Where that gets rough is with the ladies. Be prepared to have a lot of dates be one time only, because after she sees the car, she runs away. I always wanted to ask those ladies why they hate the environment, and force men to wow and woo them with big, impressive, expensive cars, but figured there was no use. I consoled myself with the thought that I wouldn't want a gold digger anyway.
It's not just that, they also demand you buy them a $10,000 diamond ring, which of course becomes mostly worthless as soon as it's sold.
I'm starting to wonder if America is just a terrible place to meet women: most of them are terribly fat, and those that aren't are airheaded gold-diggers.
What advice would you give to someone entering the electrical engineering discipline?
Choose a different major. EE is all being outsourced to Asia these days, unless you want to be stuck working for defense contractors. Your other option is to focus on digital (RTL) design, and spend your career writing Verilog at a chipmaker. If you want to do board-level design, your options are limited.
It's BS. Basically, auto dealerships are run by rich locals who are very politically connected with the local government, and they get laws passed which are favorable to their business. Car dealerships are nothing more than a tax on cars, as they add to the cost (through their overhead), but don't provide anything in return. They are a middleman, and middlemen always add cost. Car dealerships (independent, non-factory-owned) are an entirely American phenomenon; they don't exist in other countries. Studies have been done and found that currently, dealerships add around $2500 to the cost of a new car; that's money that every new car buyer has to pay in extra costs, and it only goes to enrich the car dealership. Add on top of all this the horribly inflated service costs at dealerships.
Independent auto dealerships are nothing more than scams, and laws requiring them are nothing more than protectionism. There's lots of car manufacturers out there, and we would be better off just buying from them directly, like Saturn tried to do years ago. Dealership apologists try to claim that buying direct would create a monopoly, but that's a lie since with so many carmakers these days that obviously is impossible. Finally, we're able to buy lots of other stuff directly from manufacturers, such as computers (Dell, Lenovo, etc.), so why don't we have laws requiring us to buy our computers from locally-owned shops? Because it would just cost more and give us less selection, that's why.
Is it that area of dirt between the joists and posts in a raised foundation style dwelling?
Yes.
Of course a lot of newer homes go the cheap route and have slab floors.
No, they don't. You can't put a house on a concrete slab in any given environment. You see this construction in places like Phoenix and Vegas because they're deserts and it never gets very cold there and there isn't many problems with flooding or a high water table, but in any place where the ground freezes, you can't use slabs because they'll fracture with the freeze-thaw cycles. So in those places, you either dig deeper than the frost line and build a basement, or you raise the house so it has a crawlspace under it. Crawlspaces are cheaper than digging, but you don't get the square-footage bonus that basements give you.
To me it doesn't even matter if Uber is exploitive or not. They simply provide a vastly better service than any taxi I have ever used.
This is mostly the way I feel, with an exception: in Manhattan, I can't imagine why you'd want to bother with Uber. Uber requires starting an app on your phone, punching in a destination, waiting for someone to get to you, etc. With a taxi, you just stand on the side of the street and raise your arm, and one is there in seconds. But Manhattan is exceptional that way.
Everywhere else (meaning places that aren't as dense as Manhattan, mainly suburban areas), cabs are a total PITA. You have to look them up somehow, wait 30-60 minutes for them to arrive, then give the dumb driver turn-by-turn directions because he has no idea where your destination is, then at the end you find out the fare is astronomical. Uber is easy, fast, you can see how long it'll take the driver to get to you, and the cost is much less.
Adopting a solution which doesn't actually work isn't helping anyone, it's just creating more work, and more profit for bad actors, and imposing an unnecessary cost on everyone else.
Come up with a *real* solution and we'll consider it.
HTTPS is not free. You have to purchase a certificate for it to work. That certificate can cost more than the yearly hosting fee for your website, if you have some small, cheap website on a shared host for $3/month.
Why should you do this when there's no benefit whatsoever? Why should I care if the government can see that I'm reading some guy's home-made webpage about turtles or whatever?
