current system do you like best? That we spend twice as much per patient as other industrialized nations for worse care? That insurance companies take your expensive premiums and use the money to try and find ways to deny you care? Or the fact that Cuba is catching up to us in health care despite spending 1/30th as much per patient?
So, I suppose you want to fix that by replacing that with a system where a pair of doctors have to live check to check and can't afford an apartment in Germany. Honestly, there's not a single shred of truth in the above statement. Not a one. Everyone who comes to the USA and has insurance remarks that you do not have to wait in line to get health care.
Irrelevant.
No, not at all irrelevant. The claim is made that MoveOn is pro-American, and I ask you to name me one Pro-American thing that they do. Show me one thing where MoveOn advocates this country doing anything to gain relative to the world.
Then we're going to need another 400,000 troops
We have them. The Iraqi people themselves.. fighting AQ, which has been the plan all along.
That's alright son, just go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. Soon, the pain of being that damn stupid will all go away...
What exactly does MoveOn and other morons like you advocate to make you think you are so smart. Let's see, you don't want America to win any wars. You don't want American companies to beat world competitors. You don't want Americans to have a richer life - in fact, you argue that we should have less so that we can share with the world. Seriously, what part of that plan would you not be stupid to follow. Support you, and get less. That's about as stupid as you can possibly get. If I might be drinking kool-aid, but you are surely drinking the electric stuff.
That doesn't make any sense. The megawatt is a unit of power, not energy
It's the case where market speak triumphs. Utilities use megawatts without the unit of time, where it is usually implied. Sometimes it implies instantaneous energy - like, the nuke plant has a peak output capacity of 400 megawatts for any given instant. Other times, the time is implied based upon the trading desk that trades it. A spot trader might buy a megawatt hour - or, a the integral of a megawatts worth of power over an hour.... or a longer range trader might do a megawatt day, month, or year - for a day's worth of power, month or year, respectively. Then, to get it even funkier, they might do it completely arbitrary. Like, on-peak in the USA is, if I remember 8am-10pm eastern, so they call that 8x22 and so you would say 1000 megawatts 8x22 september 1st - september 7th.
That's 17%. On exactly what planet is 17 out of 100 considered any sort of success?
You are absolutely right! Hey, public drug treatment centers have a lower rate of success, should we close them? Or, how about educational programs in prisons? The vast majority of cons in prison go back into prison. Why waste all that money? For that matter, why have any rehabilitation, becuase, its not much more successful than the 17%. OH, and lookie here, look at how few people really do succeeded despite inner city improvement programs. Why not shut those down? In fact, even this Kyoto treaty you guys keep pushing has a lower success rate. You keep arguing for the US to join Kyoto, when, I doubt 7% of the Kyoto countries will really hit their targets without moving the 1990 baseline and clever accounting tricks (as Europe keeps doing). So obviously that's a failure and we shouldn't even bother with that. Has the United Nations stopped 17% of wars that have broken out? Not really. It doesn't do anything. So, we should stop that...
I agree completely. Let's bring the troops home out of IRaq, right now, as 17% is a total failure, and then let's shut down every federal program that does not have a 17% success rate.
If we give the Pentagon a giant space laser, why do we have to send troops at all? At very least we should be able to cancel any further developement on bombers with this thing.
Well, if we didn't plan on occupying a region, you would be correct. I agree with you on the bombers. No need for manned combat aircraft when you have a giant death ray overhead. I think the F-22 will be the last class of manned fighter we'll ever build.
Being pro-American is NOT equal to American exceptionalism. Being pro-American also does NOT mean other countries have to be crushed so that we can dominate. What sort of high school bully environment did you use to form your view of the world?
Like I said, you don't want America to be the best.
Unfortunately the idiot sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has not done any of these things. You can't just cut taxes, spout some words about freedom, and hope that things will magically work out.
