>>>That sort of economy is achievable with a ten year old petrol VW Polo, *without* all the heavy complex hybrid stuff
Unfortunately it would fail the updated U.S. LEV-II standards (too much NOx). The reason MPGs have been dropping in newer cars is because the engine is being tuned to run richer to pass emissions tests.
The best petrol car right now that can pass these tough regs is the Civic HF at 45mpg. And the Chevy CruzeEco at 44. That's very close to what the Civic and Prius hybrids do.
>>>>>Considering emissions on automobiles have been reduced by 99+% (CO, NOx, HC) since the 1970's >> >>CO2 emissions from cars have been reduced? Highly doubtful.
Somebody can't read. He never once listed CO2. As for sources one only needs to look at the EPA which had very lenient standards in the 70s but gradually strengthened them over time. The current standards only allow 1/100th as much pollution as a car built in 1975. (1/1000th in the case of NOx.)
You should look at greenercars.org. They not only look at upstream emissions but also the cost of drilling for oil, shipping it to you gas station, and also downstream pollution (shipping the junk car to China for recycling). Also CO2. Here are these cars scores out of 100:
Mitsubishi myEV 58 Toyota Prius C 56 Civic CNG 55 Leaf 55 The highest non-hybrid cars are the Scion IQ at 53 and the Toyota Yaris at 50. Probably they score that high because both are SULEVs and PZEVs.
>>>US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources.
In the 1800s and upto about 1950 you could have said the same about gasoline: All domestic. But when car sales boomed, we had to start importing from outside.
The same would happen if everybody started driving EVs: The boom would exceed the supply and we would have to import electricity (or coal & CNG & oil to connvert to electricity).
greenercars.org rated my Honda Insight as cleaner than the EVs. It rated the EVs as no cleaner, over a whole lifecycle, than a Prius Hybrid or Civic HF (gasoline).
Or 75% the cost of a Nissan Leaf on the used market. Their value is plummetting fast because just because a company builds an EV doesn't mean people will buy it. The resale value is terrible.
And the cost is cheap for electricity versus gasoline. According to the DOE, $1 for every 25 miles. Gasoline is 3-4 times that much.
>>>What a stupid thing to say. I'm more likely to buy a Windows 8 tablet over the two current leaders as iOS is garbage (really, I don't know how anyone puts up with it), and I don't care for Android (I don't like the clunky UI and hate the pitiful dev tools). I seriously doubt that I'm unique.
Probably not unique given your current location (Washington, near Seattle, Microsoft cubicle).;-)
>>>Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous.
I figured Dradis was the name of the guy who invented the scanner, and it appears to be similar to our passive RADAR (shows blips of whatever EM targets it receives).
>>>Any spacecraft gives off heat, and infrared radiation is easy to spot in clumps
Not when it's 3 light-minutes away. You're talking about finding a tiny carrier-sized object at the distance of Mars, and it could be anywhere. On the same plane as you, or above you, or below you, or even behind you.
I wouldn't call that incest. Besides studies have shown that closely-related cousins have a better propagation rate than strangers. Closer chemistry leads to less stillbirths.
>>> "Yeah, we put noise in space, because... um... there's pressure on the sides of the spacecraft, yeah, that's it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
JMS never said anything like that. (If you think he did, then I want to see a linked source.) You make it sound like he's some kind of idiot.
Why are so many B5 Actors dying so young? The Star Trek crew lived on-and-on-and-on. Nobody dies until the around 2000..... 30 years after the show. Meanwhile B5 has lost several actors in just the first 12 years.
It appears you have this backwards. According to JMS it was the *B5 crew* that contacted NASA and asked for technical assistance to portray accurate ship maneuvering. The fact Starfury acts like a real space vessel is probably because the NASA advisor was rejecting early designs & offering advice on how to make it better.
>>>Yes, because there is a world of difference between fictional violence and real violence.
Studies have shown the human brain does not distinguish the difference. It has the same chemical reactions to whatever it sees, regardless if it's real or on TV.
>>>vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording
Not hardly. When a record is *brand new* it has some high frequency harmonics (upto 25,000 hertz), but those quickly get rubbed-off the record by the needle. Of course being analog it will never be a perfect amplification of the little record ridges into audible sound. There's always distortion. PLUS vinyl adds *extra* sounds to a recording, like the hiss of the needle rubbing the record and the humm of the motor. It also suffers wow and flutter since it doesn't spin at a constant rate. (And of course no record can touch Super Audio CD or DVD-audio with approximately 0 to 96000 Hz range.)
