J&J is not saying they have exclusive use or rights to the red cross symbol. They're stating that under US copyright law and an existing agreement between J&J and ARC that the American Red Cross is not allowed to use the red cross symbol for monetary gain, simply as a symbol of humanitarian aid.
J&J is simply suing ARC to stop ARC from selling red cross labeled items and to stop ARC from licensing the red cross symbol to third party manufacturers. J&J, rightfully so, is worried that such product will be confused as being made by J&J.
According to what you state, ARC is itself in violation of the international conventions by putting the symbol on nail clippers and other obviously non humanitarian aid items simply to gain a profit.
I'm going to go out on a limb and generalize that in almost any mode of transportation those in the rear of the vehicle will tend to survive more often than those in the front. My reasoning is that there is simply more stuff in front of you to absorb the impact energy and allow your body to decelerate more gradually. Most collisions occur because the vehicle impacts something and that something is almost always in front of the vehicle. Even if a train derails, you'll almost always see that the front cars are in a heap and the rear cars are sitting politely on the rails like noting happened. As in most things in life, the more "stuff" you have between you and the potential impactor, the better off you'll be.
To the casual observer the doors do appear to close simply like a car door, but it's not the case. If you watch carefully when the doors move you will see the complex hinge system swings the door to the interior of the aircraft then pushes is outward against the body. When the aircraft is pressurized the door is sealed by the outward pressure. To start opening these doors you must first pull on them, to close them you end up pushing on them. For reasons I can only imagine I am unable to locate any on-line video or diagrams of how this works but in this image you can just barely make out the instructions to pull the door open then push it out.
Jumping from 37,000 feet and hundreds of MPH requires training and equipment. At that altitude the ambient air temperature is -70 fahrenheit. If the average terminal velocity of a person skydiving is 250 ft/s then you'll take about 2m30s to get to the ground without a 'chute. At 250 ft/s the wind chill is really, really significant. You've then got a choice to make (any perhaps the airline would instruct you about the best action): open the 'chute immediately after exiting the plane or wait until you are nearer the ground. Opening the parachute early means you are certain to hit the ground slowly but maximized your exposure to very low temperatures and low oxygen with all those inherent injuries. Opening the parachute later means more wind chill and possibly more tissue damage. Your betting that you'll be conscious to pull the rip cord. You also have much less time to perform an maneuvering to get to a "good" landing spot.
That said, given the choice of almost certain death on a severely disabled airliner or possible death by parachute I'd probably choose the parachute.
US law prohibits a warranty being voided or denied because of unrelated issues. VW would have to show that the use of BD directly caused or facilitated the failure of the engine for them to decline the warranty repair. They, as well as others, try to word their warranties such that you think if you don't what they say the way they say the warranty will be void. It would be nearly impossible for VW, or anyone, to show that BD caused an engine failure. There are entire fleets of light to heavy duty vehicles ranging from passenger cars to transport trucks to construction equipment with no failures attributable to the choice of BD.
Your interpretation of clause you site in the VW statement is akin to VW trying to deny a warranty master brake cylinder repair because you took off the stock Goodyear tires and installed Michelins of the same size. These battles have been fought time and time again and the consumer almost always wins.
I didn't say my car doesn't put out pollution when it runs. The "stuff" (namely the CO2 and nitrogen) that comes out of my tailpipe came from plants. I don't put out more of that stuff than the next crop of plants will be absorbing during their growth. Unlike fossil fuels where you take long dormant carbon from underground and spew it to the atmosphere, I use carbon that is already part of the atmosphere. Hence my comment about "net" pollution. Gross pollution levels are much lower with BD that PD, plus you subtract out the "pollution" that gets absorbed/offset by your next crop. Carbon recycling if you will.
I've owned several cars from the VW/Audi family and have been tickled pink by the reliability/longevity of the vehicles.
The warranty of the car is not voided or shortened by the use of BD. Certain failures that may have been directly caused by the use of BD (or any unproved fuel) will not be covered. If my car were to experience a failure of the hatchback mechanism, VW could not (under US law) refuse to repair it under warranty because of my unrelated choice of fuel. If my car were to suffer an engine seizure and the issue was that the engine block was not manufactured correctly, the warranty would cover the repair. VWs position on this comes from the wide gamut of qualities of BD - from filtered used fryer oil, to refined product from virgin seed-oil stock (what I burn). In general BD cleans the engine instead of clogging it, runs cooler and keeps the engine better lubricated, plus it's non toxic. There really is no down-side to BD other than limited distribution.
