When WiMax first came about, all my acquaintances that owned small ISPs bragged that WiMax could cover an entire metro area with a single tower. To date, all WiMax installations I've seen use no more than 2Km range for antennas. Less than typical 3g installations.
That would be good for you if that pork actually benefits you. Lots of that pork benefits special interest groups (in your district) that elected that representative, same thing for senators, without actual regard for what the average elector actually needs. Example, the bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Besides, it would be way better for the country and all districts if that money was used towards paying the federal debt.
The people are to blame. Demand fiscally responsible politicians. Demand the end to all pork politics. Force politicians to stop catering to the space / defense lobby. Electing someone doesn't assure they will be serious. Only people's oversight over their politicians can lead to that. The Internet has brought an unprecedented level of accessibility to all government spending. It's in our hands.
Scam is all the PORK associated with most investment done by the government. Scam is the total financial irresponsibility that Washington-DC lives on today. Of every dollar the US government spends, 40 cents comes from borrowed money. SpaceX runs on a contract with NASA where SpaceX is responsible for launching, without ANY compensation owed if SpaceX looses money on their business. Contrary to all thing done by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin,... Where every time there are overruns they come to the government for compensation (like most defense/space contracts). Now if your mentality is 100% decided that privatization is a scam, nothing I say will change your mind...
Obviously the maintenance on any reusable launcher will always be expensive. That's why I believe the only truly affordable launch system will include some kind of aircraft that flies high and fast, sort of the first stage of the launch system. This way at least half of the launch weight will land nice and easy, that part of the system will then be completely reusable. The actual space capsule for re-entry is always the tricky part, since heat shielding is an extremely difficult technology. Also we need to wait another 10 or so years to take full advantage of Carbon Nanotubes. When used to the maximum extent, CNTs should at least half the structural weight of aircraft and space vehicles, bringing about a huge leap forward in air and space technology. That's one major investment that government should throw money into, developing CNT technology.
AMEN TO THAT BROTHER !!!! Private space launches = PORK FREE SPACE LAUNCHES. The two biggest costs of anything govt based is PORK and CORRUPTION ! Interesting that a Falcon 9 launch only costs US$ 150k in fuel (propelant) costs.
The total cost of the shuttle program was grossly over target, I'm talking about the total cost per launch, including the price of developing the program in first place. Before a reusable solution to the space shuttle can be reached, there needs to be huge advances in scramjet and air launched space crafts. Need a Mach 2+, 60000ft+ altitude airborne launchpad to allow for a drastic reduction in rocket fuel requirements, allowing for using less than half of the equivalent fuel used by a ground based launch. Most fuel usage of ground based launches is used to clear the launchpad, accelerate to hypersonic speeds and clear the bulk of the atmosphere, exactly the part that can be much better achieved by supersonic turbofans (like the F-22 and F-35 jet engines). Launch from a mothership at mach 2, very high altitude for a jet, and use a scramjet to accelerate through Mach 15 and reach 200k ft, and we could be looking into launch weight and costs 1/5th of today's spacecraft. And specially this kind of revolutionary research is best done by the private enterprise with some support from NASA and the military like Burt Rutan's legendary achievements have delivered over the past many years (very sad to learn he's retired, he's one of my all time hero's, right there with the best musicians of all times). How much US$ 5,6 billion FY1971 dollars is in FY2011 dollars, like one trillion dollars ?? I'm just saying that such an expensive program would have no place in today's fiscally tight reality. We can't spend billions of dollars on anything that doesn't have a measurable financial return.
SpaceX isn't about space turism. It's about doing what before only governmental space agencies done, by the private sector, much, much cheaper. Even the chinese spend more on a similar launch than the SpaceX solution (acknowledged by them). And I have the absolutely disagree with you, billions of dollars is way too much money spent to inspire people... Spend that improving USA's elementary education, much, much better return. I don't see the slightest economic sense in sending men to Mars or even back to the moon anytime soon. But I do believe in unmanned missions to advance scientific knowledge and technology. Far more important that relaunchable spacecraft is scramjet propulsion, and white knight / spaceshiptwo two craft system. Most rockets spend half their fuel in the first two minutes of flight, exactly at the stage where supersonic turbofans would do much better. A spacecraft designed to be launched at 60000ft close to mach 1 (with scramjet doing the bulk of its propulsion work) is soo much more efficient than todays rockets. Scramjet will happen, the military wants it, so not much need for NASA to get involved. I'm not a Republican, but I do believe there's way too much government in the USA. And way too much waste as a result. Most programs don't need to be axed, they need to be optimized, brutally optimized.
I agree with NASAs contribution to research. However I don't agree with their day to day involvement with launches and maintenance of space vehicles. We need NASA to continue doing research, creating cutting edge technology and building solutions like the Mars rover. However the space shuttle didn't deliver on their main objective of affordable space launches. The larger issue at hand is to end each and every lie to the cost of government projects. This applies to defense, space and other technology government projects. If a project goes 20% over budget, there should be a huge fine that someone in the private sector pays for. Something that spells a full and complete end to cost overruns. Trillions of dollars have been wasted in the last 20 years due to projects being priced at 50% or less of their real cost. This applies to the F-35 program, space shuttle, for instance. The larger question is how to instill cost awareness into traditionally cost insensitive government workers. There should be an end to all open cost projects. Everything should be fixed cost. Split it into stages. One example of success is the SDB and SDB phase II bomb programs. The SDB bomb came on budget and ahead of schedule (something more like in record time) and is already completely functional helping the US military win the war on terror. One example in the space arena is the SpaceX project that is almost ready to replace some of the space shuttle features to resupply the ISS. A contract that is completely fixed budget, with transparency standards that are causing serious concerns on the traditional space suppliers like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and others.
I said more affordable, not dirt cheap. I forgot to mention that Brazilian ISPs/Telcos pay over 50% total taxes. Just gross tax on receipts run above 30%, after adding corporate profit taxes takes over 50% of total revenue. So US$ 300/mo = US$ 150/mo net revenue for the ISP. Yes competition is key. But if there was good demand for internet service right where you are, why isn't there a venture capitalist willing to fund a startup ISP to compete with the big guys ? Perhaps what you consider fair price for Internet is actually a very low profit business, that only makes sense for companies already heavily invested on the business. There's always a flip side of the coin. When I lived in the US, I paid US$ 20/mo for a dial up ISP + US$ 20/mo for an extra landline. When ADSL came, I paid US$ 50 for 1536/256 ADSL with Mindspring. Speeds are way up, and prices are down, but are costs actually lower as well ?