This can be argued many ways. I'm not saying I completely agree with this, but consider the 2000 election: Ralph Nader ran, and we can speculate that if he hadn't done so, most of those votes would have gone to Gore instead, but because he did run, he "spoiled" the vote for Gore, and we ended up with Bush and the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. Thus, the (much) greater evil won, if you assume that Gore would not have done that (which is probably a safe assumption I think). This is the problem with this line of thinking. But then again, if we always just stick to the two "approved" parties, we'll never have any change, will we? But then again, we've tried having other candidates running (Perot, Nader) and it didn't seem to help any, and in fact seemed to make things worse. Hmmm...
Anyway, my whole point was that even if you are the pragmatic type who doesn't want to "spoil" the vote, you don't have to worry about that in most states, at least in the Presidential election (but also in many other elections too, depending on state and district). If your state/district is certain to vote a certain way, and you prefer the opposing party as the "lesser of two evils" but want to see more power for 3rd parties, you can safely vote third party. As I said before, there is zero chance that Mississippi is going to vote for the Democrat candidate in 2016, so if you live there and don't like Republicans, you might as well vote for the Greens or anyone else besides the Dem candidate, because it will not make any difference in the actual election results (the Republican candidate *is* going to get MS's electoral votes), but at least the 3rd parties will show better results. It's a small change, but it is a change.
You're arguing two totally different things: the quality of modern games and the merits of online purchasing. We're talking about online purchasing here; your diatribe about modern games is really irrelevant.
Do you buy anything from Amazon, or Newegg, or any online seller? If you're so paranoid that you're worried about people tracking your game purchases, I don't know what to tell you. This isn't a conspiracy-theorist forum, this is a tech forum, and I imagine most Slashdotters have purchased stuff online.
Ok, I have a question. I haven't played any of these games since "SimCity 2000" back in the early 1990s. With this community mod thing, is it possible to build your own transit system like SkyTran (personal rapid transit) and see how that works in the city?
In a yellow cab, you have to deal with often times 25 year old vehicles in poor condition, the dispatcher blaring on the radio the whole ride. You can call a cab, and there is no guarantee one will show up, and not to mention the tip you're expected to bestow.
This (dumb) article is about NYC, AFAICT. Things there are different. You don't "call a cab" (maybe in the outer boroughs, but my experience is in Manhattan), you stand on the side of the street and raise your arm. And the cabs I've been in lately were fairly new, certainly not 25 years old. You sound like you're complaining about cabs in other cities.
In my experience, Uber and Lyft are great (and in fact, far superior) alternatives to cabs in places which are not NYC, and are not extremely dense like that. I used to live in northern NJ, and the cabs there were indeed pretty bad: you'd have to wait 30-60 minutes for one to show up when you called one, they were stinky, and they were really expensive too. Then came Lyft and Uber and suddenly I was riding around in Mercedes for half the price of some shitty cab, and with a driver who spoke perfect English too (not that all the Lyft/Uber drivers were natural-born Americans, they weren't, but even the ones that weren't were much easier to talk to than the cab drivers).
However, over in Manhattan everything is different. I have no idea why you'd bother with Uber over there, because you can just stand on the street and raise your arm and you'll have a cab in seconds. The cabs there aren't terribly expensive, since you're probably not going that far (thanks to the density), and the cabs are actually pretty nice in NYC these days (unlike other places/cities I've used cabs), probably because of either regulation or intense competition (a medallion is $1M last I heard; why spend $1M on a medallion for a single cab, and then use it on some shitty old car that breaks down a lot?).
If you want to see what will happen if you get close to that 15% look up "Ron Paul vote rigged" to see both the RNC and the press insure that nobody in critical primary states would know the man existed, including several reports by those that counted the votes who said "The numbers we gave the RNC were NOT what the RNC reported, they took votes from Paul and gave them to Romney". Despite many calls for an investigation? None occurred.
You're alleging corruption within the Republican party (RNC) here, with how they counted votes in the Primary elections.
This is not a factor in the general elections. The RNC (a private group AFAIK) does not control the general elections, that's entirely government-run. The RNC has no power to give Green candidate votes to the Democrat or Republican candidate of their choice.
