Dogfights will continue, but in much smaller numbers. The chances of seeing a WW2-style furball are very small, but people have been predicting the end of the dogfight since the introduction of the air-to-air missile. This led to a deadly mistake on the F-4 when it was designed without a gun, leaving crews without a weapon when inside Sidewinder engagement range, or when out of missiles. This was remedied with a gun pod (taking a valuable weapons store with it) and later with an integral gun, but it was a lesson well-learned.
Since the end of Vietnam, there have been a few dogfights, including at least one against Libyan fighters once the Libyans lit up their seekers. In the initial invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm, until the Iraqis learned how outclassed they were and began fleeing to Iran, there were numerous dogfights against inbound fighters, despite expectations that the Iraqis would all be taken care of with long- and medium-range missiles. And smaller countries that do not use AWACS (or don't use it effectively) can engage in dogfights because they can still be surprised by enemy fighters. If India and Pakistan ever pull the trigger again, there will probably be some interesting tussles there.
You're right about the primary role of fighters being interceptors, but ever since radar was invented, that has been a growing role. The visual patrol is fairly rare these days, but that doesn't doom the dogfight to the backwoods of history -- just a less-likely event. And besides, any time you get a few highly-charged people together in high-performance aircraft designed for the mere chance of a dogfight, you'll get them zipping around through maneuvers... just for practice, of course.
It's a combined problem. Many of them were born here and speak English, but have trouble keeping up because they can move several times per year as their parents follow the harvests. Those that arrive late have problems that anyone can have going into a new country.
Children of military members tend to have a better support structure, and are less likely to move several times per year, every year. (I'm not saying it's not unheard-of, just less likely). You may also keep better social ties (this is case-by-case) depending on how many others are reassigned with the parents, or if the entire unit moves. Children of migrants, however, have scant time to make friends, and many of them avoid doing it because of the emotional pain involved in so many broken friendships, and this hurts them even more as they retract further into their self-made shells. By the time they reach their teens, if they haven't dropped out already, many of them are in the fields trying to earn some extra money for the family, something that is far less common than in military families.
Discipline is also better for military families, who often put a premium on the education of their children. The priorities are not the same for migrant families, for whom outright survival often takes priority.
The two situations are similar in some aspects, but are different enough that they are not easily compared.
I have no family under me to keep me here. I do, however, have an expensive training program at work to justify.:) I can't just up and leave -- it just doesn't seem right, and it may hurt my coworkers in the long run, most of whom I respect. However, once that project is out of the way, and my car is paid off (that's another $500 per month in my pocket), then all bets are off. My monthly costs plummet, and I'm able to move more freely.
I'm up in Orange County, so perhaps I don't get things as bad as you, but I still look around and wonder why I'm still here. Stubbornness? Sticktoitiveness (as you suggested)? I'm not sure. But there are other states that make me happier, and since the State of California seems to be heading towards, if not in, a state of denial, I'm thinking that I could do better elsewhere.
As I recall, the deregulation was passed while Pete Wilson (a Republican) was in the governor's chair. As much as I'm in favor of deregulation in concept, the law that was passed was badly broken, especially sinced it forced the major electric suppliers to sell off many of their power generation assets, which sort of goes against the spirit of deregulation when you're regulating what the power companies can do.
Anyway, California is an odd state, with more Democrats than anything else, but also a larger independent/decline-to-state fraction than most states. It's why, despite a generally left-leaning population, four of the last six governors have been Republican, going back to Reagan. California Republicans tend to be a little different from what one might consider mainstream Republicans, though, tending to run more towards the middle of the road (Bob Dornan notwithstanding).
Half of the state budget is mandated to go to education. The problem, however, is that the state's schools often struggle with enormous bureaucracies and a population that includes high numbers of children of both legal and illegal migrants, which have their own unique set of difficulties as they can move at odd points in the school year, making it difficult to keep them up to par. At $8000 or so per student average funding, there's no reason that there should be declared a funding shortfall. However, much gets eaten up in helping these below-average students.
There's no problem with revenues. The problem lies with the Legislature's insistence on spending every dime of new income without paying off old debts. The last couple of years have seen unexpected jumps in revenue in the order of billions of dollars. Half of it has to go to education, but the other half is immediately seized for pet projects. Existing pet projects are already hurting things (look at the number of panels that meet only a few times a month -- if that often -- and pay the members tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for very little actual work), and they just add more.
Part of me just wants to quit the state. For the moment, I will be voting to re-elect the governor, because as much as I want to see Terminator 4 and True Lies 2, I fear the consequences of Angelides in office more than I want to see new movies. Having a Republican in office at least offers a semblance of a bulwark against the Democrat-controlled Legislature's drive to ruin the state.
Are you saying I'm wrong and that this isn't the work of california democrats desperate to see Schwarzenegger replaced?
If by 'California Democrats' you mean 'the Phil Angelides campaign,' then you are correct regarding desperation. However, much like the Republicans in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, the Democrats just don't have anyone they want to put forward that is a strong alternative to the Schwarzeneggar.