What made the Internet more affordable today was (in order of importance): 1 - Drastic reduction in fiber equipment costs 2 - Availability of Gigabit and 10 Gig ethernet over long range fiber / DWDM 3 - L3 ethernet switches (switches that are routers) 4 - Improvements in Linux technology (specially ever faster CPUs and IO busses) to force Cisco(and the rest of the prime IP router suppliers) routers price down 5 - Availability of GEPON and other end user fiber solution
Ultra high speed internet isn't making its way to end users because most ISPs don't see financial returns in replacing copper cabling (twisted pair and coax) with fiber yet. Anywhere end users have fiber service, you will see users with 100Mbps+ speeds. That's a financial issue, not a technological issue. Places that need fiber the most (users far from the ADSL DSLAMs and Coax Optical Nodes) are the least likely to see their cabling replaced with fiber, due to longer fiber runs needed to reach them ($$$$).
Right here in third world country Brazil, in a 2nd tier city (1 million people metro area), I could purchase a 100Mbps down / 10Mbps up fiber broadband service. But it costs US$ 300/month. But this is Brazil, far, far from the world internet core. Obviously, I couldn't find such service in a smaller countryside city.
The Japan nuclear accident was a combination of a VERY old reactor with an EXTREME EARTHQUAKE. All reactors dating back to 1960/70s designs are much less safe than today's reactors. Modern Advanced Heavy Water reactors are essentially immune from such accidents, since they use sub-critical fission fuel, that depends on heavy water (deuterium) to actually produce fission. In an emergency, just releasing the heavy water and inserting regular water into the reactor stops fission and prevents overheating. The reason is regular water absorbs neutrons, while heavy water don't, by not absorbing neutrons, heavy water reactors can sustain fission with much less radioactive nuclear fuel. What should happen is a worldwide ban on old reactors on earthquake prone regions. But even heavy water reactor designs from the last 1990/early 2000s in Fukushima would not have caused the radioactivity release that happened there.
True unless you need to land using an LPV approach (ILS like approaches using WAAS or EGNOS). Once GPS signals go dark, accuracy goes out the window very fast. Most INS degrade at least a half a mile after one hour. If jamming/spoofing is localized, if weather is bad, they could be redirected. Right now aviation isn't a critical issue as VOR/DME/ILS are still 99.9% there. It looks like the FAA isn't going to decommission a lot of VOR and DMEs until GPS L5 is fully operational.
WAAS is great, but it's even more vulnerable than GPS, since WAAS GEO broadcasts run at 5x higher bit speed (250bps versus 50bps), without a stronger signal broadcast. The true only solution that would be able to really mitigate jamming/spoofing would be a ground based signal, like LORAN or Pseudolites. With the availability of CSACs (Chip Scale Atomic Clocks), pseudo autonomous Pseudolites become a very, very interesting alternative. Those Pseudolites would maintain accuracy even a couple hours after a jamming/spoofing starts, and even 24hrs after would still be broadcasting with better accuracy than VOR/DME, since with an onboard compact atomic clock they would be able to detect spoofing and go autonomous in case of spoofing/jamming (using its internal atomic clock) resuming clock updates after the spoofing/jamming goes away. Since a pseudolite is in a fixed position on the ground, all it needs is an accurate clock synched to GPS time to operate. Since their signal would have no ionospheric interference, and their much stronger signal would allow for less multipath issues, they could offer sub meter accuracy as a normal accuracy standard. If those pseudolites were to be collocated with cell phone towers, they could conceivably use ground based means to receive UTC time, like using cell companies fiber to receive clocking from a central atomic clock source. Some of those studies have been made, but they don't reflect the availability of relatively cheap chip sized atomic clocks. They base themselves on pseudolites that don't have an internal atomic clock.
Most industrial dependence on GNSS is as a frequency standard. Standard atomic clocks are too expensive, a good dual frequency GPS received costs about 20% of an atomic clock and outputs a 10MHz clocking source more than good enough. That goes for GNSS dependency on telecommunications, financial institutions. GNSS = All GPS like systems (GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Compass,...).
Now we have Chip scale atomic clocks which seem to be just as accurate as dual frequency GNSS receivers as a frequency standard. That should eliminate some dependency on GNSS.
WAAS/EGNOS augmented GPS gives 20ft or better accuracy all the time. In a decade with L5 fully operational, it will give 8ft accuracy all the time. VOR is dead. DME/DME is worth something, but won't give time, and its only useful for aircraft. But it's accuracy is about 600ft, and lateral positioning only. What we really need is a ground based GPS pseudo lite network that gives GPS accuracy regardless of GPS signals. Each pseudo lite should broadcast on L5 for line of sight users and on a much lower frequency for non line of sight users.
Killing eLoran was the dumbest decision the Obama administration did in my opinion.
It wasn't my 2 trillion dollars Bush spent on wars. It was American money. It now added to your national debt. So much for republicans calling themselves fiscally conservatives. Americans will need to give up on a ton of stuff to pay that (if they ever do).
Sure, after someone outside the Bush gang suggested a smart solution (the surge was McCain's proposal as I recall), things started to improve. McCain isn't a hawk, he's one of the few smart (open minded) republicans out there. And got grilled big time for all of his bipartisan initiatives. Many Democrats are close minded too, on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. But still, the Iraq invasion wasn't cost effective. It was to enrich Bush buddies. And this is a fact. Look at who are the largest political contributors to Republicans like him.
I don't need any apology from the Americans for what they did through the cold war. I hate communism in general. Even though medicine standards in Cuba are good, people are borderline starving, and there's no excuse for silencing political opposition. And Cuba seems to be the one communist regime that can say that it brought some real improvement to people's life. All others were/are utter failures. But I digress. The fact is that the US is used as a scapegoat by most dictatorships in the world. But for many in the middle east, some US humility might weaken Hamas, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations. If those terrorist organizations / dictatorships no longer can blame America/Europe for their troubles, they would be severely undermined.
Eating humble pie doesn't mean making substantial concessions. Wikileaks shows that what you say in public can be completely different from behind the doors conversation.
