Which ally would that be, Britain vis-a-vis Northern Ireland? I don't recall the British telling the U.S. not to do this. In fact it rather seems they jumped on board.
Rumsfeld was not the architect of the Iraq war
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
AIPAC, which Rumsfeld has strong links to, was. AIPAC is the second most powerful lobby in Washington behind the AARP, and is composed of pro-Israel hawks and zionist Christians. Wolfowitz, Perle, and many other members of the Bush administration are deeply linked to them as well. AIPAC represents hard-line Israeli interests. (Incidentally they're also the reason why you never hear criticism of Israel in the United States of America, because they actively and tirelessly lobby government, academia, and the media to suppress our freedom to speak honestly about and discuss openly the situation there. Their favorite tactic against people who make outrageous statements like "Palestinians are people too, and they deserve to live in peace," is to call them "anti-Semites" and target them for character assassination.)
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002 that "the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors."
It's overstating it a little to say that we invaded Iraq on AIPAC's orders. There were other parties who went along, but AIPAC was centrally involved. And what AIPAC wants from Washington, it gets. This despite a huge portion of the American public who opposed the invasion and even despite American Jewish opinion, 52-62% of whom opposed the invasion.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the giants of international relations (they're like the Freud and Jung of the discipline), published a remarkable paper on the subject last March: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/r wp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf>
Essentially what we've been doing in Iraq is fighting a proxy war on Israel's behalf (on behalf of Likud and other Israeli hawks, that is). It's also why Bush started making noises at Syria recently before things really started to fall apart in Iraq, because they're next on AIPAC's list. Iran comes after that.
-repeal the Patriot Act -put a stop to govt. spying on Americans -restore habeus corpus -repeal the tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy -close Guantanamo -stop "extraordinary rendition" -end torture -get the US out of Iraq -fund alternative energy and public transportation so we can stop funding terrorism through oil -implement national health care -disband and dismantle the Dept. of Homeland Security, which is the creepiest title since 'Ministry of Truth.' -crack down on corporate aka white-collar crime -stop outsourcing our jobs -restore environmental protections -shut NK and Iran's nuclear programs down -stop invading other countries at the orders of AIPAC (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/ rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf) -seriously fund medical research to cure cancer and heart disease, etc. -catch Osama bin Laden, for pete's sake -repair our alliances -start addressing the very scary and very imminent threat of China
Basically, I want them to undo everything Bush has done, and then take the country in a positive direction domestically and abroad.
But I will be seriously pissed if I don't see investigations and impeachment, because the neo-cons, the war profiteers like Bechtel and Halliburton, and all their co-conspirators must be brought to justice. 'Cause like it or not folks, if they don't then our last means to get justice is with our guns.
"I don't know enough about the issues" is a lame excuse to not vote. What, do you have to be a policy wonk to vote? Perhaps you think that the only people qualified to vote have PhDs in political science? Nonsense. If you're an American citizen, you're 18 years old or older, then you have the right to vote. It's the most important right you have in this political system, because every other right you have is safeguarded by that one right. It's the one you go to war over if it's taken away or subverted. And we have, and people have died for you and I to have it.
People who say you have a duty to vote are putting the wrong connotation on it, because they make it seem like a burden. Some of those say that because they naturally say everything with a negative tone. Some of those say it because they believe in civic duty as a positive thing, that which you do to serve your family, community, and fellow citizens, the same way you would join a bucket line to put out the fire consuming your neighbor's house. Some of those, though, say it because they want it to seem like too much bother to get off your couch to do, because whenever they get you to not vote, their vote counts for double, the one they cast and the one you didn't cast.
So voting is not homework. It's not a high school physics exam. It's not even remotely painful. It's joyous. YOU get to tell the politicians and parties what for, in a more powerful way than anything else you can do. Everyone repeats the myth that money is the most important, but it's not. At the end of the day, it's the votes. Steve Forbes had all the money he needed, but at the end of the day he did not get the votes. Ross Perot had more money than Bush, Cheney, and all their gang put together, but at the end of the day he did not get the votes. It's not the money, it's the votes. They spend all that money trying to buy your vote. That's how valuable your vote is.