Actually, most of the Democrats I know think that the LA Times made far too big a deal about this, and the couple that I've talked to in the last few hours think that Angelides is an idiot if he knew about this before it was first reported, and that if he really didn't know about this and disapproves and has a backbone that he'll have a press conference tomorrow where he will fire the two who downloaded the clip for poor ethics. However, no one really expects that, especially since Angelides spoke out when the reports first appeared a few days ago, claiming that it was "deeply offensive to all Californians." Apparently, I'm not a Californian, despite living here my entire 30+ years of existence, nor is any person with whom I've discussed this, despite their residence in California, sometimes for much longer than I've been here.
As for the CHP running the investigation, it's not at all surprising. What we refer to as the Highway Patrol is what other states call State Police.
The two plants are still in the tweaking phase, and there are a number of potential customers who are waiting for the longer-term results. Europe has expressed some interest in it as well to help deal with the growing biodiesel demand.
That's thermal depolymerization. There are two plants right now, the larger one at the Butterball Turkey Plant in Carthage, MO, which is fed turkey offal. It had been shut down on several occasions due to complaints about odors coming from the plant, some of which were of dubious accuracy, but those concerns have been addresses now. The major end-product is roughly the equivalent of lightweight heating oil or diesel fuel, with some water, methane (which is used to power the process), carbon black, and minerals as additional byproduct. There was also an issue of cost of the petroleum product (about $80 per barrel) until Congress approved TDP for a $1 per gallon tax credit as a biofuel source.
However, TDP needs to be tweaked for each installation: what works for turkey offal will probably not work as well for sewage or tires. However, the final byproduct is arguably more useful than simply providing electricity, as it can be shipped up to New England for heating, used in transport, or (I think) further refined to extract other useful products. What you gain in flexibility of end-products, you lose in flexibility of initial installation.
Those will cause more trouble than they're worth for the cable companies. As has been mentioned elsewhere, we're going to be dealing with IPv4 for at least the next 10-20 years, and there is not a significant rush aside from the desire of a large proportion of geeks to see the move.
IPv6 is going to be forced along by the US Dept of Defense, which is pushing to get its networks on IPv6 within the next couple of years. This will cause much of the rest of the federal government to do the same starting with those agencies that work most closely with the military (such as DHS), which in turn have close working relationships with other agencies and will drag them along. States will be pulled into it as a result of their ties with the federal government, and then local governments will be forced to come along for the ride eventually. With all of these ties in place, more ISPs will start directly supporting IPv6.
Incidentally, IPv6 support has only just been added to the DOCSIS standards with the release of 3.0. However, even by 2011, barely more than half of the nationwide cablemodem infrastructure will be DOCSIS 3.0-compliant under current estimates, and that doesn't mean that the cablemodems themselves will be compliant, as DOCSIS 3.0 is backwards-compatible. I'd go for it now if I could, but somehow I suspect that Time-Warner isn't going to have things ready next month.
Brazil has about 60% of the population of the US (185 million to 300 million), and the US has nearly seven times as many motor vehicles per capita as Brazil (about 811 per 1000 people in the US compared to about 121 per 1000 people in Brazil as of 2002). Taking admittedly off-date numbers and combining them nets about 243 million vehicles in the US compared to about 22 million in Brazil. Hence, the US has roughly an order of magnitude more motor vehicles in it than does Brazil, and that is the primary reason why they could switch to sugar cane ethanol.
The flexibility of schedule could become very useful, though. For example, if you have a major test at 10am, not having to get up at 7:30 (or much earlier, if you don't live on or right next to campus) could allow you to be much better rested before taking the test, improving your score. Normally, this results in missing a class, but if it's available for viewing after class -- say, at around 2pm -- then the impact may not be so severe.
Quite true, but initially, many of the loads may be one-way, used to build up the LEO station and the end-point. The returning cars would weigh significantly less than they did when leaving, and so the potential energy would not be as significant. In addition, the use of the nuclear plant on the ground and the solar arrays in space would minimize the need for batteries during night hours.
I don't understand why you think loading or unloading would take weeks, unless you're comparing it to the current processes which involve special packaging to handle the vibrations of rocket liftoff, which would be largely unnecessary with an elevator.
With an average speed of 50km per hour, it would take about ten hours to get to 500km, which could be a waypoint for transfers to other LEO objects. Getting out to 35,000km would take much longer at that velocity (about a month), but even if the cars were limited to such speeds in the atmosphere the speed could probably be accelerated once at least past LEO since friction and turbulence from the atmosphere are no longer any significant issue. At 500km per hour, it would take about a three days, and I'm sure there would be plenty to do along the way. If they can pull off 500km per hour average from the base to LEO, that keeps the travel time to about 40 minutes, which while twice as long as my commute is something I can handle on a frequent basis.
As to powering the unit, a nuclear plant would probably be used to start, and then eventually large solar arrays at differing points along the stretch would come into use, taking over the primary power duties while the nuclear plant remained as a backup.
