As an Atheist living in one of the most right-wing Bible thumping states in the US, I have not been cast out or stoned or burned at the stake for my heresy lately, so I still feel pretty safe (at least in that sense) living here. I am not sure it would be the same if I chose to move to one of the more fundamentalist parts of the Middle East.
Opinions may vary, but at least from what I understand, the idea of separation of church and state holds a little stronger here than there.
It's not quite like that. It's considered "involuntary manslaughter" in the US if you kill a police officer that acts outside the bounds of the law and threatens your own life.
As in, if an officer with the intent to kill or maim you comes into your house without a valid warrant, you aren't obligated to sit there and die, and the courts are on your side if that officer gets killed in the process.
It seems pretty reasonable to me. The last thing a small town like mine needs is some gung-ho cowboy with a badge going around reaping his own justice. That's what this ruling protects us against.
It's still murder if you kill a police officer that tries to arrest or subdue you legally.
If they are going to go through the whole effort of genetic modification, why not instead modify the species so the females also only eat plant matter, and eliminate the blood transfer problem entirely? The modified lineage would likely be able to outbreed the blood suckers just because the necessary resource is that much more plentiful.
Then again, any fiddling with nature can (and likely will) go awry, but I'm not sure this idea would be any more risky than the one they implemented.
Or watch the economy crash further because our entire shipping infrastructure depends on the price of oil and further taxing that would drive up the price of everything, including your already prohibitively expensive electric cars. Afterall, they are made of raw materials that have to be shipped (often overseas) from foundries to the factories, and then again when the finished cars have to be shipped from the factories to the dealerships. Whether by boat, plane, train, or truck, all of that requires oil.
Come up with a better shipping system first, then we can talk about taxing oil.
And that still doesn't solve the problem of electric cars being absolutely inadequate for a huge portion of our population.
That is one seriously ugly, slow car. The automotive industry as a whole tried to do the same thing in the eighties and early nineties, abandoning the looks and performance that worked before in favor of better fuel economy and "practicality". The cars made in that era are now the lowest valued vehicles of any generation, and it's not because gas has gotten cheaper. I don't care if it's a perpetual motion machine; I'd rather walk than drive something like that. How embarrassing.
If it ever makes it to market, you can bet that it'll have a garbage Prius interior in it, too. Show me something with high mileage to fill the niche of a 335i coupe or S4, and we'll talk. I can get either of those in damn nice shape around the price range they are planning for that XL1. Probably cost less to maintain, too.
Later on down the road when gasoline is spent to the point where it's no longer a feasible fuel source, we'll find something else to replace it, and continue using the cars we have or something with similar form and function. Ultra-low horsepower cars like that one are not the solution.
Having lived in interior Alaska my entire life, I can say that the northern lights are one of the least interesting large scale natural events out there. Compared to something like a nice sunset, torrential rain, or even a clear starry night, it's really not exciting. The photographs you can find about them are usually rather long exposure times, and even on the "best" nights what you see with your naked eye is no more than a green haze.
Then again, fireworks or flashing lights don't excite me either. Maybe it just takes a certain type of person to like that kind of thing.
What if instead the answer was "Sorry, we only make enough bottles to supply Pepsi, but if you want to pay us more we'll supply you instead.", would that be illegal? Because that's the American way of doing things.
If you take the term 'scientist' a little more loosely, there's one movie that did an accurate job of showing what computer science is really like in the workplace. Having seen Office Space while I was in high school, sadly, I am now sitting in a cubicle, staring blankly at ancient code, with one of several bosses occasionally looking over my shoulder. How are those TPS reports coming along?
I'm not sure one could say the movie 'inspired' me either, though.
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. "Design an entire fleet of vehicles around the needs of 700,000 people" is a bit of a stretch from making sure an unnecessary (and invasive) vehicle function has the option of being disabled. Ford's engineers would be short sighted to have that behavior be always active.
That's a low blow accusing me of voting for Sarah, though. Low blow, sir.