$14,000, two passengers, up to 12ft^3 cargo space ( with zero reward visibility).
I have a 2004 VW Golf TDI that I paid $17,000 for. It seats 4 and has ~18ft^3 cargo space and oh... I average 44MPG in it. I also run it on soybean oil so I have almost zero net pollution.
It's a shame that VW discontinued this configuration (small hatchback with diesel engine). Its even more of a shame that they probably had to do it for lack of demand from the American consumer.
If you want the best quality photos, you shouldn't be using inkjet either. You should either be paying $.017 (17 cents) per print at a warehouse club photo department, or using a dyesub (Dye Sublimation) printer. You can't tell the difference between a dyesub and a photo lab under almost all conditions.
A basic 4x6 dyesub printer will cost under $200 and the print refills will cost about $.22 per print. It'll also take about 2 minutes per image.
Inkjets are like duct tape: Able to do a lot of jobs,but the wrong tool for almost every job.
I know for certain that there are mono lasers that do print direct on optical disks. I'm guessing there are color lasers that do the same. I personally have never had any issues with printing labels and sticking them on a disk.
In either case, if you're happy with your inkjet, great. The Canon line is, IMO, the best inkjet printer out there on the whole.
People... stop using ink jet printers. I'm not going to talk about brands since I don't want to skew this argument, but for about $500 you can get a really decent color laser printer that will to 20 pages/minute in black and 5/minute in color. Yes, that's five pages per minute not five minutes per page.
Yes, you pay a lot more for the printer, $500 vs about $100 for a decent inkjet, but you don't need to EVER clean print heads and you don't need to purchase special photo or "hi-res" paper. As a bonus, a page printed from a laser printer will last as long as the paper does; toner doesn't fade or decay at any descernable rate unlike ink which will start fading in a few months unless well protected.
So lets look at those costs:
Inkjet: $149 to purchase the printer; $25 to refill the ink. I my experience I get maybe 100 pages from an ink cartridge. For 4000 pages I pay $975 for ink tanks. This number assumes that the tanks in the printer box are full and that I never have to clean the print heads and that all the ink is always used on printed pages. I've now spent $1,125 to print 2000 pages. Lets take my laser printer: $500 to buy the printer with cartridges that last ~4500 pages.
So even for printing 4000 pages the laser printer is $625 cheaper than the ink jet. And yes, I'm ignoring the electricity costs since most lasers today have "instant on" fusers and have quite good power management. The annual electric cost may difference may be $20, but even if the electricity operating cost is $500 more for the laser I still save $120 over the cost of the inkjet.
The break-even point for the laser is about 1500 pages. And again... all these numbers assume you are using standard paper in the inkjet. hi-res or photo paper can increase printing costs on the inkjet by a factor of two, easily.
Did you actually remove anything from the "theft victim"? Nope. That's a key part of theft that isn't met with copyright infringement. You are not depriving the owner of the thing you are taking, hence it is not a theft. Just at taking a picture of your house isn't stealing your house.
Most. perhaps only many, people who copy electronic media would not have purchased the item anyway, at lest that's the claim. I tend to think it true. In the day's of dial-up modems at 1200 baud, there was piracy. There were also music and movies on physical media. Today we have broadband internet and digital music which allows almost instant copying over the Internet. Are music, video and software sales up or down over the last 10 years? Yup. And by more than simply the growth rate of computers.
On a related tangent... software developers: please stop calling your demo software "shareware". If you put out crippled software and require payment to unlock it (time or feature restrictions), then that is a DEMO. Shareware is when you put out a full version of software and ask people to pay you voluntarily. Freeware is fully functional software with no payment strings attached at all.
Okay... I think GWB is an utter moron. I think he should be tried for treason and, when found guilty, executed by firing squad for his crimes against the United States and humanity. I am also skeptical of the entire conclusion of global warming. If it is a fact that the planet is slowly warming then I think there are also other causes that we are ignoring. Much of the information and fact provided to support human cause global warming seems to be coincidence to me.