Finally, the cost comparisons are hard to do. VoidEngineer threw out a trillion dollars as a construction price, but there are some estimates that come in much, much lower, especially since construction would take place at or near the equator -- as little as $20 billion, once the cable technology is there. I don't buy into something that low at this point, but I doubt it would be as high as the price VoidEngineer tossed out, which he said was an arbitrary number. Launch costs right now are significant; for LEO, a Russian Proton can put 44,000 pounds for ~$2000 per pound, the shuttle costs about $8000 per pound, and a Pegasus can cost $15,000 per pound. It's believed by some that it will be nearly impossible to get rocket-based costs below $1000 per pound to LEO with even the biggest launch vehicles. OTOH, a space elevator may be able to take loads into orbit for $100 per pound or less, with eventually dozens of trips per day depending on how it's built.
So let's say it's $100 billion to build, and $10 billion to maintain per year. For the first ten years ($200 billion), it would need to move 200 million pounds to make $1000 per pound. That's an average of about 55,000 pounds per day, or one fully-stocked shuttle launch. But that's not necessarily just putting things up; it can also bring things down, including rotating crews, satellites in need of maintenance that can't be done in space, retrieval of scientific experiments, and perhaps eventually even raw materials from the moon. However, the more trips that are made, the more infrastructure is in space, and the more there will be to do, including adding to the elevator's schedule, further depressing the price. The numbers here are, as with VoidEngineer's, completely arbitrary, but they show how quickly the costs can flatten out.
Microsoft has been working up with OEMs to allow free upgrades to Vista for computers bought from October on through the actual release date. Customers wishing to upgrade will probably be provided free media to perform the upgrade, as I recall that's how it was handled when XP was nearing its release date.
To cover their asses mostly. They dropped the leaflets and then struck the busses and cars of people fleeing.
But why do that when they could just coat the towns with cluster bombs and claim that they were hitting missile launch sites? That is, after all, what you claim Israel to have been Israel's goal -- killing civilians. Why kill four or five in a car or 30 in a bus when they could kill hundreds in a town?
Your words are purely anti-Israel, claiming the worst in them while refusing to acknowledge the actions of Hezbollah at least, and probably many others. I suspect that even if Israel released all prisoners, retreated to the 1967 borders, allowed the Palestinians East Jerusalem as their capital, and negotiated mutually-beneficial access to water, you would still blame Israel for all of the ills in its area of the Middle East.
What I find most amazing about your post is the completely lack of discussion about the links I sent you.
Apparently, you have some difficulty with reading comprehension. Your post to which I responded was to Macthorpe, not me.
I was dealing with what I took to be two incorrect statements on your part, the first regarding cluster munitions, which can, BTW, be precision munitions, as in the CBU-105 munition, submunitions from which target thermal blooms from tanks. So far as I know, those used by Israel were not, and I did explain that I don't care for their use. That said, when targeting multiple launchers spread across a wide location, or when not entirely sure of where the launchers are, tactically speaking cluster munitions are the fastest, easiest, and actually least damaging method of hitting them, because the next level up is something akin to carpet bombing using 500-pound bombs. However, cluster bombs often leave behind munitions that are dangerous for anyone who comes along afterward, and that's why I don't like them, hence no, I am not OK with the military targeting civilians.
Besides, if they were targeting civilians, why would they have dropped leaflets indicating that airstrikes would come soon, and that civilians should get out of town to avoid harm?
There have been hundreds of violations of lebanese sovereignty by israel since then.... Hezbollah has not retaliated and are keeping to their committment.
And there have been none at all of Israel's sovereignty? Lebanon had a responsibility to disarm all militias. They not only completely failed to disarm Hezbollah, but they allowed additional weapons, including some very advanced missiles, to cross the border to boost their armament levels. How often did Hezbollah violate Israel's borders to attack and kidnap Israeli soldiers and even civilians? How often were the Israeli incursions about which you complain a result of responding to Hezbollah provocations?
One of Hezbollah's commitments as part of the cease-fire was to disarm, but the very next day, Sheik Nasrallah said he would not disarm, and that he would fight attempts by anyone -- Israel, the UN, even Lebanon -- to disarm Hezbollah. Israel claims to have been responding to provocations, including numerous instances of armed Hezbollah fighters approaching static Israeli positions in a threatening manner.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. The response? Attacks from Hezbollah on northern Israel. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, forcibly removing some of its own people from the outposts last year. The result? Attacks from the Gaza Strip on Israeli soil. Israel now wants to withdraw from much of the West Bank. What are the chances that this will result in more attacks against Israel?
I'm wondering, do you believe that if Israel withdraws to the Blue Line (where they were when the kidnapping took place) and stays there, then Hezbollah will live in peace with them forever more?
Furthermore Israel USED CLUSTER BOMBS INSIDE CITIES [cnn.com] which are designed to cause maximum damage to civillians.
No, they're not. They're designed primarily to spread damage capabilities against lightly- or non-armored targets over a maximum area per weapon. They were intended to deal with soft targets that are often spread out or in difficult-to-reach locations such as in hilly or mountainous terrain, or which spread over a large area, such as happened with Soviet-era SAM bases, which were designed such that a single powerful bomb could not destroy the entire complex, whereas one cluster bomb had a decent chance of damaging every launcher to such an extent as to render the location useless. This also makes them useful against artillery, which includes rocket artillery, which Hezbollah makes great use of, firing from scattered locations.