>>> gun proliferation is great (despite murder rates two orders of magnitude higher than civilised countries)
The USA rather stupidly classifies self-defense as "murder". Other countries do not. I don't know why the U.S. government does that but it taints the statistics. For example an old WW2 vet recently heard a guy break into his basement, grabbed a gun, and waited to see if the guy would be stupid enough to attack. Well he did, so the WW2 vet shot him. It was ruled "justifiable homicide". And hence adds to the USA murder/homicide statistic.
>>>All it takes is one mistake and you have a loose cannon and a front page news article like this one.
This is why my virus update is off. I update about once a month, and I only accept OLD updates not newer ones. So if I had Sophos on my computer I would be having zero problems right now.
>>>I have no idea who those guys are, and have no interest to know.
You have no idea who Jerry Sandusky is? The guy who was just convicted of child molestation & brought down the Penn State football team (they are suspended for ~5 years and must pay a huge fine, as well as having all their scores for the last ten years erased). A major news story that was at the top-of-the-hour for weeks. Don't you watch TV? Or read the news? Like... ever??? Wow.
As for your claim "Communications are private, and should be private," that is not true for emails that are owned by your employer. Your emails that you post from your work account are Not private. Neither are the emails that Mann posted from his work account, which are owned by His employer: the government.
YOU HAVE NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY when posting emails from a work-owned computer. In the case of academics it's even worse: Their computers are paid-for and owned by the government. There is no reason why their emails should be protected from view by the Attorney General who has reason to believe a crime was committed. *We* would not be able to claim a right to privacy over our work emails.
>>>If someone is accused a specific wrongdoing which falls under the law
You mean like child molestation? No more protection for the PSU academics. Okay. Well PSU employee Mann is *also* accused of wrongdoing.
>>>well, tough shit, you don't get to annoy people just because you don't like them or their ideas.
It's been well-known for decades that you don't have privacy over Emails which belong to your *employer* not you. State college academics' emails belong to the employer, which is the government, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
>>>Momma Mary is going to tell you a little bit about history. In the 40s and 50s the top tax bracket was over 90%, that's right, if you made $10,000,000 you only took home, $1,000,000, but wealthy people did just fine anyway.
Dear Momma Mary who likes to talkdown to people as if they are idiots:
You. Are. Completely wrong. First off these are BRACKETS not flat tax. A person would not take-home 10% of 10 million. He would take home ~70% of the first $100,000, ~60% of the next 400,000, ~50% of the next 500,000, and so on. I cannot believe you did not realize that???
Furthermore: In the 50s, 60s, and 70s there were FAR more deductible expenses (and no AMT). Wealthy persons deducted almost everything. The net result was the *effective* tax rate was actually 2% lower in the 50s, 60s, 70s than it was in the 90s and 2000s.
Don't make the dumb mistake of confusing the listed tax rate with the actual tax rate. MY listed bracket is around 50% (last I checked) but after I take my deductions I pay far less than that. More like 30%.
Effective tax rate has hovered around 25-30%, even for millionaires, for a long long time. Today's rate is about 2% higher than the 1950s effective tax rate.
>>>we conduct our business in Office formats. Having LibreOffice do a halfass job of reading them is unacceptable.
Would be nice if you would learn to read. Let me help : "MS Office 2013 Pushing HOME USERS Toward Subscriptions 110". In other words your post is irrelevant.
The people who manage this agency are on a powertrip. They are the "nosy neighbor" types who love to spy on other people, and being in control of the TSA (and the overall Dept. of Homeland Security) allows them to do what they love to do. Be nosy. They nudebody scan you at airports, rifle through your luggage, do random spots checks along highways, at bus depots, and train stations. They've even surprised citizens at post offices and malls and public parks by demanding IDs and performing warrantless searches of backpacks, purses, et cetera. They've detained & arrested people who were doing nothing wrong except posting on facebook.
It's about time that we Americans Stand Up and start saying, "No. Do you have a warrant? Then no you may not search me at the mall, in the train station, in my car, or pour shit in my drinks." As the ACLU recently told citizens of DC: No warrant; no search. No warrant; no search.
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>>>That sort of economy is achievable with a ten year old petrol VW Polo, *without* all the heavy complex hybrid stuff
Unfortunately it would fail the updated U.S. LEV-II standards (too much NOx). The reason MPGs have been dropping in newer cars is because the engine is being tuned to run richer to pass emissions tests.