You can argue that the two main parties are corrupt (which is probably quite true), but this isn't a factor in the general elections, where the two parties oppose each other. The Parties do not count the votes in that election. The primaries, however, are basically the wild west: the primaries are just something the government (at local levels) does for the two Parties to help them select candidates. Are there even any rules about how the Parties must handle the candidate selection after the votes are counted? Are they even required to use those counts? Aren't they private organizations?
What you're doing seems like complaining how horrible Comcast is, and then saying the US government is hopelessly corrupt because Comcast is such a horrible company. The US government doesn't have that much say in how Comcast runs itself internally, or how it handles its appallingly bad customer service. It's no different with these parties.
How am I advocating splitting parties? I'm just pointing out that if you live in a red state, and you don't like the Republicans, your vote on a Democrat presidential candidate is totally wasted. There is zero chance that a Democrat will win the electoral votes in your state if it's a Republican stronghold like any southern or midwestern state. Mississippi is NOT going to give its electoral votes to the Democrat candidate in 2016, I guarantee it.
So if you live in one of these states (which is most of them), voting for the opposition candidate is already a wasted vote. So why not vote for a third party? They're not going to win either, but at least it would show support for a different party, maybe get them more funding and recognition, and maybe get the two main parties to move closer to their platform to try to capture those voters. What is there to lose?
Now, if you live in a swing state like Ohio or Florida, you might want to disregard this advice. After all, in 2000, it was a very, very small number of votes that decided which candidate got Florida's electoral votes. You might also want to disregard if you're in one of the two states which doesn't have winner-takes-all in the electoral college. But that still leaves around 40 states which have predetermined outcomes.
but it's been thousands of years since a really devastating impact, and could be thousands more before the next, in which case any resources dedicated today are wasted. Yes, they might have other applications,
That's my point: we need to be developing space-going capabilities; these resources wouldn't be wasted, they'd contribute to our capabilities. A big-ass rocket engine for pushing asteroids (or whatever kind of engine they end up using, mass driver, ion thruster, whatever) wouldn't only be useful for pushing killer asteroids to safer orbits, it'd also be useful for other things, like pushing valuable asteroids to places where they're easier to harvest, or pushing big-ass spacecraft on long voyages to Jupiter or wherever. You're not going to have a 6-month expedition to Jupiter on the Discovery with HAL with current propulsion technology.
Realistically we're probably at least a century or two out from any sort of cost-effective space exploitation beyond orbit, and cataclysmic-asteroid-moving technology is unlikely to help much in that regard,
Sure it would: if we had the technology to push big things around in space better, it'd be a lot cheaper to do anything large-scale up there, including long-distance exploration. Right now, we're basically still using rocket engines from the 1960s.
(How might ion drive technology improve with a a few extra $billion per year in funding?)
Exactly. Or fusion engines. Whatever it is, it needs money, and time to develop it. We're spending far, far, far more than a few billion a year on "defense" projects like the completely inept F-35.
"but I voted independant!" you say. yeah, how much good did that do? seriously? what did it accomplish?
The problem is that not enough people are voting for third parties. As I understand it, if at least 15% (I think) of the vote goes to a third party, suddenly things change, as that party becomes eligible for federal campaign financing, a spot in the debates, and other perks. Basically the system shuts out anyone that's too small, meaning too little of the vote. So if enough people would actually start voting for third parties, then we might start seeing some change. But no one wants to bother.
Most people who lend some vocal support say they don't vote third party because they don't want their vote "wasted", or to effectively count for "the other guy", who's even worse, so they're "voting for the lesser of two evils". The problem is, in most states, the outcome is already predetermined at the general election. Most states are not swing states. So if you're in a non-swing state, you can safely vote third party without worrying that you're helping the worse of two evils get elected. For instance, if you live in Arizona or Alabama or Oklahoma and you think Dems are the lesser evil, you're really wasting your vote on a Democrat presidential candidate because there's zero chance those states will turn blue. If half the Dem voters in those states voted for, say, the Green Party, we'd really start seeing some interesting politics.