Still no comment on global warming and CO2 rise. I stand by the root of this thread. Long commutes with Gasoline vehicles, large SUVs, pickup trucks and heavy meat consumption by developed countries (specially the US) is unsustainable, and will eventually destroy the earth. Hybrids only attenuate the issue. Whenever possible, substitute beef with eggs, milk, chicken/pork/fish meat, much more environmentally conscious options. I do eat meat BTW but I'm progressively cutting back with egg white, milk, whey protein and fish.
If the US standard of living was exercised by just half of earth's population, oil would cost at least US$ 300 / barrel and there wouldn't be enough grain to feed cattle for meat production. Those are FACTs. Global inflation would put the whole world through a new depression.
Think about it. The US way of life is very convenient. It's very painful to just digest the facts I'm rising on this message. I know how great living in the US can be compared to developing countries. So I understand how painful it must be to even try to digest this information. But its the truth.
Do you know that most countries tax petrol by at least 50%. Even though Brazil is a net exporter of Oil, Gasoline here costs more than double the US. Same for Europe. If I were Obama, I would tax petrol imports by 20% and give citizens a tax credit per person to offset that tax. This way people would be far wiser about their usage of oil (those who used less petrol would save money, while those who use more would spend more).
Gasoline in Brazil costs close to US$ 6 per gallon. In Europe its about the same.
It's interesting how your responses to my political arguments are completely devoid of any facts or any details.
Look at what oil prices did while Bush was in power. Look at the trillions of dollars he spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan invasion. I was completely in favor of the first Iraq war. I actually was at first in favor of the 2nd Iraq war, but after I realized how the US went in without a plan for peace, it was very clear that Bush & gang didn't think it through. They didn't go in to achieve piece, but just to give their defense and oil buddies hundreds of billions in profits. That's the republican approach to war. Their approach always breeds more violence. Damn defense Hawks. The US defense dept should be renamed the War dept as it was up to the WWII times.
I don't hate the US people in general. As much as I don't hate the Iranian people even though I hate their regime. Hell, I don't hate the current US administration, even though I don't love them. But you seem hell bent on mixing it all up to make me look stupid. That attitude shows weaknesses on your argument.
Funny your response on Iran. Do you deny that the Shah was armed by the USA (they have F-14, F-5 aircraft for instance). Do you deny that the Shah ruthless treatment of the Iranian people didn't cause the revolution ? Accepting responsibility over the Iranian political scenario (and many other countries) would go a long way towards restoring a good standing with the Middle East people. That doesn't mean the current Iranian regime is a good thing, I'm all for figuring a way to topple them peacefully, and going in with heavy airstrikes and special ops assaults if their nuclear threat becomes critical, but no invasion.
Do you deny that Fox News is a hate spreading organization, that manipulates their editorial content to spread hate and discontent ? Of course they make money doing that, but so does other media organizations, even those with far more balanced positions on news. We used to get them in Brazil, but about 18 months ago, they were removed from both my local cable and Brazil Sky satellite TV. It was interesting the contrast between CNN International and Fox News. Brutal.
It's possible that scientists are over blowing the short term macro earth effects. There are extremists on both sides, just as there are those that say global warming doesn't exist at all, there are those on the global warming side that will exaggerate on their predictions. But that doesn't mean the effects aren't serious. It could be another 10 years, but when it really starts getting very serious, it might take another 10 years to bring things back under control and millions will die in between. Melting of the ice caps will happen with the current state of affairs.
The oceans are becoming more acid. That's because CO2 in contact with water becomes carbonic acid. This is killing seaborne species today. I'm a fairly young guy (under 40), so I don't have a long term view of worldwide natural disasters, but has the fires in California and vicinity were that serious 30-40 years ago ? This will be my last message. If you don't want to see anything documented as of happening TODAY about global warming as serious, then you won't be persuaded until it comes close enough to biting you in the ass.
Goodbye my Ostridge friend.
I still don't hate you. It's just that I can't agree to disagree on such a serious matters.
I'm not a US hater. I lived in the US for 7 years in the 90s. I have plenty of friends both of born and raised in the US and Brazilian naturalized Americans. You just made your personal agenda very clear. Everyone that criticizes America must be labelled an enemy of America. Very typical post 9/11 behavior. I don't even hate you. I don't hate most Americans. I do hate Bush, Cheney and the rest of his gang. I don't love Obama either, but I do respect him (respect him a lot). It's a pity they voted Bush in the office as a knee jerk reaction from Clinton's sex scandals. That shows how immature the average American voter is. I could respect McCain if he didn't change a lot and got ellected. I actually was in the US when Clinton got re-elected and when Bush later took office. If you go around and talk to any Airline pilot that flies across the world's ocean, if they truly open up they will tell you that the earth's atmosphere over the oceans is increasingly becoming more and more dangerous for flying due to serious increase in convective activity (thunderstorm clouds). This is caused by a hotter earth. This isn't a critical issue, just one more evidence that the situation is happening.
Man does has the full capacity to destroy earth. Even without thinking that its doing it.
The level of resource consumption from developed countries is unsustainable. If Latin America and Africa had a society that used oil like the US does, we would already be doomed. If the same population eated protein like America, there wouldn't be enough land to grow grain to feed all that cattle. Think about it !
Just because you believe in something, it doesn't make it true. You need data to back your thinking up. Not manipulated information from Fox News.
Average human beings when threatened will deny everything that threatens them. Don't expect rational behavior from them. I don't expect rational behavior from you. Hopefully others will read this exchange and see who's being irrational. You would probably choose to ignore every shred of evidence that points to global warming and accept every thing to the contrary.
Wait until one year when a dozen category 5 hurricanes make a really serious damage on the South Eastern US coast. Wait until the forest fires in SW US become really serious. We're seeing a level of deaths in Brazil due to serious floods that can be directly linked to global warming.
There's clear evidence that the level of CO2 present in the atmosphere today hasn't happened in the last 10000 years (since the rise of the human domination of the earth). The one and only mitigating factor is that the higher CO2 levels reach, the faster vegetation will grow, specially in sunny areas with plenty of water. That has been determined by ice core analysis. Ice keeps samples of atmosphere concentrations for thousands of years.
While USA is the biggest problem, China is just a few years from becoming just as serious, Europe uses a little less Petrol per capta, but is also an issue, France being a little less problematic since they use very little coal and use very little oil for electricity generation and has reasonable mass transit (that the Americans insist on not using), because they are heavy users of Nuclear Energy.