So walk into that polling place and cast your vote like you just hit the lottery and are laying out a wad of cash to buy that shiny new Ferrari.
Given the sales of some games of late, they're the perfect platform for aspiring talent to get heard. For the game companies, it's an inexhaustible source of free or cheap soundtracks. Why pay blood money to the RIAA to license songs when the stuff you can get free or cheap is just as good if not better? Gamers, in turn, get to hear new music, which is quite difficult in this age of ClearChannel and MTV playlist payola. It just makes sense for all parties.
The only party left out in the cold is the RIAA, which is just fine by me. Disintermediating them into extinction is a joyous goal we should all work toward.
Linux desktops (Gnome, KDE) are at least as good as MS in terms of beauty. The screensavers and built-in tools (GIMP, OpenOffice, etc) are excellent and some works of art, even. People who've been following Linux through me for 8 years gasped when I showed them Ubuntu recently.
Still, the niggling little things, the rough edges that long-time linux users take in stride (such as having to update libraries manually to get apps or updates to work) are horribly frustrating to the average user. Yes, utilities like apt have made things far easier than they ever were, but even those still fail about 15% of the time. The threshhold of mass adoption is not far off, but we still need to get to a "Install" => "OK" => "OK" => "Finish" level of ease-of-use.
IMHO, it's the usability gap and interoperability hurdle that's holding the OS back more than the eye candy.
I totally agree. But what's your next move? How are you going to vote on Nov. 7th? There's so much more you can do than speak out, but at least vote. And vote against the regime that's making travesties like this commonplace.
We can, however, advocate impeaching him, putting him on trial for high treason and war crimes, convicting him, and publicly executing him on the Mall in Washington D.C. And that's giving him more right to due process than he is willing to begrudge us (bye-bye, habeus corpus!).
So, I have a question. Not an archaeologist, nor a seismologist, nor anything else. Layman here.
But don't they have the means now to map things which lie below the surface? I believe I've heard or read that they have satellites that can do that to some extent now. Also, I saw a show on the Discovery Channel where they planted small charges in a grid pattern in some Greek island while looking for the origin of the Atlantis myth, detonated them, and then created an image based on how well sound propagated through subsoil strata.
If that's so, then why can't they do something like that in the Nile river valley? Surely it's gotta be cheaper and faster and safer to uncover the past that way than to dig randomly or wait for a bunch of grave-robbing turkeys to make finds first.
You're as bad as the guy who takes issue with the statement, "We won't stop until all children are above average!"
You're as bad as the guy who worked at MegaHuge Hedge Fund in the late 90's. His boss walked into the office one day all excited about a new way to measure risk, called "Downside Risk Quotient." He asked the guy how often the stocks in their portfolio were below their mean price, or what their "Downside Risk" was. The guy foolishly answered, "50% of the time."
They launch bombs from a space station containing a neurotoxin from a rare Amazonian orchid. They're designed to wipe out humans only so we can re-populate their territory later. Brilliant!
And the only question we'll have to answer is, 'blonde, or brunette?'
I've been following these threads on Slashdot and elsewhere for years, and recently have come to have a new perspective on why we're not getting anywhere as techies or as citizens living in a democracy. I started out as a techie who's been chased to the Strategy and Management end of the production spectrum by the Dot-bomb and outsourcing craze; and I've been simply astonished by how exceedingly difficult it is to communicate exceptionally simple concepts and goals to Sales people and management--within our own industry! And it dawned on me that the reason we're banging our heads against this same suite of issues year in and year out is that we're not grasping the simple fact that we have to get our message across in the dead simplest way possible. It's about interpersonal communication.
It's true that Joe Q. Citizen doesn't know or understand much about technological issues. Most people know very little about most things. Some might know a lot about a very little if they're particularly ambitious, but most people just try to get by. The world is a big place with a lot of big things going on that they, the little guys, don't feel like they have very much effect on. So why take the time and put yourself through all the heartache to learn a whole lot and invest a whole lot of energy and passion into some big issue that you can't really do anything about? Besides they have to take care of their kids, hold down a job, manage their personal relationships, walk their dog, and just basically do all that you have to live.