If that letter is a "G" or really anything besides "D" or "R", then their goals are likely quite different. But no one will vote for anyone without a "D" or "R" so I guess we'll never know for sure.
Terrestrial missile and aerospace technology really isn't all that useful in the vacuum of space. Their technology all depends on the presence of oxygen-bearing air. Jet engines don't work in space.
To my knowledge, neither Lockheed nor Boeing have any capability of building rocket engines. The main US makers are Aerojet Rocketdyne and probably now SpaceX. There is ULA, which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, but they can't make engines, they have to get them from the Russians.
Yeah, but if we were smart (which we aren't), we'd be putting some resources into developing methods to counter such threats now (technologies which would also be useful for other missions, such as asteroid capture for mining, or for traveling to other places in the solar system more quickly), instead of just waiting to see something.
Also, it seems to me we'd do better with actual probes in space looking for these things, instead of relying on ground-based observations. Wouldn't it be better to have a space-based probe, perhaps closer to the orbit of Venus, to look away from the Sun for asteroids, seeing them by the light reflecting from the Sun?
I have to agree. In fact, it's astounding how many times I see a message from some non-native English speaker apologizing for his "bad English" when his message is perfectly comprehensible and almost entirely error-free, and certainly far better than many lazy Americans (I say that as an American, BTW) who are too stupid or lazy to use proper spelling, know the difference between they're/their/there, know the difference between it's and its, know how to use an apostrophe, etc. It's pathetic.
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
What's interesting here is that you've used two Britishisms ("bugger off" earlier, and "bloody" here), and then you spelled "apologize" in the American way...
Slashdot Mirror
Where that gets rough is with the ladies. Be prepared to have a lot of dates be one time only, because after she sees the car, she runs away. I always wanted to ask those ladies why they hate the environment, and force men to wow and woo them with big, impressive, expensive cars, but figured there was no use. I consoled myself with the thought that I wouldn't want a gold digger anyway.
It's not just that, they also demand you buy them a $10,000 diamond ring, which of course becomes mostly worthless as soon as it's sold.
I'm starting to wonder if America is just a terrible place to meet women: most of them are terribly fat, and those that aren't are airheaded gold-diggers.
What advice would you give to someone entering the electrical engineering discipline?
Choose a different major. EE is all being outsourced to Asia these days, unless you want to be stuck working for defense contractors. Your other option is to focus on digital (RTL) design, and spend your career writing Verilog at a chipmaker. If you want to do board-level design, your options are limited.
It's BS. Basically, auto dealerships are run by rich locals who are very politically connected with the local government, and they get laws passed which are favorable to their business. Car dealerships are nothing more than a tax on cars, as they add to the cost (through their overhead), but don't provide anything in return. They are a middleman, and middlemen always add cost. Car dealerships (independent, non-factory-owned) are an entirely American phenomenon; they don't exist in other countries. Studies have been done and found that currently, dealerships add around $2500 to the cost of a new car; that's money that every new car buyer has to pay in extra costs, and it only goes to enrich the car dealership. Add on top of all this the horribly inflated service costs at dealerships.
Independent auto dealerships are nothing more than scams, and laws requiring them are nothing more than protectionism. There's lots of car manufacturers out there, and we would be better off just buying from them directly, like Saturn tried to do years ago. Dealership apologists try to claim that buying direct would create a monopoly, but that's a lie since with so many carmakers these days that obviously is impossible. Finally, we're able to buy lots of other stuff directly from manufacturers, such as computers (Dell, Lenovo, etc.), so why don't we have laws requiring us to buy our computers from locally-owned shops? Because it would just cost more and give us less selection, that's why.
Yep, that's why they call them "showrooms" instead of "dealerships".
Is it that area of dirt between the joists and posts in a raised foundation style dwelling?
Yes.
Of course a lot of newer homes go the cheap route and have slab floors.