Here's some other ideas that could be causing warming: Is is perhaps related the the magnetic pole shift currently under way? The magnetic field of the planet has declined some 30% in the past 300 years, seems to be about in line with the supposed temperature increase graphs I've seen. Are we just moving through a slightly warmer part of space? If space is warmer, then the temperature of the Earth and surrounding space are closer together and heat does not leave the planet as easily so the global temperature increases. Is the core generating more heat? Is just the immense heat of human bodies and our activities generating more heat than the planet is "used to"? Is the sun generating more energy that it has previously? Perhaps on some yet unknown solar cycle.?
There's lots of things that could be causing the claimed warming other than greenhouse gasses. Most we can't do anything about, the remaining we will refuse to do anything about. Unless you think we are somehow going to force people to stop increasing the population through high birth rates and low death rates.
I think the measurement of CO2 increasing and temperate increasing is a tenuous link. This is an experiment we are conducting and we won't be alive to see the result.
And another thing... global warming is not a problem for the plant. Not one iota. If the planet is indeed warming, we will eventually die off. The planet will not care. Some new species will evolve over the millennia to become the dominant species. Or not. Point is, the planet is fine and nothing we can do to it will be of any substantive concern. We as humans are worried about the environment for our own selfish reasons: self preservation.
Haven't the courts stated that you have no right image protection in public only for non-commercial use? Isn't that why the movie studios have to close the street an hire paid extras and the news stories almost always don't film people from the neck up?
If this is part of a commercial service then I think they could have issues with personal image rights. As with all things in America, the lawyers and courts will take years and millions of dollars figuring it out.
"Then you certainly would have called an abort if a spacecraft, on launch, was struck by lightning, right?"
Yes I would have, and NASA now routinely does that also. Apollo 12 would have been just as successful had it taken off during the next launch window.
"The problem was with a property of foam that was unexpected: at high speeds, it impacts as a very rigid body."
Duh. Water isn't very damaging when you dive in to a swimming pool but hit that same water at 300 miles per hour and it might as well have been concrete. This is also true for air, and many other "soft body" materials I can think of. How about this: squeeze a Nerf ball, then have it hurled at you at 60 miles per hour, it hurts now. I find it ridiculous that NASA would know that foam comes off the external tank and NOT test impact damage at ascent speeds. This is just the sort of "low tech" or "common sense" thing they loose sight of when trying to deal with the actual tough stuff you need to be a rocket scientist to do.
The issue isn't so much hindsight, it's the ability to look at the simple issues that seems to have NASA lost. I'm no rocket scientist, and I may not know how to answer the questions I might pose, but that doesn't invalidate the questions. People close to a project can get so focused on major details they forget about the simple things. And there are lots of very talented people out here on the Internet that NASA simply can't afford to hire on their miniscule budgets. More eyes on a problem is rarely a bad thing unless you are ashamed of your procedures and plans to begin with. And lets not forget, NASA is spending OUR money, and there's no national security or corporate espionage issues here (at least there shouldn't be).
You automatically dismiss the complainers as unknowledgeable, that's a mistake. One of NASA's biggest issues is a lack of budget. The Congress continually thinks it's more important to spend 1 million dollars on a missile to shoot down an aircraft than to send a probe to another planet. If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it.
One thing that all the "leave the experts alone" posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money. This isn't a private company spending their own revenue. We're not poking our heads in to someone's private business here.
With the exception of the Mars rovers, most of NASA's recent history has been riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights. It seems to me they need to open up more projects to public scrutiny. "Go fever" seems to be at least partially in remision, but when you look at the stupid stuff that's gone on recently in the NASA failures you have to wonder if they could have been avoided if they'd just asked a non-involved person for their perspective. I know that I for one would never have said an SST could lift off if large, hell... even small, chunks of foam were falling off the external tank and hitting the vehicle.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly? Don't you think there's a chance someone would have noticed the metric conversion issue and saved the project? If NASA wants fewer people harping on their opaque processes, and fewer Monday morning quarterbacks then they should allow more review and outside input. Inbreeding is rarely a good thing in in the long run.
The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results? NASA is continually trying to do more with fewer dollars, perhaps its time they tried a more open source/distributed computing approach to some of the work.