Do you have the balls to affirm that the bad rap that Nuclear Energy got in the US isn't driven by the big oil lobby ? The US has tons of plutonium in storage that could power a lot of nuclear plants for a long time.
It's so sad that so few people can't see past the media manipulation that big business lobby have effected since there is mass media. International mainstream media is seriously manipulated. Miss information is fed into the media every day. So sad.
PS: 1 - I do hate Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Ahmajinejad, Kim Jong Il, Castro and all dictators and dictators wanna bees of the world. Even more than Bush. 2 - I'm 100% a firm believer in real democracy, even with all of its shortcomings. Unfortunately people aren't smart enough to demand lo
Go ahead, destroy the earth. Real smart. Real real smart. Take the easy convenient road. Continue to drive your huge SUVs and pickup trucks for their status and ego boosting. Thanks god America will be bankrupt before it finishes destroying earth. You're selling yourselves out to China and the big corporations. You probably think that all Wars America though were righteous. You probably believe there's no global warming. And that George W. Bush took all his actions thinking about what's best for USA's population and no to give his oil/defense/energy hundreds of billions. Be an ostrich, keep your head stuck in a whole forever.
How large a garden do you need to offset driving 100 miles a day ? Think more like a little forest. Specially if you live in high latitudes where the sun doesn't shine all that much. Methane production per gallon of milk isn't bad. Bad is Methane production for pound of beef. It takes a lot of milk to make a pound of Cheese, so its quite bad there as well. The American model of living and the Chinese coal mad dash are destroying the world. No cheap words can negate that. I lived in the US for 7 years. My commute was 30 miles each way. However I drove a fuel efficient almost compact car, 25mpg. And saw all those idiots driving gas guzzling SUVs and trucks.
No its not. Oil pollutes. The earth can't handle the current load of CO2. We need a huge investment in Nuclear and Wind electricity NOW. Coal is a LOT worse, and people aren't talking about constructing a lot of Coal power plants to produce electricity for the upcoming rise in electricity power for electric cars. The US needs to rethink its long commute way of living. Nowhere else you see people driving 100 miles to work everyday. Plenty of companies could have some departments 90% working via telecommuting but don't do it for stupid reasons, many employees would gladly give back to their employer some of their time saved by not having to drive to work. Perhaps that would be a lot more useful a government policy, a small tax break for companies that have at least 1/3 of their total working hours done by telecommuting, with a greater tax break for 50% telecommuting. Nothing huge, perhaps 3-5% tax break.
I absolutely hate both Republicans and Democrats equally when it comes down to financial responsibility. Perhaps hate the Republicans just a little bit more because they are pro Oil and pro War. While the Democrats are pro alternate energy, they waste a ton of money on all kinds of things. Nuclear energy in general is a sane, efficient solution as long as the nuclear waste is reprocessed like its done in France. Wait, even the Germans aren't pro nuclear as well. Let's not focus on one party. The target needs to be the energy lobby. If green peace and other eco organizations focused 100% of their energies on this alone, but no, they also are anti nuclear. Idiots too. Its a huge mess. Need to invest heavily on nuclear and wind power. With the latest and greatest huge 10MW wind turbines, wind power need perhaps just a 50% drop in turbine prices to become 100% economically viable, for places that are abundant in wind. For instance, the entire northern Brazilian sea shore gets a ton of wind, with peak right at the drought season that limits hydro power. Perfect solution for us.
Sure there are tons of people out there that insists on buying computers that waste so much power they could cook meals for a couple dozen people with the heat dissipated by their CPUs alone. They have a massive ego that requires the notion they have the fastest computer possible, even though their computer will run at less than 10% utilization almost all the time. Game vendors keep writing code evermore inefficient, same for Microsoft OSes. Some actually do need a fast computer, perhaps for encoding HD video, performing very complex calculations or something else. Since I migrated from Windows to Linux about 10 years ago, freeing myself from 99% of bloatware, I found out that CPU speed is becoming more and more irrelevant with each new CPU generation. Even with a 4 year old computer, I do simultaneously share a 10Mbps broadband connection, burn a DVD, play flight gear flight simulator, run e-mail server, MySQL, on the same 4GB RAM system with a dual core CPU, no damaged DVD medias, even with the game running at maximum CPU priority. Try that on Windows, any Windows ! People, save on your power bill, free yourself from wasteful computing, migrate to Linux. It will run exceptionally well on any new computer, it will also run very well on anything designed for Windows Vista. The minimum computer that Windows 7 requires just to boot and load Office is a huge computer for Linux. Migrate to Linux. Make your computer work for you instead of to evil software corporations. The computer is *yours* after all.
You're correct that us Linux users aren't enough to cause a dent in Sony's market share. But If each one of us convinced 10 other potential customers not to buy Sony, that might be noticeable.
But I don't think we're a few thousand customers, more like many tens of thousands of actual customers of open software + sony.
There's only one effective way to go about this issues, principles, principles, principles.
Just like it's been 10 years I haven't purchased a single MS product. In the 10 years since then I never hesitate to tell anyone how bad their stuff is. Now with flightgear I don't need to stinking MSFS anymore. Pure bloatware. No more Windows desktops or servers. The only non-linux OS I use is Symbian, because those came free with my mobile plan and they have a very good native SIP client. Just waiting for Android phones to come free with a 2 yr voice+internet 3g plan.
Don't underestimate the power of a customer with a deep, justified grudge. Those typically last for a lifetime. In that lifetime, that particular customer alone might cause the XYZ evil corporation to loose US$ 100k in revenues considering the negative advertisement cascade effect.
Now back to my master plot to remove windows and microsoft office from all my customer networks. About 300 desktops. All Windows servers already gone.
The only Playstation I ever had got sold 3 years ago, and now I have absolutely no interesting in purchasing ANY whatsoever Sony product. Don't need to bother with my IP address, if I still had a sony product, I would throw it into the garbage right now.
Slashdot Mirror
When WiMax first came about, all my acquaintances that owned small ISPs bragged that WiMax could cover an entire metro area with a single tower.
To date, all WiMax installations I've seen use no more than 2Km range for antennas. Less than typical 3g installations.
That would be good for you if that pork actually benefits you.