No, they don't. You can't put a house on a concrete slab in any given environment. You see this construction in places like Phoenix and Vegas because they're deserts and it never gets very cold there and there isn't many problems with flooding or a high water table, but in any place where the ground freezes, you can't use slabs because they'll fracture with the freeze-thaw cycles. So in those places, you either dig deeper than the frost line and build a basement, or you raise the house so it has a crawlspace under it. Crawlspaces are cheaper than digging, but you don't get the square-footage bonus that basements give you.
If Uber can call their drivers "contractors" what's to prevent everyone using that loophole to ignore minimum wage law?
Technically, it's against IRS regulations, but in reality, tons of small businesses do this for years and nothing ever happens to them.
To me it doesn't even matter if Uber is exploitive or not. They simply provide a vastly better service than any taxi I have ever used.
This is mostly the way I feel, with an exception: in Manhattan, I can't imagine why you'd want to bother with Uber. Uber requires starting an app on your phone, punching in a destination, waiting for someone to get to you, etc. With a taxi, you just stand on the side of the street and raise your arm, and one is there in seconds. But Manhattan is exceptional that way.
Everywhere else (meaning places that aren't as dense as Manhattan, mainly suburban areas), cabs are a total PITA. You have to look them up somehow, wait 30-60 minutes for them to arrive, then give the dumb driver turn-by-turn directions because he has no idea where your destination is, then at the end you find out the fare is astronomical. Uber is easy, fast, you can see how long it'll take the driver to get to you, and the cost is much less.
Adopting a solution which doesn't actually work isn't helping anyone, it's just creating more work, and more profit for bad actors, and imposing an unnecessary cost on everyone else.
Come up with a *real* solution and we'll consider it.
There's no reason NOT to make HTTPS everywhere.
Sure there is: cost.
HTTPS is not free. You have to purchase a certificate for it to work. That certificate can cost more than the yearly hosting fee for your website, if you have some small, cheap website on a shared host for $3/month.
Why should you do this when there's no benefit whatsoever? Why should I care if the government can see that I'm reading some guy's home-made webpage about turtles or whatever?
Yep, that summarizes things quite well. :-(
This can be argued many ways. I'm not saying I completely agree with this, but consider the 2000 election: Ralph Nader ran, and we can speculate that if he hadn't done so, most of those votes would have gone to Gore instead, but because he did run, he "spoiled" the vote for Gore, and we ended up with Bush and the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. Thus, the (much) greater evil won, if you assume that Gore would not have done that (which is probably a safe assumption I think). This is the problem with this line of thinking. But then again, if we always just stick to the two "approved" parties, we'll never have any change, will we? But then again, we've tried having other candidates running (Perot, Nader) and it didn't seem to help any, and in fact seemed to make things worse. Hmmm...
Anyway, my whole point was that even if you are the pragmatic type who doesn't want to "spoil" the vote, you don't have to worry about that in most states, at least in the Presidential election (but also in many other elections too, depending on state and district). If your state/district is certain to vote a certain way, and you prefer the opposing party as the "lesser of two evils" but want to see more power for 3rd parties, you can safely vote third party. As I said before, there is zero chance that Mississippi is going to vote for the Democrat candidate in 2016, so if you live there and don't like Republicans, you might as well vote for the Greens or anyone else besides the Dem candidate, because it will not make any difference in the actual election results (the Republican candidate *is* going to get MS's electoral votes), but at least the 3rd parties will show better results. It's a small change, but it is a change.
You're arguing two totally different things: the quality of modern games and the merits of online purchasing. We're talking about online purchasing here; your diatribe about modern games is really irrelevant.
Do you buy anything from Amazon, or Newegg, or any online seller? If you're so paranoid that you're worried about people tracking your game purchases, I don't know what to tell you. This isn't a conspiracy-theorist forum, this is a tech forum, and I imagine most Slashdotters have purchased stuff online.
Ok, I have a question. I haven't played any of these games since "SimCity 2000" back in the early 1990s. With this community mod thing, is it possible to build your own transit system like SkyTran (personal rapid transit) and see how that works in the city?
What's sad is that so many beautiful women are really so shallow they'll throw themselves at men like EA CxOs just because of the bucks.