If you don't want any of them in office, then vote against all of them on the ballot. If you wouldn't mind having any of them in office then don't vote against any of them, or vote for your favorite.
Basically on the ballot you'd have a choice: vote FOR one, or AGAINST as many as you like.
I think we should move to a system where we vote against the people we don't want in office. Vote against as many candidates as you like. The candidate with the least votes wins.
This gives people a good reason to vote for "third party" candidates as you could, for example, support both the Libertarian and Democratic candidates by voting against the Republican and any other candidates.
I think it would also give the politicians a much better view of the thought process of the voter, there's more expression possible with the ability to more accurately describe your preferences.
Being able to choose between a "positive" and a "negative" ballot could be interesting but would require some significant thought to totaling the votes.
Yes. I drive my cars until they are dead. When I get a repair bill that makes it no longer worth keeping in a car, then I start looking for a replacement. A few days to weeks of inconvenience is not a burden on me.
The difference comes in price. For a few billion we can revitalize one space telescope. For a few billion we can build or update, quite a few ground based scopes like the European OWL project that will simply blow HST away.
Why should we get rid of Hubble before a replacement is ready? This is a quandary caused directly by the astronomic community, NASA, ESA, et al for not working to get a replacement on orbit. HST has been a rather predictable beast and we've known since we built it about how long it would last. I see no replacement scope in the ready despite a decade of warning. And yes, I know about the 6.5M JWST, but it's still not scheduled for launch until 2013, and that's assuming everything goes 100% according to plan; and it won't. I have low hopes this craft will ever operate properly in space.
Exactly. In the 16 years since it's launch our technology has improved dramatically. We have learned to make super large mirrors, flexible mirrors, and other such improvements to the optical systems. We can now use a laser and either flexible mirrors or computers to remove the distortion of the atmosphere. We've gained the compute power to build arrays of smaller scopes to build a "virtual" telescope orders of magnitude larger than any single reflector in the array. On top of that we've also sent up other spacecraft, or are building them, that dwarf Hubble's capabilities.
Hubble does have the rather unique ability to stay parked on a single target, continuously, for very long periods of time. No Earth based scope can do that. But again, there are smaller, faster, cheaper craft in service or coming on line soon that will have better imaging and better processing power.
I don't know that Hubble should be repaired and kept operating, but I do think it should be brought back to Earth for placement in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Before you condemn other countries for their lack of assistance to the poor, I suggest you look at your own country first. The US has a fairly high rate of poverty and starvation itself. The richest country in the world has over 10% of its population not able to meet basic needs, I consider that much more egregious.
The US government also has no real concerns about the American people being hurt in a nuclear war, but there are contingency plans and entire complexes dedicated to letting the president hide miles underground in such an instance.
Don't condemn other countries for living up to the ideals put forth by those who claim to be the model for the rest of the world.
Yea, cause the Patriot missile system did such a bang-up job in its fist deployment. By all accounts the Patriot failed to ever hit a target and is known to have rained down debris on the bystander population causing possibly more damage than the incoming missiles did. The Patriot missile system has yet, to my knowledge, to have an undisputed, confirmed kill in an actual combat deployment scenario. Software timing glitches, guidance failures, tracking failures, weather, jamming, etc. I certainly wouldn't trust my life to the system, never mind the security of my nation's borders.
a) No you don't. Anything you write is automatically copyrighted. You only need to register if you plan to publish and need to have an official proof of prior art.
b) You call it cheating, I call it delegation of tasks to those more qualified or capable. This is a vital life lesson and one of the foundations of a free capitalistic economy.
c) Turnitin is limiting students rights to sell their paper or use it in a way they see fit. If an 8th grader is good and writing papers, why is it Turnitin's place to prevent him from writing papers for profit for underclassmen. Sure this may be unethical and a violation of school rules, but it is not plagiarism. Many texts are ghost written without accreditation to the actual author; the author gave up that right of acknowledgment for the fee paid.
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No.. we've got the point, you're missing it.
J&J is not saying they have exclusive use or rights to the red cross symbol. They're stating that under US copyright law and an existing agreement between J&J and ARC that the American Red Cross is not allowed to use the red cross symbol for monetary gain, simply as a symbol of humanitarian aid.