The best petrol car right now that can pass these tough regs is the Civic HF at 45mpg. And the Chevy CruzeEco at 44. That's very close to what the Civic and Prius hybrids do.
>>>>>Considering emissions on automobiles have been reduced by 99+% (CO, NOx, HC) since the 1970's
>>
>>CO2 emissions from cars have been reduced? Highly doubtful.
Somebody can't read. He never once listed CO2.
As for sources one only needs to look at the EPA which had very lenient standards in the 70s but gradually strengthened them over time. The current standards only allow 1/100th as much pollution as a car built in 1975. (1/1000th in the case of NOx.)
You should look at greenercars.org. They not only look at upstream emissions but also the cost of drilling for oil, shipping it to you gas station, and also downstream pollution (shipping the junk car to China for recycling). Also CO2. Here are these cars scores out of 100:
Mitsubishi myEV 58
Toyota Prius C 56
Civic CNG 55
Leaf 55
The highest non-hybrid cars are the Scion IQ at 53 and the Toyota Yaris at 50. Probably they score that high because both are SULEVs and PZEVs.
>>>US electricity production is 100% produced from domestic sources, none of it from imported sources.
In the 1800s and upto about 1950 you could have said the same about gasoline: All domestic. But when car sales boomed, we had to start importing from outside.
The same would happen if everybody started driving EVs: The boom would exceed the supply and we would have to import electricity (or coal & CNG & oil to connvert to electricity).
greenercars.org rated my Honda Insight as cleaner than the EVs. It rated the EVs as no cleaner, over a whole lifecycle, than a Prius Hybrid or Civic HF (gasoline).
>>>$14000 buys an awful lot of gas.
Or 75% the cost of a Nissan Leaf on the used market. Their value is plummetting fast because just because a company builds an EV doesn't mean people will buy it. The resale value is terrible.
And the cost is cheap for electricity versus gasoline. According to the DOE, $1 for every 25 miles. Gasoline is 3-4 times that much.
>>>What a stupid thing to say. I'm more likely to buy a Windows 8 tablet over the two current leaders as iOS is garbage (really, I don't know how anyone puts up with it), and I don't care for Android (I don't like the clunky UI and hate the pitiful dev tools). I seriously doubt that I'm unique.
Probably not unique given your current location (Washington, near Seattle, Microsoft cubicle). ;-)
>>>Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous.
I figured Dradis was the name of the guy who invented the scanner, and it appears to be similar to our passive RADAR (shows blips of whatever EM targets it receives).
>>>Any spacecraft gives off heat, and infrared radiation is easy to spot in clumps
Not when it's 3 light-minutes away. You're talking about finding a tiny carrier-sized object at the distance of Mars, and it could be anywhere. On the same plane as you, or above you, or below you, or even behind you.
I wouldn't call that incest. Besides studies have shown that closely-related cousins have a better propagation rate than strangers. Closer chemistry leads to less stillbirths.
>>> "Yeah, we put noise in space, because ... um ... there's pressure on the sides of the spacecraft, yeah, that's it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
JMS never said anything like that. (If you think he did, then I want to see a linked source.) You make it sound like he's some kind of idiot.
Why are so many B5 Actors dying so young? The Star Trek crew lived on-and-on-and-on. Nobody dies until the around 2000..... 30 years after the show. Meanwhile B5 has lost several actors in just the first 12 years.
It appears you have this backwards.
According to JMS it was the *B5 crew* that contacted NASA and asked for technical assistance to portray accurate ship maneuvering. The fact Starfury acts like a real space vessel is probably because the NASA advisor was rejecting early designs & offering advice on how to make it better.
>>>Yes, because there is a world of difference between fictional violence and real violence.
Studies have shown the human brain does not distinguish the difference. It has the same chemical reactions to whatever it sees, regardless if it's real or on TV.
>>>vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording
Not hardly. When a record is *brand new* it has some high frequency harmonics (upto 25,000 hertz), but those quickly get rubbed-off the record by the needle. Of course being analog it will never be a perfect amplification of the little record ridges into audible sound. There's always distortion. PLUS vinyl adds *extra* sounds to a recording, like the hiss of the needle rubbing the record and the humm of the motor. It also suffers wow and flutter since it doesn't spin at a constant rate. (And of course no record can touch Super Audio CD or DVD-audio with approximately 0 to 96000 Hz range.)