How is that any different from purchasing something on Amazon.com?
In a yellow cab, you have to deal with often times 25 year old vehicles in poor condition, the dispatcher blaring on the radio the whole ride. You can call a cab, and there is no guarantee one will show up, and not to mention the tip you're expected to bestow.
This (dumb) article is about NYC, AFAICT. Things there are different. You don't "call a cab" (maybe in the outer boroughs, but my experience is in Manhattan), you stand on the side of the street and raise your arm. And the cabs I've been in lately were fairly new, certainly not 25 years old. You sound like you're complaining about cabs in other cities.
In my experience, Uber and Lyft are great (and in fact, far superior) alternatives to cabs in places which are not NYC, and are not extremely dense like that. I used to live in northern NJ, and the cabs there were indeed pretty bad: you'd have to wait 30-60 minutes for one to show up when you called one, they were stinky, and they were really expensive too. Then came Lyft and Uber and suddenly I was riding around in Mercedes for half the price of some shitty cab, and with a driver who spoke perfect English too (not that all the Lyft/Uber drivers were natural-born Americans, they weren't, but even the ones that weren't were much easier to talk to than the cab drivers).
However, over in Manhattan everything is different. I have no idea why you'd bother with Uber over there, because you can just stand on the street and raise your arm and you'll have a cab in seconds. The cabs there aren't terribly expensive, since you're probably not going that far (thanks to the density), and the cabs are actually pretty nice in NYC these days (unlike other places/cities I've used cabs), probably because of either regulation or intense competition (a medallion is $1M last I heard; why spend $1M on a medallion for a single cab, and then use it on some shitty old car that breaks down a lot?).
If you want to see what will happen if you get close to that 15% look up "Ron Paul vote rigged" to see both the RNC and the press insure that nobody in critical primary states would know the man existed, including several reports by those that counted the votes who said "The numbers we gave the RNC were NOT what the RNC reported, they took votes from Paul and gave them to Romney". Despite many calls for an investigation? None occurred.
You're alleging corruption within the Republican party (RNC) here, with how they counted votes in the Primary elections.
This is not a factor in the general elections. The RNC (a private group AFAIK) does not control the general elections, that's entirely government-run. The RNC has no power to give Green candidate votes to the Democrat or Republican candidate of their choice.
You can argue that the two main parties are corrupt (which is probably quite true), but this isn't a factor in the general elections, where the two parties oppose each other. The Parties do not count the votes in that election. The primaries, however, are basically the wild west: the primaries are just something the government (at local levels) does for the two Parties to help them select candidates. Are there even any rules about how the Parties must handle the candidate selection after the votes are counted? Are they even required to use those counts? Aren't they private organizations?
What you're doing seems like complaining how horrible Comcast is, and then saying the US government is hopelessly corrupt because Comcast is such a horrible company. The US government doesn't have that much say in how Comcast runs itself internally, or how it handles its appallingly bad customer service. It's no different with these parties.
How am I advocating splitting parties? I'm just pointing out that if you live in a red state, and you don't like the Republicans, your vote on a Democrat presidential candidate is totally wasted. There is zero chance that a Democrat will win the electoral votes in your state if it's a Republican stronghold like any southern or midwestern state. Mississippi is NOT going to give its electoral votes to the Democrat candidate in 2016, I guarantee it.
So if you live in one of these states (which is most of them), voting for the opposition candidate is already a wasted vote. So why not vote for a third party? They're not going to win either, but at least it would show support for a different party, maybe get them more funding and recognition, and maybe get the two main parties to move closer to their platform to try to capture those voters. What is there to lose?