They are, of course, quite effective against civilians, since civilians are rarely well-armored, but this is incidental. That Israel used them bothers me greatly, as I am generally in favor of the removal from service of the common dumb weapons that make up cluster munitions, and was quite pleased when the US began doing so some time ago. From a moral perspective, I would rather have seen their use avoided, but from a tactical perspective, it's easy to see their utility.
"I think there is an equal amount of culpability to be shared by all sides in this."
Really? Equal? Exactly 50/50? Does the fact that hezbollah killed more soldiers then civillians and israel killed more civillians then soldiers make a difference at all?
Israel withdrew completely from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN. Later, every militia group in Lebanon disarmed -- except for Hezbollah. Hezbollah continued periodic attacks against Israel for six years, including attacking outposts and patrols, kidnapping soldiers, and the occasional rocket attack into northern Israel, on the fictional basis that Israel had not completed its withdrawal because it was still in the Shebaa Farms area, a location that no map in the last century has showed as part of Lebanon, save for one that conveniently showed up in 2000 and which was claimed to have dated from the 1960s, and which was contradicted by official Lebanese and Syrian maps printed over the ensuing decades.
Hezbollah views Israel as a snake. Well, if you keep prodding a snake that has nowhere to which it can retreat, at some point it will lash out, and Hezbollah claimed surprise that it did so, suggesting that the response was unprovoked. While it's possible to claim that Israel's response was out of scale (and I do think that it was), I don't think anyone can reasonably believe that Israel was completely unprovoked.
And for those that think that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians and not causing collateral damage when attempting to deal with Hezbollah infrastructure, consider that an average of 30 Lebanese (including Hezbollah fighters) were killed each day over the course of the war. If Israel was capable of killing dozens with a single bomb, and civilians were what Israel was after, then why was the overall count not in the several tens of thousands? If Israel was capable of hitting Hezbollah bunkers, then why did it not hit a few dozen civilian bunkers, where dozens or hundreds could have been killed in short order?
Lebanon is in a very poor position. Due to both the unwillingness of the Lebanese government and the world to force a disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has remained a pawn, even after Syria's withdrawal, in a larger game of which most of its people want no part. It is the only state in the Middle East that has significant fractional percentages of multiple religions living largely peacefully in the same set of borders. Muslims (Sunni and Shiite), Druze, Christians, and (until recently) even Jews lived there. I see more hope in a better Middle East in Lebanon than I do in Israel. Until Lebanon can be helped to rid itself of Hezbollah, it will remain as a pawn, and subject to outside interference from Israel, Iran, and Syria, and its people will continue to suffer.
Not to me, no, it's not creepy. In fact, I rather like the idea, because it suggests the possibility of better quality meat (not just beef, but pretty much anything) at a lower price and better availability. It might even be possible to set up such labs in areas that are severely protein and mineral deficient, and produce it rapidly enough to enable the inclusion of a reasonable quantity of meat in the diet for those that want it as an everyday thing.
It does. Certain species of the mantis shrimp are able to strike at a speed of up to 23m/s, whereas the range listed here is 35m/s to 65m/s.
The mantis shrimp is able to manage an acceleration of 10,500g and achieve a force of 1500N at impact. I wonder what the acceleration and force are for this ant. Any physics experts want to chime in?
The lower gravity does not change the value of the gold, because the value is based on the mass, which is different from the weight. The value would remain the same. You don't pay less for gold because you buy it from some guy on a mountain.
And I know of people who will pay more for a looney than it's worth, because it's not a common coin outside of Canada, unlike the Canadian pennies that flood the US.
Gold is at about $625 per troy ounce or 480 grains, or about $1.30 per grain. A troy pound is 12 ounces or 5760 grains, whereas an avoirdupois pound, used in launch masses, is 7000 grains, so one avoirdupois pound of gold is worth about $9100.
I suspect retrieving dissolved gold from the ocean would be more cost-effective.
You raise a good point. I had been referencing one of the most simplistic gripes about licenses, but in the interests of completeness, here are Microsoft's shared-source licenses:
These have some restrictions in them that many devs would find onerous, but they're much more open than the standard EULA. A license covering use of the Windows source code (they do exist) are probably much longer and use a 3-ring binder, and are somewhat unique to each company or group involved as lawyers would certainly be participating in the drafting of the license.
I think a big part of the issue is that the GPLv3 can sound more like a manifesto than a license. Maybe I'm unusual in this respect, but I find it easier to read Microsoft's licenses than the GPLv3, partially because it's more straightforward in how it is written (regardless of what is written). I read GPLv2 for the first time several years ago, and it was fairly quick and to the point. When I read the GPLv3 (including reviewing the latest revision this morning), I found it to be tedious and somewhat lecturing (sort of the way that RMS comes off).
I understand and respect what it's trying to do, and I agree with most of the goals (though I do see possible value in some uses of DRM, and hence do not agree with that section), but I think the license as a whole needs a clean-up and simplification. It's trying to catch every visible instance where it was felt that GPLv2 failed, and in doing so may end up being too specific and limiting, unable to adapt to the needs of the development community.