The best solution is roundabouts, but Americans are too confused by them. The ones out front of my house have tire tracks going up over the top, tracks going the wrong way, and tire marks from panic stops inside the roundabout - and this is in a low density suburban setting. I'd hate to see what would happen if they put one in my city.
The flywheel mass needed to make this work in anything bigger than a moped engine would be somewhere between impractical and impossible. Ever try to turn over a car engine with your bare hands?
You and I are not talking about the same kind of cold. 0C is not cold enough to matter.
-40C is 'start it up and idle for a while' territory. Even if it's a diesel, even if it's a small engine, even if it's European built. If nothing else, your turbo would not last long if you took the car to highway speeds while it was still that cold.
Not to mention that it would also be -40 in the cab. That has its own set of problems.
Current (mainstream) automotive batteries are a lot more willing to discharge than they are to charge. You can probably run your starter for a minute or two before the battery is dead, but if you tried to charge it that fast not only would it not hold the charge, but it would likely overheat and explode. Automotive alternators (the thing keeping your battery charged) are built with this in mind. They provide relatively little current over a longer period of time. Also keep in mind that making a larger alternator to overcome this would drop the efficiency of the engine.
Starting and stopping the engine repeatedly in any situation would not work out. The only place this kind of thing would work is if you have infrequent, long stops.
It wouldn't behave in cold weather. It would have to be an option that could be disabled.
Depending on how cold the climate is, it might even be better for the car to sit and idle for a little while before taking off. Oil and transmission fluid don't lubricate terribly well below 0F - even the low viscosity flavors. This is especially true when the vehicle has been sitting for several hours. If it's cold enough, there might be -no- oil on the cylinder walls. Starting the engine cold and immediately taking off like that would damage the engine.
I disagree. A good application would have password requirements in line with the security requirements of the application. Users don't want or need a long, convoluted password of caps and numbers and symbols with a dictionary check for their twitter account or for a Mazda RX-7 enthusiast forum. I could understand having more security on something like an online bank account service, but even that leash could be kept loose, depending on what features are available on the site. My bank only offers a debit transaction listing. Everything else has to be handled in person.
Forcing asinine levels of security on everything is just going to make users write their passwords down. This is especially true of sites that require frequent password changes.
Put a few of them in series and you can get a pretty strong current. Touch a wire from either end on either side of the rolling paper and it should ignite if it's dry enough.
The contents of alkaline batteries are poisonous and potentially explosive though... If a prisoner is too dangerous to be given a lighter or a wall socket, why would they have access to batteries?
Everyone needs it... you may not need it now, but you may need it tomorrow when you finally get that lump in your neck looked at.
Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but I kinda liked when a person could choose whether or not he wanted to spend his hard earned money on health insurance. Apparently having choices is going out of style.
Everyone "needs" exercise so gym memberships should be state mandated too, right?
I play WoW eight to ten hours a day, every day. I have for six years with few breaks, and even those breaks were to play other MMOs. Between the characters I have made over the years I have recently passed the 700 days of played time marker. I have been accused countless times of being addicted, and that "it's ruining my life" and that "I should get out more" or that "I should get help".
I don't get it. While endgame raiding I have moved out on my own, finished a 'difficult' bachelor's degree program at a high end university, and am now holding a 9 to 5 secure, meaningful job in the field I studied in. It's not like there's anything constructive to do at latitude 65. To be honest, I don't even like the game, but it's all that's here. Everyone I grew up with is either dead or incarcerated.
I can understand having hostile feelings towards someone who neglects their spouse or children to play a video game, or towards those who play as much as I do but don't have a job and/or live at home with their parents. Just don't assume that everyone who plays for several hours every day fits into those categories. People that are worthless garbage while playing a video game are most likely also worthless garbage without the video game.