Now, if you live in a swing state like Ohio or Florida, you might want to disregard this advice. After all, in 2000, it was a very, very small number of votes that decided which candidate got Florida's electoral votes. You might also want to disregard if you're in one of the two states which doesn't have winner-takes-all in the electoral college. But that still leaves around 40 states which have predetermined outcomes.
but it's been thousands of years since a really devastating impact, and could be thousands more before the next, in which case any resources dedicated today are wasted. Yes, they might have other applications,
That's my point: we need to be developing space-going capabilities; these resources wouldn't be wasted, they'd contribute to our capabilities. A big-ass rocket engine for pushing asteroids (or whatever kind of engine they end up using, mass driver, ion thruster, whatever) wouldn't only be useful for pushing killer asteroids to safer orbits, it'd also be useful for other things, like pushing valuable asteroids to places where they're easier to harvest, or pushing big-ass spacecraft on long voyages to Jupiter or wherever. You're not going to have a 6-month expedition to Jupiter on the Discovery with HAL with current propulsion technology.
Realistically we're probably at least a century or two out from any sort of cost-effective space exploitation beyond orbit, and cataclysmic-asteroid-moving technology is unlikely to help much in that regard,
Sure it would: if we had the technology to push big things around in space better, it'd be a lot cheaper to do anything large-scale up there, including long-distance exploration. Right now, we're basically still using rocket engines from the 1960s.
(How might ion drive technology improve with a a few extra $billion per year in funding?)
Exactly. Or fusion engines. Whatever it is, it needs money, and time to develop it. We're spending far, far, far more than a few billion a year on "defense" projects like the completely inept F-35.
That's where I read about ULA. I'm sorry, buying engines from the Russians doesn't count.
"but I voted independant!" you say. yeah, how much good did that do? seriously? what did it accomplish?
The problem is that not enough people are voting for third parties. As I understand it, if at least 15% (I think) of the vote goes to a third party, suddenly things change, as that party becomes eligible for federal campaign financing, a spot in the debates, and other perks. Basically the system shuts out anyone that's too small, meaning too little of the vote. So if enough people would actually start voting for third parties, then we might start seeing some change. But no one wants to bother.
Most people who lend some vocal support say they don't vote third party because they don't want their vote "wasted", or to effectively count for "the other guy", who's even worse, so they're "voting for the lesser of two evils". The problem is, in most states, the outcome is already predetermined at the general election. Most states are not swing states. So if you're in a non-swing state, you can safely vote third party without worrying that you're helping the worse of two evils get elected. For instance, if you live in Arizona or Alabama or Oklahoma and you think Dems are the lesser evil, you're really wasting your vote on a Democrat presidential candidate because there's zero chance those states will turn blue. If half the Dem voters in those states voted for, say, the Green Party, we'd really start seeing some interesting politics.
That's not necessarily true.
If that letter is a "G" or really anything besides "D" or "R", then their goals are likely quite different. But no one will vote for anyone without a "D" or "R" so I guess we'll never know for sure.
Terrestrial missile and aerospace technology really isn't all that useful in the vacuum of space. Their technology all depends on the presence of oxygen-bearing air. Jet engines don't work in space.
To my knowledge, neither Lockheed nor Boeing have any capability of building rocket engines. The main US makers are Aerojet Rocketdyne and probably now SpaceX. There is ULA, which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, but they can't make engines, they have to get them from the Russians.
Yeah, but if we were smart (which we aren't), we'd be putting some resources into developing methods to counter such threats now (technologies which would also be useful for other missions, such as asteroid capture for mining, or for traveling to other places in the solar system more quickly), instead of just waiting to see something.
Also, it seems to me we'd do better with actual probes in space looking for these things, instead of relying on ground-based observations. Wouldn't it be better to have a space-based probe, perhaps closer to the orbit of Venus, to look away from the Sun for asteroids, seeing them by the light reflecting from the Sun?
I have to agree. In fact, it's astounding how many times I see a message from some non-native English speaker apologizing for his "bad English" when his message is perfectly comprehensible and almost entirely error-free, and certainly far better than many lazy Americans (I say that as an American, BTW) who are too stupid or lazy to use proper spelling, know the difference between they're/their/there, know the difference between it's and its, know how to use an apostrophe, etc. It's pathetic.
Bloody Americans who don't know the difference between their, there and they're never apologize for it.
What's interesting here is that you've used two Britishisms ("bugger off" earlier, and "bloody" here), and then you spelled "apologize" in the American way...