Lots of that pork benefits special interest groups (in your district) that elected that representative, same thing for senators, without actual regard for what the average elector actually needs.
Example, the bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
Besides, it would be way better for the country and all districts if that money was used towards paying the federal debt.
The people are to blame. Demand fiscally responsible politicians. Demand the end to all pork politics. Force politicians to stop catering to the space / defense lobby.
Electing someone doesn't assure they will be serious. Only people's oversight over their politicians can lead to that.
The Internet has brought an unprecedented level of accessibility to all government spending. It's in our hands.
Scam is all the PORK associated with most investment done by the government. ... Where every time there are overruns they come to the government for compensation (like most defense/space contracts).
Scam is the total financial irresponsibility that Washington-DC lives on today.
Of every dollar the US government spends, 40 cents comes from borrowed money.
SpaceX runs on a contract with NASA where SpaceX is responsible for launching, without ANY compensation owed if SpaceX looses money on their business.
Contrary to all thing done by Boeing, Lockheed-Martin,
Now if your mentality is 100% decided that privatization is a scam, nothing I say will change your mind...
Obviously the maintenance on any reusable launcher will always be expensive.
That's why I believe the only truly affordable launch system will include some kind of aircraft that flies high and fast, sort of the first stage of the launch system.
This way at least half of the launch weight will land nice and easy, that part of the system will then be completely reusable.
The actual space capsule for re-entry is always the tricky part, since heat shielding is an extremely difficult technology.
Also we need to wait another 10 or so years to take full advantage of Carbon Nanotubes. When used to the maximum extent, CNTs should at least half the structural weight of aircraft and space vehicles, bringing about a huge leap forward in air and space technology.
That's one major investment that government should throw money into, developing CNT technology.
AMEN TO THAT BROTHER !!!!
Private space launches = PORK FREE SPACE LAUNCHES.
The two biggest costs of anything govt based is PORK and CORRUPTION !
Interesting that a Falcon 9 launch only costs US$ 150k in fuel (propelant) costs.
The total cost of the shuttle program was grossly over target, I'm talking about the total cost per launch, including the price of developing the program in first place.
Before a reusable solution to the space shuttle can be reached, there needs to be huge advances in scramjet and air launched space crafts.
Need a Mach 2+, 60000ft+ altitude airborne launchpad to allow for a drastic reduction in rocket fuel requirements, allowing for using less than half of the equivalent fuel used by a ground based launch. Most fuel usage of ground based launches is used to clear the launchpad, accelerate to hypersonic speeds and clear the bulk of the atmosphere, exactly the part that can be much better achieved by supersonic turbofans (like the F-22 and F-35 jet engines). Launch from a mothership at mach 2, very high altitude for a jet, and use a scramjet to accelerate through Mach 15 and reach 200k ft, and we could be looking into launch weight and costs 1/5th of today's spacecraft.
And specially this kind of revolutionary research is best done by the private enterprise with some support from NASA and the military like Burt Rutan's legendary achievements have delivered over the past many years (very sad to learn he's retired, he's one of my all time hero's, right there with the best musicians of all times).
How much US$ 5,6 billion FY1971 dollars is in FY2011 dollars, like one trillion dollars ??
I'm just saying that such an expensive program would have no place in today's fiscally tight reality.
We can't spend billions of dollars on anything that doesn't have a measurable financial return.
SpaceX isn't about space turism. It's about doing what before only governmental space agencies done, by the private sector, much, much cheaper. Even the chinese spend more on a similar launch than the SpaceX solution (acknowledged by them).
And I have the absolutely disagree with you, billions of dollars is way too much money spent to inspire people... Spend that improving USA's elementary education, much, much better return.
I don't see the slightest economic sense in sending men to Mars or even back to the moon anytime soon. But I do believe in unmanned missions to advance scientific knowledge and technology.
Far more important that relaunchable spacecraft is scramjet propulsion, and white knight / spaceshiptwo two craft system.
Most rockets spend half their fuel in the first two minutes of flight, exactly at the stage where supersonic turbofans would do much better.
A spacecraft designed to be launched at 60000ft close to mach 1 (with scramjet doing the bulk of its propulsion work) is soo much more efficient than todays rockets.
Scramjet will happen, the military wants it, so not much need for NASA to get involved.
I'm not a Republican, but I do believe there's way too much government in the USA. And way too much waste as a result. Most programs don't need to be axed, they need to be optimized, brutally optimized.
I agree with NASAs contribution to research. However I don't agree with their day to day involvement with launches and maintenance of space vehicles.
We need NASA to continue doing research, creating cutting edge technology and building solutions like the Mars rover.
However the space shuttle didn't deliver on their main objective of affordable space launches.
The larger issue at hand is to end each and every lie to the cost of government projects. This applies to defense, space and other technology government projects.
If a project goes 20% over budget, there should be a huge fine that someone in the private sector pays for. Something that spells a full and complete end to cost overruns.
Trillions of dollars have been wasted in the last 20 years due to projects being priced at 50% or less of their real cost. This applies to the F-35 program, space shuttle, for instance.
The larger question is how to instill cost awareness into traditionally cost insensitive government workers.
There should be an end to all open cost projects. Everything should be fixed cost. Split it into stages.
One example of success is the SDB and SDB phase II bomb programs. The SDB bomb came on budget and ahead of schedule (something more like in record time) and is already completely functional helping the US military win the war on terror.
One example in the space arena is the SpaceX project that is almost ready to replace some of the space shuttle features to resupply the ISS. A contract that is completely fixed budget, with transparency standards that are causing serious concerns on the traditional space suppliers like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and others.
I said more affordable, not dirt cheap.
I forgot to mention that Brazilian ISPs/Telcos pay over 50% total taxes. Just gross tax on receipts run above 30%, after adding corporate profit taxes takes over 50% of total revenue.
So US$ 300/mo = US$ 150/mo net revenue for the ISP.
Yes competition is key. But if there was good demand for internet service right where you are, why isn't there a venture capitalist willing to fund a startup ISP to compete with the big guys ? Perhaps what you consider fair price for Internet is actually a very low profit business, that only makes sense for companies already heavily invested on the business. There's always a flip side of the coin. When I lived in the US, I paid US$ 20/mo for a dial up ISP + US$ 20/mo for an extra landline. When ADSL came, I paid US$ 50 for 1536/256 ADSL with Mindspring. Speeds are way up, and prices are down, but are costs actually lower as well ?