How about even simpler? Really all a phone should need is a small, one-liner monochrome LCD screen, one button for answer/call/hangup, and a touch scroller to scroll through names or numbers you'd be interested in calling. Have the numbers be programmable with a PC through the micro USB plug, which also charges the phone. For an added bonus, drop a couple gigs of solid state memory in it to double as a portable data solution.
Make the body out of CNC aluminum or stainless steel, build it to be submersible and droppable, and slap a sapphire lens over the LCD. Then fill the rest of the phone with a battery on one end and an antenna on the other. If you made it the size of an iphone, the range and battery life should be unprecedented. Or you could make it the size of a typical on-ear bluetooth headset and still function as well as or better than a modern smart phone for what it's used for.
Too bad something like that would be dead before it ever got off the ground. Kids these days and their texting. I'll tell ya.
I am seeing a lot of posts here from the kinds of people that are the root cause of all this nonsense.
"It's okay that kids get groped because terrorists use kids to meet their ends all the time." I disagree. If children being used as weapons was a common security problem in our airports, I could understand that point of view. But it isn't. This isn't Vietnam, and this isn't Afghanistan. Either way, this kind of reaction is not okay.
Want my opinion on the matter? Drop all of this airport check-in security garbage. All of it. No scans, no molestation, no profiling, no cavity searches. Let anyone with a knife or a properly licensed handgun take it with them on board. Want to know what will happen when that one in twenty thousand flights has a hijack attempt? The guy is going to get shot, and the plane will make it safely to its destination. And the time when an extremist decides to blow himself up and take down the plane? It isn't like we can actually catch that anyways, so we can take the tax money we saved from this false security to seek justice upon those responsible instead of pulling the covers over our head like a scared child.
It should be "If you're too paranoid to fly, don't fly." not "If you don't want to be sexually assaulted, don't fly." Until this is changed, I'd rather risk driving.
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I found it interesting that one of the items in her list was "Tactless".
Extremists will be extremists wherever you go.
As an Atheist living in one of the most right-wing Bible thumping states in the US, I have not been cast out or stoned or burned at the stake for my heresy lately, so I still feel pretty safe (at least in that sense) living here. I am not sure it would be the same if I chose to move to one of the more fundamentalist parts of the Middle East.
Opinions may vary, but at least from what I understand, the idea of separation of church and state holds a little stronger here than there.
You're probably just trolling anyways, though.
It's not quite like that. It's considered "involuntary manslaughter" in the US if you kill a police officer that acts outside the bounds of the law and threatens your own life.
As in, if an officer with the intent to kill or maim you comes into your house without a valid warrant, you aren't obligated to sit there and die, and the courts are on your side if that officer gets killed in the process.
It seems pretty reasonable to me. The last thing a small town like mine needs is some gung-ho cowboy with a badge going around reaping his own justice. That's what this ruling protects us against.
It's still murder if you kill a police officer that tries to arrest or subdue you legally.
If they are going to go through the whole effort of genetic modification, why not instead modify the species so the females also only eat plant matter, and eliminate the blood transfer problem entirely? The modified lineage would likely be able to outbreed the blood suckers just because the necessary resource is that much more plentiful.
Then again, any fiddling with nature can (and likely will) go awry, but I'm not sure this idea would be any more risky than the one they implemented.
Or watch the economy crash further because our entire shipping infrastructure depends on the price of oil and further taxing that would drive up the price of everything, including your already prohibitively expensive electric cars. Afterall, they are made of raw materials that have to be shipped (often overseas) from foundries to the factories, and then again when the finished cars have to be shipped from the factories to the dealerships. Whether by boat, plane, train, or truck, all of that requires oil.
Come up with a better shipping system first, then we can talk about taxing oil.
And that still doesn't solve the problem of electric cars being absolutely inadequate for a huge portion of our population.
That is one seriously ugly, slow car. The automotive industry as a whole tried to do the same thing in the eighties and early nineties, abandoning the looks and performance that worked before in favor of better fuel economy and "practicality". The cars made in that era are now the lowest valued vehicles of any generation, and it's not because gas has gotten cheaper. I don't care if it's a perpetual motion machine; I'd rather walk than drive something like that. How embarrassing.