In addition (and this is admittedly a bit trivial), I've heard complaints here for years about the length of Microsoft EULAs, but GPLv3 is getting up there in length, too. As a quick comparison of some common licenses:
Apache v1.1: ~350 words
Apache v2.0: ~1600 words
BSD License: ~360 words
GPLv2: ~3000 words
GPLv3: ~4500 words
Microsoft MSDN License: ~4700 words
Microsoft Windows XP EULA: ~5200 words
MIT License: ~170 words
MPL 1.1: ~3700 words (including license exhibit)
I guess in summary, my feeling is that while GPLv2 could use some tweaks to handle some oddities, an entirely new version is not necessary. I don't think I'm alone in opining that it would be better to have seen GPLv2.1 than 3.0.
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Dogfights will continue, but in much smaller numbers. The chances of seeing a WW2-style furball are very small, but people have been predicting the end of the dogfight since the introduction of the air-to-air missile. This led to a deadly mistake on the F-4 when it was designed without a gun, leaving crews without a weapon when inside Sidewinder engagement range, or when out of missiles. This was remedied with a gun pod (taking a valuable weapons store with it) and later with an integral gun, but it was a lesson well-learned.
Since the end of Vietnam, there have been a few dogfights, including at least one against Libyan fighters once the Libyans lit up their seekers. In the initial invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm, until the Iraqis learned how outclassed they were and began fleeing to Iran, there were numerous dogfights against inbound fighters, despite expectations that the Iraqis would all be taken care of with long- and medium-range missiles. And smaller countries that do not use AWACS (or don't use it effectively) can engage in dogfights because they can still be surprised by enemy fighters. If India and Pakistan ever pull the trigger again, there will probably be some interesting tussles there.
You're right about the primary role of fighters being interceptors, but ever since radar was invented, that has been a growing role. The visual patrol is fairly rare these days, but that doesn't doom the dogfight to the backwoods of history -- just a less-likely event. And besides, any time you get a few highly-charged people together in high-performance aircraft designed for the mere chance of a dogfight, you'll get them zipping around through maneuvers... just for practice, of course.
It's a combined problem. Many of them were born here and speak English, but have trouble keeping up because they can move several times per year as their parents follow the harvests. Those that arrive late have problems that anyone can have going into a new country.
Children of military members tend to have a better support structure, and are less likely to move several times per year, every year. (I'm not saying it's not unheard-of, just less likely). You may also keep better social ties (this is case-by-case) depending on how many others are reassigned with the parents, or if the entire unit moves. Children of migrants, however, have scant time to make friends, and many of them avoid doing it because of the emotional pain involved in so many broken friendships, and this hurts them even more as they retract further into their self-made shells. By the time they reach their teens, if they haven't dropped out already, many of them are in the fields trying to earn some extra money for the family, something that is far less common than in military families.
Discipline is also better for military families, who often put a premium on the education of their children. The priorities are not the same for migrant families, for whom outright survival often takes priority.
The two situations are similar in some aspects, but are different enough that they are not easily compared.
I have no family under me to keep me here. I do, however, have an expensive training program at work to justify. :) I can't just up and leave -- it just doesn't seem right, and it may hurt my coworkers in the long run, most of whom I respect. However, once that project is out of the way, and my car is paid off (that's another $500 per month in my pocket), then all bets are off. My monthly costs plummet, and I'm able to move more freely.
I'm up in Orange County, so perhaps I don't get things as bad as you, but I still look around and wonder why I'm still here. Stubbornness? Sticktoitiveness (as you suggested)? I'm not sure. But there are other states that make me happier, and since the State of California seems to be heading towards, if not in, a state of denial, I'm thinking that I could do better elsewhere.
As I recall, the deregulation was passed while Pete Wilson (a Republican) was in the governor's chair. As much as I'm in favor of deregulation in concept, the law that was passed was badly broken, especially sinced it forced the major electric suppliers to sell off many of their power generation assets, which sort of goes against the spirit of deregulation when you're regulating what the power companies can do.
Anyway, California is an odd state, with more Democrats than anything else, but also a larger independent/decline-to-state fraction than most states. It's why, despite a generally left-leaning population, four of the last six governors have been Republican, going back to Reagan. California Republicans tend to be a little different from what one might consider mainstream Republicans, though, tending to run more towards the middle of the road (Bob Dornan notwithstanding).
Half of the state budget is mandated to go to education. The problem, however, is that the state's schools often struggle with enormous bureaucracies and a population that includes high numbers of children of both legal and illegal migrants, which have their own unique set of difficulties as they can move at odd points in the school year, making it difficult to keep them up to par. At $8000 or so per student average funding, there's no reason that there should be declared a funding shortfall. However, much gets eaten up in helping these below-average students.
There's no problem with revenues. The problem lies with the Legislature's insistence on spending every dime of new income without paying off old debts. The last couple of years have seen unexpected jumps in revenue in the order of billions of dollars. Half of it has to go to education, but the other half is immediately seized for pet projects. Existing pet projects are already hurting things (look at the number of panels that meet only a few times a month -- if that often -- and pay the members tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for very little actual work), and they just add more.