If you're lucky, the average person has about 10 minutes a day to think about the big picture, new concepts, and form opinions. The desire and drive to learn, adapt, and grow that we techies share, just aren't by most people. And in all these threads we rail and gibber and threaten and protest that nobody cares and nobody is doing anything. And we just cannot understand it, precisely because our assumptions about people wanting to know are not matching up with reality.
That's why, my friends, if we want the government to change its policies on tech or anything else we have to 1) stop repeating platitudes, truisms, and articles of faith like "in a democracy people get the government they deserve" or "it's not a democracy, it's a republic!" and feeling like we've said or done anything that matters, 2) organize as techies and get our story straight, 3) re-phrase and test and re-phrase our message until your randomly selected group of citizens gets it on the first pass, and 4) repeat it high and low until the hills and valleys ring, until it's lost all flavor in our mouths and we dream it at night and mumble it under our breaths autonomically.
That is the only, only way to break through the great white noise and extremely well-funded spin that is the modern industrialized democracy. We have to be able to get through to people in those precious 10 minutes a day that they have to think about anything that's not right in front of their noses and smacking them in the head.
Another entry in the Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too Hall of Fame. They want to sue music fans for sharing files, yet they also want to market to them. They want them to stop sharing files, but they want them to share files so they will see their ads.
The RIAA has truly entered the Escherian phase of their downfall, where they have begun to swallow their own tails.
Let's pass that along to our kids, too. Instead of paying record labels, patronize podsafe music or amateur bands (most of whom sound better than record label pap).
Or make your own music. That's the best of all.
Since the RIAA began their suicidal jihad, I taught myself to play the guitar. I'm no virtuoso or even very good by any objective measure, but there's about 100 times the satisfaction and enjoyment in playing the 10 tunes I know than in just listening to any song I've ever heard.
So, in a way, thank you RIAA for showing me that doing my own thing is far more amazing than giving you money for the garbage you laughingly, mockingly call 'art.'
dropped out of the running. Used to be when I was a kid in the Cold War everyone always talked about how heavily outnumbered we were against the Russians. What did they have, 350 million? So it really shocked me when Russia recently said they only have 150 million. Wow. Didn't think the Baltics and Kazakhstan had that many people.
But there's a country that should start accepting immigrants, especially from any place but China. All of Siberia's replete with oil and timber and natural resources and just plain elbow room, and China's incredibly populous, right next door, and hungry for resources. Eventually they'll figure that out, and with a third of the people to defend it that they used to have, Russia will crumble. It'll be the Golden Horde, Take 2.
They want to know everything but everything about me? OK, fine.
As long as I get to know everything but everything about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Pat Robertson. Specifically, I'd like to know their exact whereabouts at all times, what their bank account and social security #'s are. I'd also really like to know where their kids go to school and what their medical histories are.
Oh, wait. You're not ready to share that information with the rest of us? Then you can butt the hell out of my information. Anything less will be settled with guns.
Everytime the subject of flying cars or similar comes up, someone always rolls out the argument, "If I can't deal with the idiots who are on the road now, I can't possibly imagine having those same idiots flying around above me."
But people said similar things about the first automobiles. And about the first airplanes. And so on, and so forth. That's a social resistance to change that can be overcome.
It seems to me that catastrophic failure in mid-flight is more an engineering challenge. Do you deploy parachutes? Could there be a fine-grained failure sensing system that instantly forces a landing when it senses trouble? How about a shroud of airbags like those that landed Pathfinder on Mars? A creative engineer could certainly solve this problem the same way creative engineers have solved every other problem.
As the major supplier of aid to NK, China should have been able to curb their client state. But they didn't. Even after they said to NK the diplomatic equivalent of, "No don't you frickin' dare conduct a nuclear test." Talk about losing face.
Also, because they lost face now SK, Japan, and Taiwan could well pull nuclear arsenals out of their hats to counterbalance NK. China's regional security situation instantly becomes much more complicated--can't really invade Taiwan anymore, can't really cow Japan anymore, can't expand its empire the way it wants to.