>>>the actual crime he did commit.
He said he would be willing to kill to get some shoes. That's not a crime. That's a joke. Like if I said, "I could kill for some ice cream."
>>> gun proliferation is great (despite murder rates two orders of magnitude higher than civilised countries)
The USA rather stupidly classifies self-defense as "murder". Other countries do not. I don't know why the U.S. government does that but it taints the statistics. For example an old WW2 vet recently heard a guy break into his basement, grabbed a gun, and waited to see if the guy would be stupid enough to attack. Well he did, so the WW2 vet shot him. It was ruled "justifiable homicide". And hence adds to the USA murder/homicide statistic.
>>>All it takes is one mistake and you have a loose cannon and a front page news article like this one.
This is why my virus update is off. I update about once a month, and I only accept OLD updates not newer ones. So if I had Sophos on my computer I would be having zero problems right now.
I never could figure-out what that 486 Turbo button was for. I didn't notice any difference in speed.
>>>I have no idea who those guys are, and have no interest to know.
You have no idea who Jerry Sandusky is? The guy who was just convicted of child molestation & brought down the Penn State football team (they are suspended for ~5 years and must pay a huge fine, as well as having all their scores for the last ten years erased). A major news story that was at the top-of-the-hour for weeks. Don't you watch TV? Or read the news? Like... ever??? Wow.
As for your claim "Communications are private, and should be private," that is not true for emails that are owned by your employer. Your emails that you post from your work account are Not private. Neither are the emails that Mann posted from his work account, which are owned by His employer: the government.
YOU HAVE NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY when posting emails from a work-owned computer. In the case of academics it's even worse: Their computers are paid-for and owned by the government. There is no reason why their emails should be protected from view by the Attorney General who has reason to believe a crime was committed. *We* would not be able to claim a right to privacy over our work emails.
>>>If someone is accused a specific wrongdoing which falls under the law
You mean like child molestation? No more protection for the PSU academics. Okay. Well PSU employee Mann is *also* accused of wrongdoing.
>>>well, tough shit, you don't get to annoy people just because you don't like them or their ideas.
It's been well-known for decades that you don't have privacy over Emails which belong to your *employer* not you. State college academics' emails belong to the employer, which is the government, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
>>>Momma Mary is going to tell you a little bit about history. In the 40s and 50s the top tax bracket was over 90%, that's right, if you made $10,000,000 you only took home, $1,000,000, but wealthy people did just fine anyway.
Dear Momma Mary who likes to talkdown to people as if they are idiots:
You. Are. Completely wrong. First off these are BRACKETS not flat tax. A person would not take-home 10% of 10 million. He would take home ~70% of the first $100,000, ~60% of the next 400,000, ~50% of the next 500,000, and so on. I cannot believe you did not realize that???
Furthermore: In the 50s, 60s, and 70s there were FAR more deductible expenses (and no AMT). Wealthy persons deducted almost everything. The net result was the *effective* tax rate was actually 2% lower in the 50s, 60s, 70s than it was in the 90s and 2000s.
Don't make the dumb mistake of confusing the listed tax rate with the actual tax rate. MY listed bracket is around 50% (last I checked) but after I take my deductions I pay far less than that. More like 30%.
Effective tax rate has hovered around 25-30%, even for millionaires, for a long long time. Today's rate is about 2% higher than the 1950s effective tax rate.
>>>we conduct our business in Office formats. Having LibreOffice do a halfass job of reading them is unacceptable.
Would be nice if you would learn to read. Let me help : "MS Office 2013 Pushing HOME USERS Toward Subscriptions 110". In other words your post is irrelevant.
The people who manage this agency are on a powertrip. They are the "nosy neighbor" types who love to spy on other people, and being in control of the TSA (and the overall Dept. of Homeland Security) allows them to do what they love to do. Be nosy. They nudebody scan you at airports, rifle through your luggage, do random spots checks along highways, at bus depots, and train stations. They've even surprised citizens at post offices and malls and public parks by demanding IDs and performing warrantless searches of backpacks, purses, et cetera. They've detained & arrested people who were doing nothing wrong except posting on facebook.
It's about time that we Americans Stand Up and start saying, "No. Do you have a warrant? Then no you may not search me at the mall, in the train station, in my car, or pour shit in my drinks." As the ACLU recently told citizens of DC:
No warrant; no search.
No warrant; no search.