That's not a liberal brainwashing, it's just a poor knowledge of older history. They see that Republicans are the ones who are having a spastic attack over a black president and attempting voter suppression tactics and don't realize that the parties swapped roles in the 60's over the Civil Rights Act. So they figure Lincolncouldn't have been Republican and must have been Democrats. Heck if Goldwater would have had problems with 21st century Republican platforms, I doubt Lincoln would have been supportive.
Dig deep enough and you get bedrock, though admittedly not uniform. You would probably avoid going high-speed and deep through areas like the New Madrid Seismic Zone and the San Andreas Fault though, but the most of the continent is pretty seismically stable, which should be good enough. Yes, tunnels are not currently cheap and easy to build, though I think I have provided a scenario in which that could change. Maintaining the vacuum is a tricky but not intractable engineering problem. You would probably need to run power down the tunnel for monitoring equipment, so that could power pumps as well.
Thinking about it some more, you might be able to cross the MAR on the surface at Iceland. It would be a big detour and still a very nasty engineering problem, but not a ridiculously difficult/impossible problem. There would be a big detour too, but you might still beat subsonic flight transit times.
Yes, I think that was the point of my post on the other thread and why I recommended continental travel at first. Crossing plate boundaries underwater like the mid-Atlantic ridge or the Pacific ring of fire are ridiculously difficult engineering problems.
However just eliminating continental air travel would make a huge dent in jet engine pollution.
Actually, I agree with you on (a)-(f). The advantages of using a subterranean tunnel, which is implied in my post, is that it's much less externally exposed to terrorist actions and, while the pressure would be huge under the ocean floor, more of the pressure could be redistributed into/supported by the surrounding rock with the obvious remaining problem being tectonic plate boundaries. Of course, digging tunnels through rock just makes your last point, expense, even more relevant.
However, suppose EMCC manage to get the funding and Polywell technology working for a WB-D 100MW p-B demo plant. Line up 5-10 of them on a train (to keep the cross-section small) and you've got a lot of self-contained power that give you a lot more options for tunnelling than your typical carbide/diamond borers: direct thermal application, railgun-launched metal projectiles that could be picked out of the tailings by magnets and reformed/re-used, high-pressure water jets, or some combination of these or other techniques that might give you orders of magnitude faster and cheaper boring rates than currently available.
Why? Because if you've got p-B fusion then electricty is cheap and relatively clean, Nb for superconducting magnets become cheaper (it's refined from niobium oxide concentrate through electron beam refining), while jet fuel combustion pollutes with both greenhouse gases and other pollutants and is based on non-renewable crude oil. Most transportation and industrial production can be switched to using fusion-produced electricity, but probably not flight (at least not at current jet speeds, let-alone supersonic). An evacuated subterranean line can go from downtown to downtown, requires less intrusive and time consuming security screening than flight-based transportation because the failure modes are more limited, will likely require less power to operate, and would provide significant improvements in travel times at all stages of the process. Once the tunnels are built, large planes will be useless for anything other than transcontinental travel. For scenic flights you would probably use dirigibles instead. Really, with pB fusion available, the question becomes: why not?
Hmm, generally your books' ratings on Amazon are not exactly stellar, so Microsoft may not be panicking just yet. That said, any book is better than the 0 I have written, and I have not yet tried Windows 8. I'll try to download Win 8 RTM and install it in a VM soon. I thought I had heard Windows actively resisted that configuration, so I hadn't tried it until now.
As Grishnakh pointed out, travelling through evacuated tubes, probably using maglev trains, is the best technological candidate for public super/hypersonic transport since it removes the friction losses from air resistance that make supersonic flight cost prohibitive. There would nevertheless still be some ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and pumping costs in maintaining a sufficiently high vacuum.
He may not have been talking about that. Let's look at the US Civil War - approx 625,000 dead. WWII comes a close second at 405,000+.