If it ever makes it to market, you can bet that it'll have a garbage Prius interior in it, too. Show me something with high mileage to fill the niche of a 335i coupe or S4, and we'll talk. I can get either of those in damn nice shape around the price range they are planning for that XL1. Probably cost less to maintain, too.
Later on down the road when gasoline is spent to the point where it's no longer a feasible fuel source, we'll find something else to replace it, and continue using the cars we have or something with similar form and function. Ultra-low horsepower cars like that one are not the solution.
My ISP does do this. Then again, Alaskans don't seem to know any different. Not that we have any choice in the matter. Our internets really are tubes.
http://www.gci.com/for-home/alaskas-fastest-internet
You think Comcast or AT&T are bad?
Having lived in interior Alaska my entire life, I can say that the northern lights are one of the least interesting large scale natural events out there. Compared to something like a nice sunset, torrential rain, or even a clear starry night, it's really not exciting. The photographs you can find about them are usually rather long exposure times, and even on the "best" nights what you see with your naked eye is no more than a green haze.
Then again, fireworks or flashing lights don't excite me either. Maybe it just takes a certain type of person to like that kind of thing.
What if instead the answer was "Sorry, we only make enough bottles to supply Pepsi, but if you want to pay us more we'll supply you instead.", would that be illegal? Because that's the American way of doing things.
If you take the term 'scientist' a little more loosely, there's one movie that did an accurate job of showing what computer science is really like in the workplace. Having seen Office Space while I was in high school, sadly, I am now sitting in a cubicle, staring blankly at ancient code, with one of several bosses occasionally looking over my shoulder. How are those TPS reports coming along?
I'm not sure one could say the movie 'inspired' me either, though.
I didn't suggest anything of the sort. "Design an entire fleet of vehicles around the needs of 700,000 people" is a bit of a stretch from making sure an unnecessary (and invasive) vehicle function has the option of being disabled. Ford's engineers would be short sighted to have that behavior be always active.
That's a low blow accusing me of voting for Sarah, though. Low blow, sir.
It's a common winter day here in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Even stop signs are pretty terrible.
The best solution is roundabouts, but Americans are too confused by them. The ones out front of my house have tire tracks going up over the top, tracks going the wrong way, and tire marks from panic stops inside the roundabout - and this is in a low density suburban setting. I'd hate to see what would happen if they put one in my city.
The flywheel mass needed to make this work in anything bigger than a moped engine would be somewhere between impractical and impossible. Ever try to turn over a car engine with your bare hands?
You and I are not talking about the same kind of cold. 0C is not cold enough to matter.
-40C is 'start it up and idle for a while' territory. Even if it's a diesel, even if it's a small engine, even if it's European built. If nothing else, your turbo would not last long if you took the car to highway speeds while it was still that cold.
Not to mention that it would also be -40 in the cab. That has its own set of problems.
Current (mainstream) automotive batteries are a lot more willing to discharge than they are to charge. You can probably run your starter for a minute or two before the battery is dead, but if you tried to charge it that fast not only would it not hold the charge, but it would likely overheat and explode. Automotive alternators (the thing keeping your battery charged) are built with this in mind. They provide relatively little current over a longer period of time. Also keep in mind that making a larger alternator to overcome this would drop the efficiency of the engine.
Starting and stopping the engine repeatedly in any situation would not work out. The only place this kind of thing would work is if you have infrequent, long stops.
It wouldn't behave in cold weather. It would have to be an option that could be disabled.
Depending on how cold the climate is, it might even be better for the car to sit and idle for a little while before taking off. Oil and transmission fluid don't lubricate terribly well below 0F - even the low viscosity flavors. This is especially true when the vehicle has been sitting for several hours. If it's cold enough, there might be -no- oil on the cylinder walls. Starting the engine cold and immediately taking off like that would damage the engine.