J&J is simply suing ARC to stop ARC from selling red cross labeled items and to stop ARC from licensing the red cross symbol to third party manufacturers. J&J, rightfully so, is worried that such product will be confused as being made by J&J.
According to what you state, ARC is itself in violation of the international conventions by putting the symbol on nail clippers and other obviously non humanitarian aid items simply to gain a profit.
Arsenic, Lead, Mercury... each 100% all natural and lethal.
Gasoline is 100% all natural; even organic.
I'm going to go out on a limb and generalize that in almost any mode of transportation those in the rear of the vehicle will tend to survive more often than those in the front.
My reasoning is that there is simply more stuff in front of you to absorb the impact energy and allow your body to decelerate more gradually. Most collisions occur because the vehicle impacts something and that something is almost always in front of the vehicle. Even if a train derails, you'll almost always see that the front cars are in a heap and the rear cars are sitting politely on the rails like noting happened.
As in most things in life, the more "stuff" you have between you and the potential impactor, the better off you'll be.
To the casual observer the doors do appear to close simply like a car door, but it's not the case. If you watch carefully when the doors move you will see the complex hinge system swings the door to the interior of the aircraft then pushes is outward against the body. When the aircraft is pressurized the door is sealed by the outward pressure. To start opening these doors you must first pull on them, to close them you end up pushing on them. For reasons I can only imagine I am unable to locate any on-line video or diagrams of how this works but in this image you can just barely make out the instructions to pull the door open then push it out.
Jumping from 37,000 feet and hundreds of MPH requires training and equipment. At that altitude the ambient air temperature is -70 fahrenheit. If the average terminal velocity of a person skydiving is 250 ft/s then you'll take about 2m30s to get to the ground without a 'chute. At 250 ft/s the wind chill is really, really significant. You've then got a choice to make (any perhaps the airline would instruct you about the best action): open the 'chute immediately after exiting the plane or wait until you are nearer the ground.
Opening the parachute early means you are certain to hit the ground slowly but maximized your exposure to very low temperatures and low oxygen with all those inherent injuries.
Opening the parachute later means more wind chill and possibly more tissue damage. Your betting that you'll be conscious to pull the rip cord. You also have much less time to perform an maneuvering to get to a "good" landing spot.
That said, given the choice of almost certain death on a severely disabled airliner or possible death by parachute I'd probably choose the parachute.
US law prohibits a warranty being voided or denied because of unrelated issues. VW would have to show that the use of BD directly caused or facilitated the failure of the engine for them to decline the warranty repair. They, as well as others, try to word their warranties such that you think if you don't what they say the way they say the warranty will be void.
It would be nearly impossible for VW, or anyone, to show that BD caused an engine failure. There are entire fleets of light to heavy duty vehicles ranging from passenger cars to transport trucks to construction equipment with no failures attributable to the choice of BD.
Your interpretation of clause you site in the VW statement is akin to VW trying to deny a warranty master brake cylinder repair because you took off the stock Goodyear tires and installed Michelins of the same size. These battles have been fought time and time again and the consumer almost always wins.
I didn't say my car doesn't put out pollution when it runs. The "stuff" (namely the CO2 and nitrogen) that comes out of my tailpipe came from plants. I don't put out more of that stuff than the next crop of plants will be absorbing during their growth. Unlike fossil fuels where you take long dormant carbon from underground and spew it to the atmosphere, I use carbon that is already part of the atmosphere. Hence my comment about "net" pollution. Gross pollution levels are much lower with BD that PD, plus you subtract out the "pollution" that gets absorbed/offset by your next crop. Carbon recycling if you will.
I've owned several cars from the VW/Audi family and have been tickled pink by the reliability/longevity of the vehicles.
The warranty of the car is not voided or shortened by the use of BD. Certain failures that may have been directly caused by the use of BD (or any unproved fuel) will not be covered. If my car were to experience a failure of the hatchback mechanism, VW could not (under US law) refuse to repair it under warranty because of my unrelated choice of fuel. If my car were to suffer an engine seizure and the issue was that the engine block was not manufactured correctly, the warranty would cover the repair. VWs position on this comes from the wide gamut of qualities of BD - from filtered used fryer oil, to refined product from virgin seed-oil stock (what I burn). In general BD cleans the engine instead of clogging it, runs cooler and keeps the engine better lubricated, plus it's non toxic. There really is no down-side to BD other than limited distribution.