Part of me just wants to quit the state. For the moment, I will be voting to re-elect the governor, because as much as I want to see Terminator 4 and True Lies 2, I fear the consequences of Angelides in office more than I want to see new movies. Having a Republican in office at least offers a semblance of a bulwark against the Democrat-controlled Legislature's drive to ruin the state.
Are you saying I'm wrong and that this isn't the work of california democrats desperate to see Schwarzenegger replaced?
If by 'California Democrats' you mean 'the Phil Angelides campaign,' then you are correct regarding desperation. However, much like the Republicans in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, the Democrats just don't have anyone they want to put forward that is a strong alternative to the Schwarzeneggar.
Actually, most of the Democrats I know think that the LA Times made far too big a deal about this, and the couple that I've talked to in the last few hours think that Angelides is an idiot if he knew about this before it was first reported, and that if he really didn't know about this and disapproves and has a backbone that he'll have a press conference tomorrow where he will fire the two who downloaded the clip for poor ethics. However, no one really expects that, especially since Angelides spoke out when the reports first appeared a few days ago, claiming that it was "deeply offensive to all Californians." Apparently, I'm not a Californian, despite living here my entire 30+ years of existence, nor is any person with whom I've discussed this, despite their residence in California, sometimes for much longer than I've been here.
As for the CHP running the investigation, it's not at all surprising. What we refer to as the Highway Patrol is what other states call State Police.
The two plants are still in the tweaking phase, and there are a number of potential customers who are waiting for the longer-term results. Europe has expressed some interest in it as well to help deal with the growing biodiesel demand.
That's thermal depolymerization. There are two plants right now, the larger one at the Butterball Turkey Plant in Carthage, MO, which is fed turkey offal. It had been shut down on several occasions due to complaints about odors coming from the plant, some of which were of dubious accuracy, but those concerns have been addresses now. The major end-product is roughly the equivalent of lightweight heating oil or diesel fuel, with some water, methane (which is used to power the process), carbon black, and minerals as additional byproduct. There was also an issue of cost of the petroleum product (about $80 per barrel) until Congress approved TDP for a $1 per gallon tax credit as a biofuel source.
However, TDP needs to be tweaked for each installation: what works for turkey offal will probably not work as well for sewage or tires. However, the final byproduct is arguably more useful than simply providing electricity, as it can be shipped up to New England for heating, used in transport, or (I think) further refined to extract other useful products. What you gain in flexibility of end-products, you lose in flexibility of initial installation.
Those will cause more trouble than they're worth for the cable companies. As has been mentioned elsewhere, we're going to be dealing with IPv4 for at least the next 10-20 years, and there is not a significant rush aside from the desire of a large proportion of geeks to see the move.
IPv6 is going to be forced along by the US Dept of Defense, which is pushing to get its networks on IPv6 within the next couple of years. This will cause much of the rest of the federal government to do the same starting with those agencies that work most closely with the military (such as DHS), which in turn have close working relationships with other agencies and will drag them along. States will be pulled into it as a result of their ties with the federal government, and then local governments will be forced to come along for the ride eventually. With all of these ties in place, more ISPs will start directly supporting IPv6.
Incidentally, IPv6 support has only just been added to the DOCSIS standards with the release of 3.0. However, even by 2011, barely more than half of the nationwide cablemodem infrastructure will be DOCSIS 3.0-compliant under current estimates, and that doesn't mean that the cablemodems themselves will be compliant, as DOCSIS 3.0 is backwards-compatible. I'd go for it now if I could, but somehow I suspect that Time-Warner isn't going to have things ready next month.
Brazil has about 60% of the population of the US (185 million to 300 million), and the US has nearly seven times as many motor vehicles per capita as Brazil (about 811 per 1000 people in the US compared to about 121 per 1000 people in Brazil as of 2002). Taking admittedly off-date numbers and combining them nets about 243 million vehicles in the US compared to about 22 million in Brazil. Hence, the US has roughly an order of magnitude more motor vehicles in it than does Brazil, and that is the primary reason why they could switch to sugar cane ethanol.
The flexibility of schedule could become very useful, though. For example, if you have a major test at 10am, not having to get up at 7:30 (or much earlier, if you don't live on or right next to campus) could allow you to be much better rested before taking the test, improving your score. Normally, this results in missing a class, but if it's available for viewing after class -- say, at around 2pm -- then the impact may not be so severe.
Quite true, but initially, many of the loads may be one-way, used to build up the LEO station and the end-point. The returning cars would weigh significantly less than they did when leaving, and so the potential energy would not be as significant. In addition, the use of the nuclear plant on the ground and the solar arrays in space would minimize the need for batteries during night hours.
I don't understand why you think loading or unloading would take weeks, unless you're comparing it to the current processes which involve special packaging to handle the vibrations of rocket liftoff, which would be largely unnecessary with an elevator.
With an average speed of 50km per hour, it would take about ten hours to get to 500km, which could be a waypoint for transfers to other LEO objects. Getting out to 35,000km would take much longer at that velocity (about a month), but even if the cars were limited to such speeds in the atmosphere the speed could probably be accelerated once at least past LEO since friction and turbulence from the atmosphere are no longer any significant issue. At 500km per hour, it would take about a three days, and I'm sure there would be plenty to do along the way. If they can pull off 500km per hour average from the base to LEO, that keeps the travel time to about 40 minutes, which while twice as long as my commute is something I can handle on a frequent basis.