Seems to me that putting pressure on NK is pointless. The path to success is putting pressure on China. They're a lot more integrated with the rest of the world and have a whole lot more to lose. Tell the Chinese to deal with their mess, or the rest of the world will. And China will lose even more face and wind up with even more compromised regional security.
i am not an astronomer. never taken an astronomy class. rank amateur here.
but i do know that we're far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milkyway galaxy. there are a lot of stars in the sky, but they're really just pretty pinpricks that you can play connect-the-dots with. sure, they provide a little light, but not much.
so i wonder what it would be like on one of those planets orbiting suns in the galactic core. would the relative proximity of so many more stars raise the ambient radiation level appreciably? would it be as bright at night as moonlight here, even without a moon? would the metabolism and life cycle of the flora and fauna there be accelerated relative to us because there's more energy being put into their systems?
OK, let's say that you get 100,000 Kwh over 20 years out of this thing. That's 5000/Kwh per year. If it cost $11K to install, then that's equivalent to paying $0.11/Kwh consistently for 20 years. Pretty nice to know that if you're doing long term planning.
Let's look at my ConEd bill for 2005 by way of comparison. The cost ranged from $.20-.31/Kwh.
So, the lowest cost was nearly double what this windmill would do for me, plus there was 50% volatility. Tough to plan for that if you're a business or cost-conscious household.
Then there's my total consumption for 2005: 3528Kwh. Well below the 5000Kwh the windmill would generate. So, (.25-.11)*(5000-3528) = $206.08/year profit. Put that into an investment paying 7% returns, and you're making $220.51/year.
If you're even more frugal with your power consumption than my house is and living on a fixed income, you could be making a decent supplement to your income. Predictability * powergrid savings = not a bad deal, if you don't mind standing out from your neighbors.
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Which ally would that be, Britain vis-a-vis Northern Ireland? I don't recall the British telling the U.S. not to do this. In fact it rather seems they jumped on board.
AIPAC, which Rumsfeld has strong links to, was. AIPAC is the second most powerful lobby in Washington behind the AARP, and is composed of pro-Israel hawks and zionist Christians. Wolfowitz, Perle, and many other members of the Bush administration are deeply linked to them as well. AIPAC represents hard-line Israeli interests. (Incidentally they're also the reason why you never hear criticism of Israel in the United States of America, because they actively and tirelessly lobby government, academia, and the media to suppress our freedom to speak honestly about and discuss openly the situation there. Their favorite tactic against people who make outrageous statements like "Palestinians are people too, and they deserve to live in peace," is to call them "anti-Semites" and target them for character assassination.)
r wp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf>
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002 that "the campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must. Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors."
It's overstating it a little to say that we invaded Iraq on AIPAC's orders. There were other parties who went along, but AIPAC was centrally involved. And what AIPAC wants from Washington, it gets. This despite a huge portion of the American public who opposed the invasion and even despite American Jewish opinion, 52-62% of whom opposed the invasion.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the giants of international relations (they're like the Freud and Jung of the discipline), published a remarkable paper on the subject last March: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/
Essentially what we've been doing in Iraq is fighting a proxy war on Israel's behalf (on behalf of Likud and other Israeli hawks, that is). It's also why Bush started making noises at Syria recently before things really started to fall apart in Iraq, because they're next on AIPAC's list. Iran comes after that.
Sure, I agree. I want Congress to:
/ rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf)
-repeal the Patriot Act
-put a stop to govt. spying on Americans
-restore habeus corpus
-repeal the tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy
-close Guantanamo
-stop "extraordinary rendition"
-end torture
-get the US out of Iraq
-fund alternative energy and public transportation so we can stop funding terrorism through oil
-implement national health care
-disband and dismantle the Dept. of Homeland Security, which is the creepiest title since 'Ministry of Truth.'
-crack down on corporate aka white-collar crime
-stop outsourcing our jobs
-restore environmental protections
-shut NK and Iran's nuclear programs down
-stop invading other countries at the orders of AIPAC (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf
-seriously fund medical research to cure cancer and heart disease, etc.