What made the Internet more affordable today was (in order of importance):
1 - Drastic reduction in fiber equipment costs
2 - Availability of Gigabit and 10 Gig ethernet over long range fiber / DWDM
3 - L3 ethernet switches (switches that are routers)
4 - Improvements in Linux technology (specially ever faster CPUs and IO busses) to force Cisco(and the rest of the prime IP router suppliers) routers price down
5 - Availability of GEPON and other end user fiber solution
Ultra high speed internet isn't making its way to end users because most ISPs don't see financial returns in replacing copper cabling (twisted pair and coax) with fiber yet. Anywhere end users have fiber service, you will see users with 100Mbps+ speeds. That's a financial issue, not a technological issue. Places that need fiber the most (users far from the ADSL DSLAMs and Coax Optical Nodes) are the least likely to see their cabling replaced with fiber, due to longer fiber runs needed to reach them ($$$$).
Right here in third world country Brazil, in a 2nd tier city (1 million people metro area), I could purchase a 100Mbps down / 10Mbps up fiber broadband service. But it costs US$ 300/month. But this is Brazil, far, far from the world internet core. Obviously, I couldn't find such service in a smaller countryside city.
The Japan nuclear accident was a combination of a VERY old reactor with an EXTREME EARTHQUAKE.
All reactors dating back to 1960/70s designs are much less safe than today's reactors.
Modern Advanced Heavy Water reactors are essentially immune from such accidents, since they use sub-critical fission fuel, that depends on heavy water (deuterium) to actually produce fission. In an emergency, just releasing the heavy water and inserting regular water into the reactor stops fission and prevents overheating.
The reason is regular water absorbs neutrons, while heavy water don't, by not absorbing neutrons, heavy water reactors can sustain fission with much less radioactive nuclear fuel.
What should happen is a worldwide ban on old reactors on earthquake prone regions. But even heavy water reactor designs from the last 1990/early 2000s in Fukushima would not have caused the radioactivity release that happened there.
True unless you need to land using an LPV approach (ILS like approaches using WAAS or EGNOS).
Once GPS signals go dark, accuracy goes out the window very fast.
Most INS degrade at least a half a mile after one hour.
If jamming/spoofing is localized, if weather is bad, they could be redirected.
Right now aviation isn't a critical issue as VOR/DME/ILS are still 99.9% there.
It looks like the FAA isn't going to decommission a lot of VOR and DMEs until GPS L5 is fully operational.
WAAS is great, but it's even more vulnerable than GPS, since WAAS GEO broadcasts run at 5x higher bit speed (250bps versus 50bps), without a stronger signal broadcast.
The true only solution that would be able to really mitigate jamming/spoofing would be a ground based signal, like LORAN or Pseudolites.
With the availability of CSACs (Chip Scale Atomic Clocks), pseudo autonomous Pseudolites become a very, very interesting alternative. Those Pseudolites would maintain accuracy even a couple hours after a jamming/spoofing starts, and even 24hrs after would still be broadcasting with better accuracy than VOR/DME, since with an onboard compact atomic clock they would be able to detect spoofing and go autonomous in case of spoofing/jamming (using its internal atomic clock) resuming clock updates after the spoofing/jamming goes away.
Since a pseudolite is in a fixed position on the ground, all it needs is an accurate clock synched to GPS time to operate.
Since their signal would have no ionospheric interference, and their much stronger signal would allow for less multipath issues, they could offer sub meter accuracy as a normal accuracy standard.
If those pseudolites were to be collocated with cell phone towers, they could conceivably use ground based means to receive UTC time, like using cell companies fiber to receive clocking from a central atomic clock source.
Some of those studies have been made, but they don't reflect the availability of relatively cheap chip sized atomic clocks. They base themselves on pseudolites that don't have an internal atomic clock.
Most industrial dependence on GNSS is as a frequency standard. Standard atomic clocks are too expensive, a good dual frequency GPS received costs about 20% of an atomic clock and outputs a 10MHz clocking source more than good enough. That goes for GNSS dependency on telecommunications, financial institutions. GNSS = All GPS like systems (GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Compass, ...).
Now we have Chip scale atomic clocks which seem to be just as accurate as dual frequency GNSS receivers as a frequency standard. That should eliminate some dependency on GNSS.
WAAS/EGNOS augmented GPS gives 20ft or better accuracy all the time.
In a decade with L5 fully operational, it will give 8ft accuracy all the time.
VOR is dead. DME/DME is worth something, but won't give time, and its only useful for aircraft. But it's accuracy is about 600ft, and lateral positioning only.
What we really need is a ground based GPS pseudo lite network that gives GPS accuracy regardless of GPS signals. Each pseudo lite should broadcast on L5 for line of sight users and on a much lower frequency for non line of sight users.
Killing eLoran was the dumbest decision the Obama administration did in my opinion.
It wasn't my 2 trillion dollars Bush spent on wars. It was American money. It now added to your national debt. So much for republicans calling themselves fiscally conservatives. Americans will need to give up on a ton of stuff to pay that (if they ever do).
Sure, after someone outside the Bush gang suggested a smart solution (the surge was McCain's proposal as I recall), things started to improve. McCain isn't a hawk, he's one of the few smart (open minded) republicans out there. And got grilled big time for all of his bipartisan initiatives. Many Democrats are close minded too, on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum. But still, the Iraq invasion wasn't cost effective. It was to enrich Bush buddies. And this is a fact. Look at who are the largest political contributors to Republicans like him.
I don't need any apology from the Americans for what they did through the cold war. I hate communism in general. Even though medicine standards in Cuba are good, people are borderline starving, and there's no excuse for silencing political opposition. And Cuba seems to be the one communist regime that can say that it brought some real improvement to people's life. All others were/are utter failures. But I digress. The fact is that the US is used as a scapegoat by most dictatorships in the world. But for many in the middle east, some US humility might weaken Hamas, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations. If those terrorist organizations / dictatorships no longer can blame America/Europe for their troubles, they would be severely undermined.
Eating humble pie doesn't mean making substantial concessions. Wikileaks shows that what you say in public can be completely different from behind the doors conversation.
Still no comment on global warming and CO2 rise.