$14,000, two passengers, up to 12ft^3 cargo space ( with zero reward visibility).
I have a 2004 VW Golf TDI that I paid $17,000 for. It seats 4 and has ~18ft^3 cargo space and oh... I average 44MPG in it. I also run it on soybean oil so I have almost zero net pollution.
It's a shame that VW discontinued this configuration (small hatchback with diesel engine). Its even more of a shame that they probably had to do it for lack of demand from the American consumer.
Hence blocking in both the cars you parked between causing them to ram in to your doors and wreck you little vehicle.
If you want the best quality photos, you shouldn't be using inkjet either. You should either be paying $.017 (17 cents) per print at a warehouse club photo department, or using a dyesub (Dye Sublimation) printer. You can't tell the difference between a dyesub and a photo lab under almost all conditions.
A basic 4x6 dyesub printer will cost under $200 and the print refills will cost about $.22 per print. It'll also take about 2 minutes per image.
Inkjets are like duct tape: Able to do a lot of jobs,but the wrong tool for almost every job.
I know for certain that there are mono lasers that do print direct on optical disks. I'm guessing there are color lasers that do the same. I personally have never had any issues with printing labels and sticking them on a disk.
In either case, if you're happy with your inkjet, great. The Canon line is, IMO, the best inkjet printer out there on the whole.
People... stop using ink jet printers. I'm not going to talk about brands since I don't want to skew this argument, but for about $500 you can get a really decent color laser printer that will to 20 pages/minute in black and 5/minute in color. Yes, that's five pages per minute not five minutes per page.
Yes, you pay a lot more for the printer, $500 vs about $100 for a decent inkjet, but you don't need to EVER clean print heads and you don't need to purchase special photo or "hi-res" paper. As a bonus, a page printed from a laser printer will last as long as the paper does; toner doesn't fade or decay at any descernable rate unlike ink which will start fading in a few months unless well protected.
So lets look at those costs:
Inkjet: $149 to purchase the printer; $25 to refill the ink. I my experience I get maybe 100 pages from an ink cartridge. For 4000 pages I pay $975 for ink tanks. This number assumes that the tanks in the printer box are full and that I never have to clean the print heads and that all the ink is always used on printed pages. I've now spent $1,125 to print 2000 pages.
Lets take my laser printer: $500 to buy the printer with cartridges that last ~4500 pages.
So even for printing 4000 pages the laser printer is $625 cheaper than the ink jet. And yes, I'm ignoring the electricity costs since most lasers today have "instant on" fusers and have quite good power management. The annual electric cost may difference may be $20, but even if the electricity operating cost is $500 more for the laser I still save $120 over the cost of the inkjet.
The break-even point for the laser is about 1500 pages. And again... all these numbers assume you are using standard paper in the inkjet. hi-res or photo paper can increase printing costs on the inkjet by a factor of two, easily.
Did you actually remove anything from the "theft victim"? Nope. That's a key part of theft that isn't met with copyright infringement. You are not depriving the owner of the thing you are taking, hence it is not a theft. Just at taking a picture of your house isn't stealing your house.
Most. perhaps only many, people who copy electronic media would not have purchased the item anyway, at lest that's the claim. I tend to think it true. In the day's of dial-up modems at 1200 baud, there was piracy. There were also music and movies on physical media.
Today we have broadband internet and digital music which allows almost instant copying over the Internet. Are music, video and software sales up or down over the last 10 years?
Yup. And by more than simply the growth rate of computers.
On a related tangent... software developers: please stop calling your demo software "shareware". If you put out crippled software and require payment to unlock it (time or feature restrictions), then that is a DEMO. Shareware is when you put out a full version of software and ask people to pay you voluntarily. Freeware is fully functional software with no payment strings attached at all.
Which of course means that it fails at being really good at being either type/size.
Okay... I think GWB is an utter moron. I think he should be tried for treason and, when found guilty, executed by firing squad for his crimes against the United States and humanity.
I am also skeptical of the entire conclusion of global warming. If it is a fact that the planet is slowly warming then I think there are also other causes that we are ignoring. Much of the information and fact provided to support human cause global warming seems to be coincidence to me.