From 1990 to 1997, there were 293,781 firearm deaths - homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. Even with more than half of those deaths being suicides, that still leaves a lot of Americans being killed, intentionally or accidentally, by their fellow citizens in less than a decade, albeit one with a peak in gun violence. And while only about 90,000 (or 1/3) of those were homicides using handguns, there's some more deaths from accidental shootings, as well as murders with other guns and knives. With more than 10,000 homicides in each year since 1975, it's pretty likely that the number of "peacetime" killings of Americans by other Americans significantly exceed the number of deaths in the US Civil War.
I've been thinking about that. I think you would do NY-SF, Seattle-San Diego and Boston-Miami (and European routes) with a few selected optional stops long before you tackled trans-ocean. Apart for crossing the San Andreas fault, most of the NA routes are on a single continental plate, and you could cross the SA fault on the surface at lower speeds since it's so close to the SF terminus. Crossing the mid-Atlantic trench under the pressure of miles of water and engineering it to endure the trench's heat, chemical soup, and seismic activity, that's a completely different ball game (and category of liability insurance).
As for your comment re what you see on the train - you see what you want to see
. Or, just as possible, the train itself is a filter that selects for iPhones. If the train is BART near Cupertino for example, as opposed to near Mountain View or Redmond. Or maybe he hangs in first class with hipsters and is missing all the Androids in all the 2nd class wagons with working stiffs. The point he's missing being that his train trip isn't a random sample.
I must admit being at a loss as to why you are buying stopwatch app. My 2+ year old Samsung Galaxy app has a Clock app which provides alarm and stopwatch functions and has done so through 3 versions of Android (2.1-2.3). Isn't it part of the base Android app set?
Well, if that's true then it shows that all those claims that "electronic devices need to be shut off to avoid interference with critical airplane controls" is just complete garbage. If airplane mode doesn't power down the baseband, then interference is still possible.
Well he said Dev Tools. If that includes debuggers, then they tend to use privileged instructions, for setting watch/breakpoints or messing with MMU settings and that performance can be severely impacted by virtualization. although that can be somewhat reduced depending on the support in the processor. Could be pricey having to give to your developers workstations with moderately recent Xenon CPUs.
I expect the critical computers are probably air-gapped. But then that was probably the case with the PLCs running the Iran centrifuges too. They may be concerned about somebody accidentally sneakernetting something onto the critical computers via a USB key or some other manual data transmission feature from a non-critical system while transferring logs, updates, data, or something else.
Well, Piers Anthony had the disease untreated for so long that it grew particularly acute. (Treatment involves sales of new books drastically dropping from readers looking at the latest offering, shuddering after remembering hours wasted on the previous volume, and saying "Never again!"). Other high profile cases would be Fred Saberhagen (*Swords*), Terry Brooks, and David Eddings. There are rumours of cases prior to Piers Anthony, such as John Norman, but this correspondent has declined to confirm them.
The Quintaglio Ascension books are well written, and I would recommend them for anybody who wants to introduce SF to kids with dinosaur fixations. However, I found that most of his follow-on books have Piers Anthony-itis; that condition whereby an author takes a story that has enough plot and characterization for a short story or novelette at best, but pads it out with useless verbiage into a novel to maximize earning potential.
The Moon Goddess and the Sun was one of my favourite books in the 80s and I still have it in hardbound. The chapter where the main character is made to role play to understand the role/impression of the Mongol invasions on the Russian psyche and organizational patterns is at the same time engrossing, bordering on hallucenic, and enlightening.
I also met Kingsbury at the Baltimore Worldcon ('98). That year he was reading excerpts from Psychohistorical Crisis, which was nearing completion, and I'm sorry to say I found him to be a very prosaic reader and found myself hoping, for his students' sake, that his math lectures had more life to them. That said I was lucky that we were staying in the same hotel and wound up chatting with him in the lobby. I loved speaking to him in person.