I disagree. A good application would have password requirements in line with the security requirements of the application. Users don't want or need a long, convoluted password of caps and numbers and symbols with a dictionary check for their twitter account or for a Mazda RX-7 enthusiast forum. I could understand having more security on something like an online bank account service, but even that leash could be kept loose, depending on what features are available on the site. My bank only offers a debit transaction listing. Everything else has to be handled in person.
Forcing asinine levels of security on everything is just going to make users write their passwords down. This is especially true of sites that require frequent password changes.
Put a few of them in series and you can get a pretty strong current. Touch a wire from either end on either side of the rolling paper and it should ignite if it's dry enough.
The contents of alkaline batteries are poisonous and potentially explosive though... If a prisoner is too dangerous to be given a lighter or a wall socket, why would they have access to batteries?
Everyone needs it... you may not need it now, but you may need it tomorrow when you finally get that lump in your neck looked at.
Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned, but I kinda liked when a person could choose whether or not he wanted to spend his hard earned money on health insurance. Apparently having choices is going out of style.
Everyone "needs" exercise so gym memberships should be state mandated too, right?
I play WoW eight to ten hours a day, every day. I have for six years with few breaks, and even those breaks were to play other MMOs. Between the characters I have made over the years I have recently passed the 700 days of played time marker. I have been accused countless times of being addicted, and that "it's ruining my life" and that "I should get out more" or that "I should get help".
I don't get it. While endgame raiding I have moved out on my own, finished a 'difficult' bachelor's degree program at a high end university, and am now holding a 9 to 5 secure, meaningful job in the field I studied in. It's not like there's anything constructive to do at latitude 65. To be honest, I don't even like the game, but it's all that's here. Everyone I grew up with is either dead or incarcerated.
I can understand having hostile feelings towards someone who neglects their spouse or children to play a video game, or towards those who play as much as I do but don't have a job and/or live at home with their parents. Just don't assume that everyone who plays for several hours every day fits into those categories. People that are worthless garbage while playing a video game are most likely also worthless garbage without the video game.
How about even simpler? Really all a phone should need is a small, one-liner monochrome LCD screen, one button for answer/call/hangup, and a touch scroller to scroll through names or numbers you'd be interested in calling. Have the numbers be programmable with a PC through the micro USB plug, which also charges the phone. For an added bonus, drop a couple gigs of solid state memory in it to double as a portable data solution.
Make the body out of CNC aluminum or stainless steel, build it to be submersible and droppable, and slap a sapphire lens over the LCD. Then fill the rest of the phone with a battery on one end and an antenna on the other. If you made it the size of an iphone, the range and battery life should be unprecedented. Or you could make it the size of a typical on-ear bluetooth headset and still function as well as or better than a modern smart phone for what it's used for.
Too bad something like that would be dead before it ever got off the ground. Kids these days and their texting. I'll tell ya.
I am seeing a lot of posts here from the kinds of people that are the root cause of all this nonsense.
"It's okay that kids get groped because terrorists use kids to meet their ends all the time." I disagree. If children being used as weapons was a common security problem in our airports, I could understand that point of view. But it isn't. This isn't Vietnam, and this isn't Afghanistan. Either way, this kind of reaction is not okay.
Want my opinion on the matter? Drop all of this airport check-in security garbage. All of it. No scans, no molestation, no profiling, no cavity searches. Let anyone with a knife or a properly licensed handgun take it with them on board. Want to know what will happen when that one in twenty thousand flights has a hijack attempt? The guy is going to get shot, and the plane will make it safely to its destination. And the time when an extremist decides to blow himself up and take down the plane? It isn't like we can actually catch that anyways, so we can take the tax money we saved from this false security to seek justice upon those responsible instead of pulling the covers over our head like a scared child.
It should be "If you're too paranoid to fly, don't fly." not "If you don't want to be sexually assaulted, don't fly." Until this is changed, I'd rather risk driving.