Here's some other ideas that could be causing warming:
Is is perhaps related the the magnetic pole shift currently under way? The magnetic field of the planet has declined some 30% in the past 300 years, seems to be about in line with the supposed temperature increase graphs I've seen.
Are we just moving through a slightly warmer part of space? If space is warmer, then the temperature of the Earth and surrounding space are closer together and heat does not leave the planet as easily so the global temperature increases.
Is the core generating more heat?
Is just the immense heat of human bodies and our activities generating more heat than the planet is "used to"?
Is the sun generating more energy that it has previously? Perhaps on some yet unknown solar cycle.?
There's lots of things that could be causing the claimed warming other than greenhouse gasses. Most we can't do anything about, the remaining we will refuse to do anything about. Unless you think we are somehow going to force people to stop increasing the population through high birth rates and low death rates.
I think the measurement of CO2 increasing and temperate increasing is a tenuous link. This is an experiment we are conducting and we won't be alive to see the result.
And another thing... global warming is not a problem for the plant. Not one iota. If the planet is indeed warming, we will eventually die off. The planet will not care. Some new species will evolve over the millennia to become the dominant species. Or not. Point is, the planet is fine and nothing we can do to it will be of any substantive concern. We as humans are worried about the environment for our own selfish reasons: self preservation.
Haven't the courts stated that you have no right image protection in public only for non-commercial use? Isn't that why the movie studios have to close the street an hire paid extras and the news stories almost always don't film people from the neck up?
If this is part of a commercial service then I think they could have issues with personal image rights. As with all things in America, the lawyers and courts will take years and millions of dollars figuring it out.
"Then you certainly would have called an abort if a spacecraft, on launch, was struck by lightning, right?"
Yes I would have, and NASA now routinely does that also. Apollo 12 would have been just as successful had it taken off during the next launch window.
"The problem was with a property of foam that was unexpected: at high speeds, it impacts as a very rigid body."
Duh. Water isn't very damaging when you dive in to a swimming pool but hit that same water at 300 miles per hour and it might as well have been concrete. This is also true for air, and many other "soft body" materials I can think of. How about this: squeeze a Nerf ball, then have it hurled at you at 60 miles per hour, it hurts now.
I find it ridiculous that NASA would know that foam comes off the external tank and NOT test impact damage at ascent speeds. This is just the sort of "low tech" or "common sense" thing they loose sight of when trying to deal with the actual tough stuff you need to be a rocket scientist to do.
The issue isn't so much hindsight, it's the ability to look at the simple issues that seems to have NASA lost. I'm no rocket scientist, and I may not know how to answer the questions I might pose, but that doesn't invalidate the questions. People close to a project can get so focused on major details they forget about the simple things. And there are lots of very talented people out here on the Internet that NASA simply can't afford to hire on their miniscule budgets. More eyes on a problem is rarely a bad thing unless you are ashamed of your procedures and plans to begin with.
And lets not forget, NASA is spending OUR money, and there's no national security or corporate espionage issues here (at least there shouldn't be).
You automatically dismiss the complainers as unknowledgeable, that's a mistake. One of NASA's biggest issues is a lack of budget. The Congress continually thinks it's more important to spend 1 million dollars on a missile to shoot down an aircraft than to send a probe to another planet.
If there is a mechanism where NASA can get additional expertise/oversight with little to no increase in cost, then let's do it.
One thing that all the "leave the experts alone" posters are forgetting is that NASA is spending OUR money. This isn't a private company spending their own revenue. We're not poking our heads in to someone's private business here.
With the exception of the Mars rovers, most of NASA's recent history has been riddled with failures, mistakes and oversights. It seems to me they need to open up more projects to public scrutiny.
"Go fever" seems to be at least partially in remision, but when you look at the stupid stuff that's gone on recently in the NASA failures you have to wonder if they could have been avoided if they'd just asked a non-involved person for their perspective. I know that I for one would never have said an SST could lift off if large, hell... even small, chunks of foam were falling off the external tank and hitting the vehicle.
What if the entry plan for the Mars Climate Observer had been reviewed publicly? Don't you think there's a chance someone would have noticed the metric conversion issue and saved the project? If NASA wants fewer people harping on their opaque processes, and fewer Monday morning quarterbacks then they should allow more review and outside input. Inbreeding is rarely a good thing in in the long run.