-catch Osama bin Laden, for pete's sake
-repair our alliances
-start addressing the very scary and very imminent threat of China
Basically, I want them to undo everything Bush has done, and then take the country in a positive direction domestically and abroad.
But I will be seriously pissed if I don't see investigations and impeachment, because the neo-cons, the war profiteers like Bechtel and Halliburton, and all their co-conspirators must be brought to justice. 'Cause like it or not folks, if they don't then our last means to get justice is with our guns.
"I don't know enough about the issues" is a lame excuse to not vote. What, do you have to be a policy wonk to vote? Perhaps you think that the only people qualified to vote have PhDs in political science? Nonsense. If you're an American citizen, you're 18 years old or older, then you have the right to vote. It's the most important right you have in this political system, because every other right you have is safeguarded by that one right. It's the one you go to war over if it's taken away or subverted. And we have, and people have died for you and I to have it.
People who say you have a duty to vote are putting the wrong connotation on it, because they make it seem like a burden. Some of those say that because they naturally say everything with a negative tone. Some of those say it because they believe in civic duty as a positive thing, that which you do to serve your family, community, and fellow citizens, the same way you would join a bucket line to put out the fire consuming your neighbor's house. Some of those, though, say it because they want it to seem like too much bother to get off your couch to do, because whenever they get you to not vote, their vote counts for double, the one they cast and the one you didn't cast.
So voting is not homework. It's not a high school physics exam. It's not even remotely painful. It's joyous. YOU get to tell the politicians and parties what for, in a more powerful way than anything else you can do. Everyone repeats the myth that money is the most important, but it's not. At the end of the day, it's the votes. Steve Forbes had all the money he needed, but at the end of the day he did not get the votes. Ross Perot had more money than Bush, Cheney, and all their gang put together, but at the end of the day he did not get the votes. It's not the money, it's the votes. They spend all that money trying to buy your vote. That's how valuable your vote is.
So walk into that polling place and cast your vote like you just hit the lottery and are laying out a wad of cash to buy that shiny new Ferrari.
Honestly, now! It's "cited".
Given the sales of some games of late, they're the perfect platform for aspiring talent to get heard. For the game companies, it's an inexhaustible source of free or cheap soundtracks. Why pay blood money to the RIAA to license songs when the stuff you can get free or cheap is just as good if not better? Gamers, in turn, get to hear new music, which is quite difficult in this age of ClearChannel and MTV playlist payola. It just makes sense for all parties.
The only party left out in the cold is the RIAA, which is just fine by me. Disintermediating them into extinction is a joyous goal we should all work toward.
Linux desktops (Gnome, KDE) are at least as good as MS in terms of beauty. The screensavers and built-in tools (GIMP, OpenOffice, etc) are excellent and some works of art, even. People who've been following Linux through me for 8 years gasped when I showed them Ubuntu recently.
Still, the niggling little things, the rough edges that long-time linux users take in stride (such as having to update libraries manually to get apps or updates to work) are horribly frustrating to the average user. Yes, utilities like apt have made things far easier than they ever were, but even those still fail about 15% of the time. The threshhold of mass adoption is not far off, but we still need to get to a "Install" => "OK" => "OK" => "Finish" level of ease-of-use.
IMHO, it's the usability gap and interoperability hurdle that's holding the OS back more than the eye candy.
I totally agree. But what's your next move? How are you going to vote on Nov. 7th? There's so much more you can do than speak out, but at least vote. And vote against the regime that's making travesties like this commonplace.
We can, however, advocate impeaching him, putting him on trial for high treason and war crimes, convicting him, and publicly executing him on the Mall in Washington D.C. And that's giving him more right to due process than he is willing to begrudge us (bye-bye, habeus corpus!).
So, I have a question. Not an archaeologist, nor a seismologist, nor anything else. Layman here.
But don't they have the means now to map things which lie below the surface? I believe I've heard or read that they have satellites that can do that to some extent now. Also, I saw a show on the Discovery Channel where they planted small charges in a grid pattern in some Greek island while looking for the origin of the Atlantis myth, detonated them, and then created an image based on how well sound propagated through subsoil strata.