As to powering the unit, a nuclear plant would probably be used to start, and then eventually large solar arrays at differing points along the stretch would come into use, taking over the primary power duties while the nuclear plant remained as a backup.
Finally, the cost comparisons are hard to do. VoidEngineer threw out a trillion dollars as a construction price, but there are some estimates that come in much, much lower, especially since construction would take place at or near the equator -- as little as $20 billion, once the cable technology is there. I don't buy into something that low at this point, but I doubt it would be as high as the price VoidEngineer tossed out, which he said was an arbitrary number. Launch costs right now are significant; for LEO, a Russian Proton can put 44,000 pounds for ~$2000 per pound, the shuttle costs about $8000 per pound, and a Pegasus can cost $15,000 per pound. It's believed by some that it will be nearly impossible to get rocket-based costs below $1000 per pound to LEO with even the biggest launch vehicles. OTOH, a space elevator may be able to take loads into orbit for $100 per pound or less, with eventually dozens of trips per day depending on how it's built.
So let's say it's $100 billion to build, and $10 billion to maintain per year. For the first ten years ($200 billion), it would need to move 200 million pounds to make $1000 per pound. That's an average of about 55,000 pounds per day, or one fully-stocked shuttle launch. But that's not necessarily just putting things up; it can also bring things down, including rotating crews, satellites in need of maintenance that can't be done in space, retrieval of scientific experiments, and perhaps eventually even raw materials from the moon. However, the more trips that are made, the more infrastructure is in space, and the more there will be to do, including adding to the elevator's schedule, further depressing the price. The numbers here are, as with VoidEngineer's, completely arbitrary, but they show how quickly the costs can flatten out.
Microsoft has been working up with OEMs to allow free upgrades to Vista for computers bought from October on through the actual release date. Customers wishing to upgrade will probably be provided free media to perform the upgrade, as I recall that's how it was handled when XP was nearing its release date.
But why do that when they could just coat the towns with cluster bombs and claim that they were hitting missile launch sites? That is, after all, what you claim Israel to have been Israel's goal -- killing civilians. Why kill four or five in a car or 30 in a bus when they could kill hundreds in a town?
Your words are purely anti-Israel, claiming the worst in them while refusing to acknowledge the actions of Hezbollah at least, and probably many others. I suspect that even if Israel released all prisoners, retreated to the 1967 borders, allowed the Palestinians East Jerusalem as their capital, and negotiated mutually-beneficial access to water, you would still blame Israel for all of the ills in its area of the Middle East.
Apparently, you have some difficulty with reading comprehension. Your post to which I responded was to Macthorpe, not me.
I was dealing with what I took to be two incorrect statements on your part, the first regarding cluster munitions, which can, BTW, be precision munitions, as in the CBU-105 munition, submunitions from which target thermal blooms from tanks. So far as I know, those used by Israel were not, and I did explain that I don't care for their use. That said, when targeting multiple launchers spread across a wide location, or when not entirely sure of where the launchers are, tactically speaking cluster munitions are the fastest, easiest, and actually least damaging method of hitting them, because the next level up is something akin to carpet bombing using 500-pound bombs. However, cluster bombs often leave behind munitions that are dangerous for anyone who comes along afterward, and that's why I don't like them, hence no, I am not OK with the military targeting civilians.
Besides, if they were targeting civilians, why would they have dropped leaflets indicating that airstrikes would come soon, and that civilians should get out of town to avoid harm?
And there have been none at all of Israel's sovereignty? Lebanon had a responsibility to disarm all militias. They not only completely failed to disarm Hezbollah, but they allowed additional weapons, including some very advanced missiles, to cross the border to boost their armament levels. How often did Hezbollah violate Israel's borders to attack and kidnap Israeli soldiers and even civilians? How often were the Israeli incursions about which you complain a result of responding to Hezbollah provocations?
One of Hezbollah's commitments as part of the cease-fire was to disarm, but the very next day, Sheik Nasrallah said he would not disarm, and that he would fight attempts by anyone -- Israel, the UN, even Lebanon -- to disarm Hezbollah. Israel claims to have been responding to provocations, including numerous instances of armed Hezbollah fighters approaching static Israeli positions in a threatening manner.
Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. The response? Attacks from Hezbollah on northern Israel. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, forcibly removing some of its own people from the outposts last year. The result? Attacks from the Gaza Strip on Israeli soil. Israel now wants to withdraw from much of the West Bank. What are the chances that this will result in more attacks against Israel?
I'm wondering, do you believe that if Israel withdraws to the Blue Line (where they were when the kidnapping took place) and stays there, then Hezbollah will live in peace with them forever more?