Psychohistorical Crisis is underappreciated genius. It blows away the 3 "Foundation" follow-up novels written by the Killer Bs. I love the parts where the characters are trying to use psychohistory to reconstruct the "ancient" pre-atomic history of Earth and get things a wonderful mix of correct and hilariously wrong. The part about getting the astrological movements to form the basis of a democratized psychohistorical predictor pool is also brilliantly funny. That part's about as believable as using the Church of Scientology as a basis for a renewal of SETI, but I think that's the point: that despite all the advantages that would be available from learning the mathematical techniques of psychohistory, the only way to trick the masses into it would be by sucking them in through a pyramid learning scheme that started with something as laughably and easily falsifiable as astrology. The book has more insight into the human condition (both generally and in response to the technological/scientific age) than much high-brow literature.
Kingsbury is a big believer in the practice. dating back to pulp SF days, of getting a strong hook in the first paragraph and first chapter of a book. To get a catchy first chapter, Kingsbury seems to overly rely on picking a good point in the middle of the story, starting with it, and then striping/splicing the first and second halves together. He does it in this book and did it decades ago in The Moon Godess and the Son. The technique seems to disorient and alienate a lot of readers and critics from at least two of his more wonderful stories. I think PH would be much more accessible, more critically acclaimed, and almost as powerful if it was laid out in chronological order as a classic story of the rise, fall, and struggle for recovery of a tragic character.
I don't think Psychohistorical Crisis is a book that Asimov would have ever written because it doesn't really suit Asimov's generally positive view of humanity, but I think it's a better Foundation follow-on than Foundation's Edge and its sequels. Style-wise I think it's closer to Heinlein than Asimov. But I'm glad it was written and that I got to worry the people sitting next to me on the train thanks to my crazed gleeful chortles.
Because flash animations and other movie formats have been used as vectors for malware in the past. So if they're using missile defense computers to watch porn, they are potentially infecting critical defense computers with trojans that could be exploited by an enemy.
I suppose that if they're bringing their commercial DVDs, or personal home movies through the security checkpoints it might be OK, but then they would need to explain their collection to their wives/SOs.
Slashdot Mirror
Gum disease has a number of medical effects, including a significant impact on cardiovascular health.
That's not a liberal brainwashing, it's just a poor knowledge of older history. They see that Republicans are the ones who are having a spastic attack over a black president and attempting voter suppression tactics and don't realize that the parties swapped roles in the 60's over the Civil Rights Act. So they figure Lincolncouldn't have been Republican and must have been Democrats. Heck if Goldwater would have had problems with 21st century Republican platforms, I doubt Lincoln would have been supportive.
Dig deep enough and you get bedrock, though admittedly not uniform. You would probably avoid going high-speed and deep through areas like the New Madrid Seismic Zone and the San Andreas Fault though, but the most of the continent is pretty seismically stable, which should be good enough. Yes, tunnels are not currently cheap and easy to build, though I think I have provided a scenario in which that could change. Maintaining the vacuum is a tricky but not intractable engineering problem. You would probably need to run power down the tunnel for monitoring equipment, so that could power pumps as well.
RIP Harry Harrison :-)
Thinking about it some more, you might be able to cross the MAR on the surface at Iceland. It would be a big detour and still a very nasty engineering problem, but not a ridiculously difficult/impossible problem. There would be a big detour too, but you might still beat subsonic flight transit times.
Yes, I think that was the point of my post on the other thread and why I recommended continental travel at first. Crossing plate boundaries underwater like the mid-Atlantic ridge or the Pacific ring of fire are ridiculously difficult engineering problems. However just eliminating continental air travel would make a huge dent in jet engine pollution.
Actually, I agree with you on (a)-(f). The advantages of using a subterranean tunnel, which is implied in my post, is that it's much less externally exposed to terrorist actions and, while the pressure would be huge under the ocean floor, more of the pressure could be redistributed into/supported by the surrounding rock with the obvious remaining problem being tectonic plate boundaries. Of course, digging tunnels through rock just makes your last point, expense, even more relevant.
However, suppose EMCC manage to get the funding and Polywell technology working for a WB-D 100MW p-B demo plant. Line up 5-10 of them on a train (to keep the cross-section small) and you've got a lot of self-contained power that give you a lot more options for tunnelling than your typical carbide/diamond borers: direct thermal application, railgun-launched metal projectiles that could be picked out of the tailings by magnets and reformed/re-used, high-pressure water jets, or some combination of these or other techniques that might give you orders of magnitude faster and cheaper boring rates than currently available.