I stand by the root of this thread. Long commutes with Gasoline vehicles, large SUVs, pickup trucks and heavy meat consumption by developed countries (specially the US) is unsustainable, and will eventually destroy the earth. Hybrids only attenuate the issue.
Whenever possible, substitute beef with eggs, milk, chicken/pork/fish meat, much more environmentally conscious options. I do eat meat BTW but I'm progressively cutting back with egg white, milk, whey protein and fish.
If the US standard of living was exercised by just half of earth's population, oil would cost at least US$ 300 / barrel and there wouldn't be enough grain to feed cattle for meat production. Those are FACTs. Global inflation would put the whole world through a new depression.
Think about it. The US way of life is very convenient. It's very painful to just digest the facts I'm rising on this message. I know how great living in the US can be compared to developing countries. So I understand how painful it must be to even try to digest this information. But its the truth.
Do you know that most countries tax petrol by at least 50%. Even though Brazil is a net exporter of Oil, Gasoline here costs more than double the US. Same for Europe. If I were Obama, I would tax petrol imports by 20% and give citizens a tax credit per person to offset that tax. This way people would be far wiser about their usage of oil (those who used less petrol would save money, while those who use more would spend more).
Gasoline in Brazil costs close to US$ 6 per gallon. In Europe its about the same.
It's interesting how your responses to my political arguments are completely devoid of any facts or any details.
Look at what oil prices did while Bush was in power. Look at the trillions of dollars he spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan invasion. I was completely in favor of the first Iraq war. I actually was at first in favor of the 2nd Iraq war, but after I realized how the US went in without a plan for peace, it was very clear that Bush & gang didn't think it through. They didn't go in to achieve piece, but just to give their defense and oil buddies hundreds of billions in profits. That's the republican approach to war. Their approach always breeds more violence. Damn defense Hawks. The US defense dept should be renamed the War dept as it was up to the WWII times.
I don't hate the US people in general. As much as I don't hate the Iranian people even though I hate their regime. Hell, I don't hate the current US administration, even though I don't love them. But you seem hell bent on mixing it all up to make me look stupid. That attitude shows weaknesses on your argument.
Funny your response on Iran. Do you deny that the Shah was armed by the USA (they have F-14, F-5 aircraft for instance). Do you deny that the Shah ruthless treatment of the Iranian people didn't cause the revolution ?
Accepting responsibility over the Iranian political scenario (and many other countries) would go a long way towards restoring a good standing with the Middle East people. That doesn't mean the current Iranian regime is a good thing, I'm all for figuring a way to topple them peacefully, and going in with heavy airstrikes and special ops assaults if their nuclear threat becomes critical, but no invasion.
Do you deny that Fox News is a hate spreading organization, that manipulates their editorial content to spread hate and discontent ? Of course they make money doing that, but so does other media organizations, even those with far more balanced positions on news.
We used to get them in Brazil, but about 18 months ago, they were removed from both my local cable and Brazil Sky satellite TV. It was interesting the contrast between CNN International and Fox News. Brutal.
The rise in CO2 levels is a documented fact.
Look at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
Same for global warming:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Global_Temperature_Anomaly_1880-2010_(Fig.A).gif
Have you seen this chart ???? It was measured in American soil (Hawaii), by the Mauna Loa observatory.
It's possible that scientists are over blowing the short term macro earth effects. There are extremists on both sides, just as there are those that say global warming doesn't exist at all, there are those on the global warming side that will exaggerate on their predictions. But that doesn't mean the effects aren't serious. It could be another 10 years, but when it really starts getting very serious, it might take another 10 years to bring things back under control and millions will die in between. Melting of the ice caps will happen with the current state of affairs.
The oceans are becoming more acid. That's because CO2 in contact with water becomes carbonic acid. This is killing seaborne species today.
I'm a fairly young guy (under 40), so I don't have a long term view of worldwide natural disasters, but has the fires in California and vicinity were that serious 30-40 years ago ?
This will be my last message. If you don't want to see anything documented as of happening TODAY about global warming as serious, then you won't be persuaded until it comes close enough to biting you in the ass.
Goodbye my Ostridge friend.
I still don't hate you. It's just that I can't agree to disagree on such a serious matters.
I'm not a US hater.
I lived in the US for 7 years in the 90s.
I have plenty of friends both of born and raised in the US and Brazilian naturalized Americans.
You just made your personal agenda very clear. Everyone that criticizes America must be labelled an enemy of America. Very typical post 9/11 behavior.
I don't even hate you. I don't hate most Americans. I do hate Bush, Cheney and the rest of his gang. I don't love Obama either, but I do respect him (respect him a lot). It's a pity they voted Bush in the office as a knee jerk reaction from Clinton's sex scandals. That shows how immature the average American voter is. I could respect McCain if he didn't change a lot and got ellected. I actually was in the US when Clinton got re-elected and when Bush later took office.
If you go around and talk to any Airline pilot that flies across the world's ocean, if they truly open up they will tell you that the earth's atmosphere over the oceans is increasingly becoming more and more dangerous for flying due to serious increase in convective activity (thunderstorm clouds). This is caused by a hotter earth.
This isn't a critical issue, just one more evidence that the situation is happening.
Man does has the full capacity to destroy earth. Even without thinking that its doing it.
The level of resource consumption from developed countries is unsustainable. If Latin America and Africa had a society that used oil like the US does, we would already be doomed. If the same population eated protein like America, there wouldn't be enough land to grow grain to feed all that cattle. Think about it !
Just because you believe in something, it doesn't make it true. You need data to back your thinking up. Not manipulated information from Fox News.
Average human beings when threatened will deny everything that threatens them. Don't expect rational behavior from them. I don't expect rational behavior from you. Hopefully others will read this exchange and see who's being irrational. You would probably choose to ignore every shred of evidence that points to global warming and accept every thing to the contrary.
Wait until one year when a dozen category 5 hurricanes make a really serious damage on the South Eastern US coast. Wait until the forest fires in SW US become really serious. We're seeing a level of deaths in Brazil due to serious floods that can be directly linked to global warming.
There's clear evidence that the level of CO2 present in the atmosphere today hasn't happened in the last 10000 years (since the rise of the human domination of the earth). The one and only mitigating factor is that the higher CO2 levels reach, the faster vegetation will grow, specially in sunny areas with plenty of water. That has been determined by ice core analysis. Ice keeps samples of atmosphere concentrations for thousands of years.