No, they're not. They're designed primarily to spread damage capabilities against lightly- or non-armored targets over a maximum area per weapon. They were intended to deal with soft targets that are often spread out or in difficult-to-reach locations such as in hilly or mountainous terrain, or which spread over a large area, such as happened with Soviet-era SAM bases, which were designed such that a single powerful bomb could not destroy the entire complex, whereas one cluster bomb had a decent chance of damaging every launcher to such an extent as to render the location useless. This also makes them useful against artillery, which includes rocket artillery, which Hezbollah makes great use of, firing from scattered locations.
They are, of course, quite effective against civilians, since civilians are rarely well-armored, but this is incidental. That Israel used them bothers me greatly, as I am generally in favor of the removal from service of the common dumb weapons that make up cluster munitions, and was quite pleased when the US began doing so some time ago. From a moral perspective, I would rather have seen their use avoided, but from a tactical perspective, it's easy to see their utility.
Israel withdrew completely from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN. Later, every militia group in Lebanon disarmed -- except for Hezbollah. Hezbollah continued periodic attacks against Israel for six years, including attacking outposts and patrols, kidnapping soldiers, and the occasional rocket attack into northern Israel, on the fictional basis that Israel had not completed its withdrawal because it was still in the Shebaa Farms area, a location that no map in the last century has showed as part of Lebanon, save for one that conveniently showed up in 2000 and which was claimed to have dated from the 1960s, and which was contradicted by official Lebanese and Syrian maps printed over the ensuing decades.
Hezbollah views Israel as a snake. Well, if you keep prodding a snake that has nowhere to which it can retreat, at some point it will lash out, and Hezbollah claimed surprise that it did so, suggesting that the response was unprovoked. While it's possible to claim that Israel's response was out of scale (and I do think that it was), I don't think anyone can reasonably believe that Israel was completely unprovoked.
And for those that think that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians and not causing collateral damage when attempting to deal with Hezbollah infrastructure, consider that an average of 30 Lebanese (including Hezbollah fighters) were killed each day over the course of the war. If Israel was capable of killing dozens with a single bomb, and civilians were what Israel was after, then why was the overall count not in the several tens of thousands? If Israel was capable of hitting Hezbollah bunkers, then why did it not hit a few dozen civilian bunkers, where dozens or hundreds could have been killed in short order?
Lebanon is in a very poor position. Due to both the unwillingness of the Lebanese government and the world to force a disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has remained a pawn, even after Syria's withdrawal, in a larger game of which most of its people want no part. It is the only state in the Middle East that has significant fractional percentages of multiple religions living largely peacefully in the same set of borders. Muslims (Sunni and Shiite), Druze, Christians, and (until recently) even Jews lived there. I see more hope in a better Middle East in Lebanon than I do in Israel. Until Lebanon can be helped to rid itself of Hezbollah, it will remain as a pawn, and subject to outside interference from Israel, Iran, and Syria, and its people will continue to suffer.
Not to me, no, it's not creepy. In fact, I rather like the idea, because it suggests the possibility of better quality meat (not just beef, but pretty much anything) at a lower price and better availability. It might even be possible to set up such labs in areas that are severely protein and mineral deficient, and produce it rapidly enough to enable the inclusion of a reasonable quantity of meat in the diet for those that want it as an everyday thing.
It does. Certain species of the mantis shrimp are able to strike at a speed of up to 23m/s, whereas the range listed here is 35m/s to 65m/s.
The mantis shrimp is able to manage an acceleration of 10,500g and achieve a force of 1500N at impact. I wonder what the acceleration and force are for this ant. Any physics experts want to chime in?
I would imagine that such devices would be recording all sorts of information including vertical acceleration
Someone better tell Bo and Luke Duke to stay away from the new Chargers.
The lower gravity does not change the value of the gold, because the value is based on the mass, which is different from the weight. The value would remain the same. You don't pay less for gold because you buy it from some guy on a mountain.
And I know of people who will pay more for a looney than it's worth, because it's not a common coin outside of Canada, unlike the Canadian pennies that flood the US.
Gold is at about $625 per troy ounce or 480 grains, or about $1.30 per grain. A troy pound is 12 ounces or 5760 grains, whereas an avoirdupois pound, used in launch masses, is 7000 grains, so one avoirdupois pound of gold is worth about $9100.
I suspect retrieving dissolved gold from the ocean would be more cost-effective.
These have some restrictions in them that many devs would find onerous, but they're much more open than the standard EULA. A license covering use of the Windows source code (they do exist) are probably much longer and use a 3-ring binder, and are somewhat unique to each company or group involved as lawyers would certainly be participating in the drafting of the license.
I understand and respect what it's trying to do, and I agree with most of the goals (though I do see possible value in some uses of DRM, and hence do not agree with that section), but I think the license as a whole needs a clean-up and simplification. It's trying to catch every visible instance where it was felt that GPLv2 failed, and in doing so may end up being too specific and limiting, unable to adapt to the needs of the development community.
In addition (and this is admittedly a bit trivial), I've heard complaints here for years about the length of Microsoft EULAs, but GPLv3 is getting up there in length, too. As a quick comparison of some common licenses:
I guess in summary, my feeling is that while GPLv2 could use some tweaks to handle some oddities, an entirely new version is not necessary. I don't think I'm alone in opining that it would be better to have seen GPLv2.1 than 3.0.