Um, it would be nice if you could spare the rhetoric and check your numbers a bit. Bush has the most liberal president since Lyndon Johnson. Not even your prized Bill Clinton sought and got the kind of increases in spending in education, health care, and scientific research that Bush has. Despite left wing lies to the contrary, virtually every category of federal technical spending has greatly outpaced the rate of inflation. Indeed, for all of the talk about Bush having a war on science, he's spent far more on it than Clinton even dreamed. Even excluding military and entitlement spending, Bush has presided over the biggest expansion of federal investment in decades.
Let's just run down some of the economically strategic things Bush has funded: coal to liquids, carbon sequestration from coal, ethanol from corn, ethanol from non-corn sources such as switchgrass, new kinds of nuclear power, participation in ITER's fusion research, our own local fusion research such as the sort going on at Los Alamos, and more. Bush is spending a mountain on energy. In fact, I would not be surprised if a lot of these solar cell breakthroughs that have been reported over the last few weeks are federally funded - meaning the Bush Administration somewhere along the way is pumping money into solar cells too. Clinton, by contrast, basically did nothing for alternative energy.
Despite much criticism, Bush has turned missile defense into a workable reality. One could theoretically make the argument that it doesn't matter if a rogue state gets a simple missile, if we could shoot it down. If anything prevented a war with Iran, it was that we have been shooting down ICBMs in test. We have ships that can do boost phase interceptions with an upgraded AEGIS system, a theater ballistic missile interception capability, interception of even RPG and mortars rockets with lasers, and we also finally have a system that can do high altitude interception of ICBMS with kinetic vehicles. Sure, this is a military thing, but, there's a huge number of spinoffs as well. First off, lasers have gotten a lot more powerful, a key thing needed to make space based solar power a reality. Secondly, you have all sorts of the new materials needed to make something steerable at mach 17, paving open the way to practical someday space plane.
Bush will just about have the space station wrapped up at the end of his term, and put the USA firmly down the path of going back to the moon. He has sent the FIRST probe to go and get more pictures of Pluto than the six pixels Hubble gets. He is sending probes to investigate the Asteroid Ceres... paving the way to get resources from space rather than fight for them at home.
Under Bush, funding for public schools is higher than it has ever been. Similarly, Bush has increased as much as possible the number of H1-B visas to allow the best and brightest from around the world to come to the United States. Had Bush's vision for immigration reform been not so foolishly derailed by his own party, the USA would have had immigration guidelines that rank countries not based on their social need, but, based on economic need to the USA... so rather than stacking things in favor of farmers from poor countries, we would stack things in favor of Phds from richer countries.
Bush's capital gains and income tax cuts proved to be the precise tonic needed to keep the economy rolling. Whereas Clinton's economy was powered essentially by financial speculation and marketing, Bush's economy is m
I know this may sound crazy, but the achilles heel of the US military is its fuel. Forget about the obvious guzzlers - like gas turbine warships and fighter jets, just look at the US Army, where its lightest and most fuel efficient fighting vehicle is a frigging Hummer. And then radios and combat centers and all of the communications, artillery and other infrastructure require generators, and hence even more fuel. I think the US Army blows through more fuel today in a month then the whole Army did during all of World War II. It's really a staggering problem... you have to have a lot of infrastructure to move all that fuel around, and all that infrastructure comes at a heavy, heavy price.
If you could have some sort of space based system beaming massive amounts of energy down to the ground, you could theoretically have a mobile receiving station, you could think about electric powered transport to replace things like Hummers, power all the command and control electronics, and probably also do electromagnetic artillery rather than conventional artillery. I imagine you'd have to have some seriously powerful batteries to move a tank with an electric motor, but, you even still, the weight savings in all the other stuff could at least help keep your MBTs moving. Perhaps you could, domestically, produce tank and jet fuel with coal to liquids, and still ship -that- via normal transport, in the interim. Or, you rethink your army so that you basically have a lighter force but with genuinely awesome artillery to back it up... if all you had to do was transport kinetic slugs, and not heavy shells, you could throw a lot more destructive power at an enemy.