While USA is the biggest problem, China is just a few years from becoming just as serious, Europe uses a little less Petrol per capta, but is also an issue, France being a little less problematic since they use very little coal and use very little oil for electricity generation and has reasonable mass transit (that the Americans insist on not using), because they are heavy users of Nuclear Energy.
Do you have the balls to affirm that the bad rap that Nuclear Energy got in the US isn't driven by the big oil lobby ?
The US has tons of plutonium in storage that could power a lot of nuclear plants for a long time.
It's so sad that so few people can't see past the media manipulation that big business lobby have effected since there is mass media.
International mainstream media is seriously manipulated. Miss information is fed into the media every day.
So sad.
PS:
1 - I do hate Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Ahmajinejad, Kim Jong Il, Castro and all dictators and dictators wanna bees of the world. Even more than Bush.
2 - I'm 100% a firm believer in real democracy, even with all of its shortcomings. Unfortunately people aren't smart enough to demand lo
Go ahead, destroy the earth.
Real smart. Real real smart.
Take the easy convenient road.
Continue to drive your huge SUVs and pickup trucks for their status and ego boosting.
Thanks god America will be bankrupt before it finishes destroying earth.
You're selling yourselves out to China and the big corporations.
You probably think that all Wars America though were righteous.
You probably believe there's no global warming. And that George W. Bush took all his actions thinking about what's best for USA's population and no to give his oil/defense/energy hundreds of billions.
Be an ostrich, keep your head stuck in a whole forever.
How large a garden do you need to offset driving 100 miles a day ? Think more like a little forest.
Specially if you live in high latitudes where the sun doesn't shine all that much.
Methane production per gallon of milk isn't bad. Bad is Methane production for pound of beef.
It takes a lot of milk to make a pound of Cheese, so its quite bad there as well.
The American model of living and the Chinese coal mad dash are destroying the world. No cheap words can negate that.
I lived in the US for 7 years. My commute was 30 miles each way. However I drove a fuel efficient almost compact car, 25mpg.
And saw all those idiots driving gas guzzling SUVs and trucks.
No its not. Oil pollutes. The earth can't handle the current load of CO2. We need a huge investment in Nuclear and Wind electricity NOW.
Coal is a LOT worse, and people aren't talking about constructing a lot of Coal power plants to produce electricity for the upcoming rise in electricity power for electric cars.
The US needs to rethink its long commute way of living. Nowhere else you see people driving 100 miles to work everyday. Plenty of companies could have some departments 90% working via telecommuting but don't do it for stupid reasons, many employees would gladly give back to their employer some of their time saved by not having to drive to work.
Perhaps that would be a lot more useful a government policy, a small tax break for companies that have at least 1/3 of their total working hours done by telecommuting, with a greater tax break for 50% telecommuting. Nothing huge, perhaps 3-5% tax break.
I absolutely hate both Republicans and Democrats equally when it comes down to financial responsibility. Perhaps hate the Republicans just a little bit more because they are pro Oil and pro War.
While the Democrats are pro alternate energy, they waste a ton of money on all kinds of things.
Nuclear energy in general is a sane, efficient solution as long as the nuclear waste is reprocessed like its done in France.
Wait, even the Germans aren't pro nuclear as well. Let's not focus on one party. The target needs to be the energy lobby.
If green peace and other eco organizations focused 100% of their energies on this alone, but no, they also are anti nuclear. Idiots too.
Its a huge mess.
Need to invest heavily on nuclear and wind power. With the latest and greatest huge 10MW wind turbines, wind power need perhaps just a 50% drop in turbine prices to become 100% economically viable, for places that are abundant in wind.
For instance, the entire northern Brazilian sea shore gets a ton of wind, with peak right at the drought season that limits hydro power. Perfect solution for us.
Sure there are tons of people out there that insists on buying computers that waste so much power they could cook meals for a couple dozen people with the heat dissipated by their CPUs alone. They have a massive ego that requires the notion they have the fastest computer possible, even though their computer will run at less than 10% utilization almost all the time. Game vendors keep writing code evermore inefficient, same for Microsoft OSes. Some actually do need a fast computer, perhaps for encoding HD video, performing very complex calculations or something else.
Since I migrated from Windows to Linux about 10 years ago, freeing myself from 99% of bloatware, I found out that CPU speed is becoming more and more irrelevant with each new CPU generation. Even with a 4 year old computer, I do simultaneously share a 10Mbps broadband connection, burn a DVD, play flight gear flight simulator, run e-mail server, MySQL, on the same 4GB RAM system with a dual core CPU, no damaged DVD medias, even with the game running at maximum CPU priority. Try that on Windows, any Windows !
People, save on your power bill, free yourself from wasteful computing, migrate to Linux. It will run exceptionally well on any new computer, it will also run very well on anything designed for Windows Vista. The minimum computer that Windows 7 requires just to boot and load Office is a huge computer for Linux.
Migrate to Linux. Make your computer work for you instead of to evil software corporations. The computer is *yours* after all.
You're correct that us Linux users aren't enough to cause a dent in Sony's market share. But If each one of us convinced 10 other potential customers not to buy Sony, that might be noticeable.
But I don't think we're a few thousand customers, more like many tens of thousands of actual customers of open software + sony.
There's only one effective way to go about this issues, principles, principles, principles.
Just like it's been 10 years I haven't purchased a single MS product. In the 10 years since then I never hesitate to tell anyone how bad their stuff is.
Now with flightgear I don't need to stinking MSFS anymore. Pure bloatware. No more Windows desktops or servers. The only non-linux OS I use is Symbian, because those came free with my mobile plan and they have a very good native SIP client. Just waiting for Android phones to come free with a 2 yr voice+internet 3g plan.
Don't underestimate the power of a customer with a deep, justified grudge. Those typically last for a lifetime. In that lifetime, that particular customer alone might cause the XYZ evil corporation to loose US$ 100k in revenues considering the negative advertisement cascade effect.
Now back to my master plot to remove windows and microsoft office from all my customer networks. About 300 desktops. All Windows servers already gone.
The only Playstation I ever had got sold 3 years ago, and now I have absolutely no interesting in purchasing ANY whatsoever Sony product.
Don't need to bother with my IP address, if I still had a sony product, I would throw it into the garbage right now.