Why? Because if you've got p-B fusion then electricty is cheap and relatively clean, Nb for superconducting magnets become cheaper (it's refined from niobium oxide concentrate through electron beam refining), while jet fuel combustion pollutes with both greenhouse gases and other pollutants and is based on non-renewable crude oil. Most transportation and industrial production can be switched to using fusion-produced electricity, but probably not flight (at least not at current jet speeds, let-alone supersonic). An evacuated subterranean line can go from downtown to downtown, requires less intrusive and time consuming security screening than flight-based transportation because the failure modes are more limited, will likely require less power to operate, and would provide significant improvements in travel times at all stages of the process. Once the tunnels are built, large planes will be useless for anything other than transcontinental travel. For scenic flights you would probably use dirigibles instead. Really, with pB fusion available, the question becomes: why not?
Hmm, generally your books' ratings on Amazon are not exactly stellar, so Microsoft may not be panicking just yet. That said, any book is better than the 0 I have written, and I have not yet tried Windows 8. I'll try to download Win 8 RTM and install it in a VM soon. I thought I had heard Windows actively resisted that configuration, so I hadn't tried it until now.
As Grishnakh pointed out, travelling through evacuated tubes, probably using maglev trains, is the best technological candidate for public super/hypersonic transport since it removes the friction losses from air resistance that make supersonic flight cost prohibitive. There would nevertheless still be some ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and pumping costs in maintaining a sufficiently high vacuum.
He may not have been talking about that. Let's look at the US Civil War - approx 625,000 dead. WWII comes a close second at 405,000+.
From 1990 to 1997, there were 293,781 firearm deaths - homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. Even with more than half of those deaths being suicides, that still leaves a lot of Americans being killed, intentionally or accidentally, by their fellow citizens in less than a decade, albeit one with a peak in gun violence. And while only about 90,000 (or 1/3) of those were homicides using handguns, there's some more deaths from accidental shootings, as well as murders with other guns and knives. With more than 10,000 homicides in each year since 1975, it's pretty likely that the number of "peacetime" killings of Americans by other Americans significantly exceed the number of deaths in the US Civil War.
I've been thinking about that. I think you would do NY-SF, Seattle-San Diego and Boston-Miami (and European routes) with a few selected optional stops long before you tackled trans-ocean. Apart for crossing the San Andreas fault, most of the NA routes are on a single continental plate, and you could cross the SA fault on the surface at lower speeds since it's so close to the SF terminus. Crossing the mid-Atlantic trench under the pressure of miles of water and engineering it to endure the trench's heat, chemical soup, and seismic activity, that's a completely different ball game (and category of liability insurance).
You should hear them applaud at concerts. Once.
That depends on what they know.
. Or, just as possible, the train itself is a filter that selects for iPhones. If the train is BART near Cupertino for example, as opposed to near Mountain View or Redmond. Or maybe he hangs in first class with hipsters and is missing all the Androids in all the 2nd class wagons with working stiffs. The point he's missing being that his train trip isn't a random sample.
I must admit being at a loss as to why you are buying stopwatch app. My 2+ year old Samsung Galaxy app has a Clock app which provides alarm and stopwatch functions and has done so through 3 versions of Android (2.1-2.3). Isn't it part of the base Android app set?
Well, if that's true then it shows that all those claims that "electronic devices need to be shut off to avoid interference with critical airplane controls" is just complete garbage. If airplane mode doesn't power down the baseband, then interference is still possible.
Well he said Dev Tools. If that includes debuggers, then they tend to use privileged instructions, for setting watch/breakpoints or messing with MMU settings and that performance can be severely impacted by virtualization. although that can be somewhat reduced depending on the support in the processor. Could be pricey having to give to your developers workstations with moderately recent Xenon CPUs.