If that's so, then why can't they do something like that in the Nile river valley? Surely it's gotta be cheaper and faster and safer to uncover the past that way than to dig randomly or wait for a bunch of grave-robbing turkeys to make finds first.
Foiled by statistics again!
You're as bad as the guy who takes issue with the statement, "We won't stop until all children are above average!"
You're as bad as the guy who worked at MegaHuge Hedge Fund in the late 90's. His boss walked into the office one day all excited about a new way to measure risk, called "Downside Risk Quotient." He asked the guy how often the stocks in their portfolio were below their mean price, or what their "Downside Risk" was. The guy foolishly answered, "50% of the time."
They launch bombs from a space station containing a neurotoxin from a rare Amazonian orchid. They're designed to wipe out humans only so we can re-populate their territory later. Brilliant!
And the only question we'll have to answer is, 'blonde, or brunette?'
I've been following these threads on Slashdot and elsewhere for years, and recently have come to have a new perspective on why we're not getting anywhere as techies or as citizens living in a democracy. I started out as a techie who's been chased to the Strategy and Management end of the production spectrum by the Dot-bomb and outsourcing craze; and I've been simply astonished by how exceedingly difficult it is to communicate exceptionally simple concepts and goals to Sales people and management--within our own industry! And it dawned on me that the reason we're banging our heads against this same suite of issues year in and year out is that we're not grasping the simple fact that we have to get our message across in the dead simplest way possible. It's about interpersonal communication.
It's true that Joe Q. Citizen doesn't know or understand much about technological issues. Most people know very little about most things. Some might know a lot about a very little if they're particularly ambitious, but most people just try to get by. The world is a big place with a lot of big things going on that they, the little guys, don't feel like they have very much effect on. So why take the time and put yourself through all the heartache to learn a whole lot and invest a whole lot of energy and passion into some big issue that you can't really do anything about? Besides they have to take care of their kids, hold down a job, manage their personal relationships, walk their dog, and just basically do all that you have to live.
If you're lucky, the average person has about 10 minutes a day to think about the big picture, new concepts, and form opinions. The desire and drive to learn, adapt, and grow that we techies share, just aren't by most people. And in all these threads we rail and gibber and threaten and protest that nobody cares and nobody is doing anything. And we just cannot understand it, precisely because our assumptions about people wanting to know are not matching up with reality.
That's why, my friends, if we want the government to change its policies on tech or anything else we have to 1) stop repeating platitudes, truisms, and articles of faith like "in a democracy people get the government they deserve" or "it's not a democracy, it's a republic!" and feeling like we've said or done anything that matters, 2) organize as techies and get our story straight, 3) re-phrase and test and re-phrase our message until your randomly selected group of citizens gets it on the first pass, and 4) repeat it high and low until the hills and valleys ring, until it's lost all flavor in our mouths and we dream it at night and mumble it under our breaths autonomically.
That is the only, only way to break through the great white noise and extremely well-funded spin that is the modern industrialized democracy. We have to be able to get through to people in those precious 10 minutes a day that they have to think about anything that's not right in front of their noses and smacking them in the head.
Another entry in the Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too Hall of Fame. They want to sue music fans for sharing files, yet they also want to market to them. They want them to stop sharing files, but they want them to share files so they will see their ads.
The RIAA has truly entered the Escherian phase of their downfall, where they have begun to swallow their own tails.
squat and goblinlike describes my mother-in-law to a 'T.'
Let's pass that along to our kids, too. Instead of paying record labels, patronize podsafe music or amateur bands (most of whom sound better than record label pap).
Or make your own music. That's the best of all.
Since the RIAA began their suicidal jihad, I taught myself to play the guitar. I'm no virtuoso or even very good by any objective measure, but there's about 100 times the satisfaction and enjoyment in playing the 10 tunes I know than in just listening to any song I've ever heard.