The bigger question is does NASA have the ego to handle letting outsiders look at projects and can they accept the constructive criticism that results? NASA is continually trying to do more with fewer dollars, perhaps its time they tried a more open source/distributed computing approach to some of the work.
If you don't want any of them in office, then vote against all of them on the ballot.
If you wouldn't mind having any of them in office then don't vote against any of them, or vote for your favorite.
Basically on the ballot you'd have a choice: vote FOR one, or AGAINST as many as you like.
I think we should move to a system where we vote against the people we don't want in office. Vote against as many candidates as you like. The candidate with the least votes wins.
This gives people a good reason to vote for "third party" candidates as you could, for example, support both the Libertarian and Democratic candidates by voting against the Republican and any other candidates.
I think it would also give the politicians a much better view of the thought process of the voter, there's more expression possible with the ability to more accurately describe your preferences.
Being able to choose between a "positive" and a "negative" ballot could be interesting but would require some significant thought to totaling the votes.
Yes. I drive my cars until they are dead. When I get a repair bill that makes it no longer worth keeping in a car, then I start looking for a replacement.
A few days to weeks of inconvenience is not a burden on me.
The difference comes in price. For a few billion we can revitalize one space telescope. For a few billion we can build or update, quite a few ground based scopes like the European OWL project that will simply blow HST away.
Why should we get rid of Hubble before a replacement is ready? This is a quandary caused directly by the astronomic community, NASA, ESA, et al for not working to get a replacement on orbit. HST has been a rather predictable beast and we've known since we built it about how long it would last. I see no replacement scope in the ready despite a decade of warning. And yes, I know about the 6.5M JWST, but it's still not scheduled for launch until 2013, and that's assuming everything goes 100% according to plan; and it won't. I have low hopes this craft will ever operate properly in space.
Exactly. In the 16 years since it's launch our technology has improved dramatically. We have learned to make super large mirrors, flexible mirrors, and other such improvements to the optical systems. We can now use a laser and either flexible mirrors or computers to remove the distortion of the atmosphere. We've gained the compute power to build arrays of smaller scopes to build a "virtual" telescope orders of magnitude larger than any single reflector in the array.
On top of that we've also sent up other spacecraft, or are building them, that dwarf Hubble's capabilities.
Hubble does have the rather unique ability to stay parked on a single target, continuously, for very long periods of time. No Earth based scope can do that. But again, there are smaller, faster, cheaper craft in service or coming on line soon that will have better imaging and better processing power.
I don't know that Hubble should be repaired and kept operating, but I do think it should be brought back to Earth for placement in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Before you condemn other countries for their lack of assistance to the poor, I suggest you look at your own country first. The US has a fairly high rate of poverty and starvation itself. The richest country in the world has over 10% of its population not able to meet basic needs, I consider that much more egregious.
The US government also has no real concerns about the American people being hurt in a nuclear war, but there are contingency plans and entire complexes dedicated to letting the president hide miles underground in such an instance.
Don't condemn other countries for living up to the ideals put forth by those who claim to be the model for the rest of the world.
Yea, cause the Patriot missile system did such a bang-up job in its fist deployment. By all accounts the Patriot failed to ever hit a target and is known to have rained down debris on the bystander population causing possibly more damage than the incoming missiles did.
The Patriot missile system has yet, to my knowledge, to have an undisputed, confirmed kill in an actual combat deployment scenario. Software timing glitches, guidance failures, tracking failures, weather, jamming, etc. I certainly wouldn't trust my life to the system, never mind the security of my nation's borders.
a) No you don't. Anything you write is automatically copyrighted. You only need to register if you plan to publish and need to have an official proof of prior art.
b) You call it cheating, I call it delegation of tasks to those more qualified or capable. This is a vital life lesson and one of the foundations of a free capitalistic economy.
c) Turnitin is limiting students rights to sell their paper or use it in a way they see fit. If an 8th grader is good and writing papers, why is it Turnitin's place to prevent him from writing papers for profit for underclassmen. Sure this may be unethical and a violation of school rules, but it is not plagiarism. Many texts are ghost written without accreditation to the actual author; the author gave up that right of acknowledgment for the fee paid.