I expect the critical computers are probably air-gapped. But then that was probably the case with the PLCs running the Iran centrifuges too. They may be concerned about somebody accidentally sneakernetting something onto the critical computers via a USB key or some other manual data transmission feature from a non-critical system while transferring logs, updates, data, or something else.
Well, Piers Anthony had the disease untreated for so long that it grew particularly acute. (Treatment involves sales of new books drastically dropping from readers looking at the latest offering, shuddering after remembering hours wasted on the previous volume, and saying "Never again!"). Other high profile cases would be Fred Saberhagen (*Swords*), Terry Brooks, and David Eddings. There are rumours of cases prior to Piers Anthony, such as John Norman, but this correspondent has declined to confirm them.
When HARLIE Was One
The Quintaglio Ascension books are well written, and I would recommend them for anybody who wants to introduce SF to kids with dinosaur fixations. However, I found that most of his follow-on books have Piers Anthony-itis; that condition whereby an author takes a story that has enough plot and characterization for a short story or novelette at best, but pads it out with useless verbiage into a novel to maximize earning potential.
The Moon Goddess and the Sun was one of my favourite books in the 80s and I still have it in hardbound. The chapter where the main character is made to role play to understand the role/impression of the Mongol invasions on the Russian psyche and organizational patterns is at the same time engrossing, bordering on hallucenic, and enlightening.
I also met Kingsbury at the Baltimore Worldcon ('98). That year he was reading excerpts from Psychohistorical Crisis, which was nearing completion, and I'm sorry to say I found him to be a very prosaic reader and found myself hoping, for his students' sake, that his math lectures had more life to them. That said I was lucky that we were staying in the same hotel and wound up chatting with him in the lobby. I loved speaking to him in person.
Psychohistorical Crisis is underappreciated genius. It blows away the 3 "Foundation" follow-up novels written by the Killer Bs. I love the parts where the characters are trying to use psychohistory to reconstruct the "ancient" pre-atomic history of Earth and get things a wonderful mix of correct and hilariously wrong. The part about getting the astrological movements to form the basis of a democratized psychohistorical predictor pool is also brilliantly funny. That part's about as believable as using the Church of Scientology as a basis for a renewal of SETI, but I think that's the point: that despite all the advantages that would be available from learning the mathematical techniques of psychohistory, the only way to trick the masses into it would be by sucking them in through a pyramid learning scheme that started with something as laughably and easily falsifiable as astrology. The book has more insight into the human condition (both generally and in response to the technological/scientific age) than much high-brow literature.
Kingsbury is a big believer in the practice. dating back to pulp SF days, of getting a strong hook in the first paragraph and first chapter of a book. To get a catchy first chapter, Kingsbury seems to overly rely on picking a good point in the middle of the story, starting with it, and then striping/splicing the first and second halves together. He does it in this book and did it decades ago in The Moon Godess and the Son. The technique seems to disorient and alienate a lot of readers and critics from at least two of his more wonderful stories. I think PH would be much more accessible, more critically acclaimed, and almost as powerful if it was laid out in chronological order as a classic story of the rise, fall, and struggle for recovery of a tragic character.
I don't think Psychohistorical Crisis is a book that Asimov would have ever written because it doesn't really suit Asimov's generally positive view of humanity, but I think it's a better Foundation follow-on than Foundation's Edge and its sequels. Style-wise I think it's closer to Heinlein than Asimov. But I'm glad it was written and that I got to worry the people sitting next to me on the train thanks to my crazed gleeful chortles.
Apparently, a bunch of the seed capital for Bain capital came from families that either directly and/or through ARENA, the El Salvador right wing political party, supported the death squads in that country in the 80's. So saying he doesn't care for the little guy is understating it. He was handling the money of people who had the little guys shot and killed in the middle of the night.
Because flash animations and other movie formats have been used as vectors for malware in the past. So if they're using missile defense computers to watch porn, they are potentially infecting critical defense computers with trojans that could be exploited by an enemy.
I suppose that if they're bringing their commercial DVDs, or personal home movies through the security checkpoints it might be OK, but then they would need to explain their collection to their wives/SOs.