So, in a way, thank you RIAA for showing me that doing my own thing is far more amazing than giving you money for the garbage you laughingly, mockingly call 'art.'
dropped out of the running. Used to be when I was a kid in the Cold War everyone always talked about how heavily outnumbered we were against the Russians. What did they have, 350 million? So it really shocked me when Russia recently said they only have 150 million. Wow. Didn't think the Baltics and Kazakhstan had that many people.
But there's a country that should start accepting immigrants, especially from any place but China. All of Siberia's replete with oil and timber and natural resources and just plain elbow room, and China's incredibly populous, right next door, and hungry for resources. Eventually they'll figure that out, and with a third of the people to defend it that they used to have, Russia will crumble. It'll be the Golden Horde, Take 2.
They want to know everything but everything about me? OK, fine.
As long as I get to know everything but everything about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Pat Robertson. Specifically, I'd like to know their exact whereabouts at all times, what their bank account and social security #'s are. I'd also really like to know where their kids go to school and what their medical histories are.
Oh, wait. You're not ready to share that information with the rest of us? Then you can butt the hell out of my information. Anything less will be settled with guns.
DON'T forget the last episode of 'Single Female Lawyer.'
Staaar Waaars, all o' the time...
Everytime the subject of flying cars or similar comes up, someone always rolls out the argument, "If I can't deal with the idiots who are on the road now, I can't possibly imagine having those same idiots flying around above me."
But people said similar things about the first automobiles. And about the first airplanes. And so on, and so forth. That's a social resistance to change that can be overcome.
It seems to me that catastrophic failure in mid-flight is more an engineering challenge. Do you deploy parachutes? Could there be a fine-grained failure sensing system that instantly forces a landing when it senses trouble? How about a shroud of airbags like those that landed Pathfinder on Mars? A creative engineer could certainly solve this problem the same way creative engineers have solved every other problem.
As the major supplier of aid to NK, China should have been able to curb their client state. But they didn't. Even after they said to NK the diplomatic equivalent of, "No don't you frickin' dare conduct a nuclear test." Talk about losing face.
Also, because they lost face now SK, Japan, and Taiwan could well pull nuclear arsenals out of their hats to counterbalance NK. China's regional security situation instantly becomes much more complicated--can't really invade Taiwan anymore, can't really cow Japan anymore, can't expand its empire the way it wants to.
Seems to me that putting pressure on NK is pointless. The path to success is putting pressure on China. They're a lot more integrated with the rest of the world and have a whole lot more to lose. Tell the Chinese to deal with their mess, or the rest of the world will. And China will lose even more face and wind up with even more compromised regional security.
i am not an astronomer. never taken an astronomy class. rank amateur here.
but i do know that we're far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the milkyway galaxy. there are a lot of stars in the sky, but they're really just pretty pinpricks that you can play connect-the-dots with. sure, they provide a little light, but not much.
so i wonder what it would be like on one of those planets orbiting suns in the galactic core. would the relative proximity of so many more stars raise the ambient radiation level appreciably? would it be as bright at night as moonlight here, even without a moon? would the metabolism and life cycle of the flora and fauna there be accelerated relative to us because there's more energy being put into their systems?
OK, let's say that you get 100,000 Kwh over 20 years out of this thing. That's 5000/Kwh per year. If it cost $11K to install, then that's equivalent to paying $0.11/Kwh consistently for 20 years. Pretty nice to know that if you're doing long term planning.
Let's look at my ConEd bill for 2005 by way of comparison. The cost ranged from $.20-.31/Kwh.
So, the lowest cost was nearly double what this windmill would do for me, plus there was 50% volatility. Tough to plan for that if you're a business or cost-conscious household.
Then there's my total consumption for 2005: 3528Kwh. Well below the 5000Kwh the windmill would generate. So, (.25-.11)*(5000-3528) = $206.08/year profit. Put that into an investment paying 7% returns, and you're making $220.51/year.
If you're even more frugal with your power consumption than my house is and living on a fixed income, you could be making a decent supplement to your income. Predictability * powergrid savings = not a bad deal, if you don't mind standing out from your neighbors.
the price of oil is volatile. the cost of wind power is much more predictable. if you're doing long term planning, the latter is a strong argument.