> My case: the root issue isn't fixable. With a collective attitude like that, you're probably right. We, as a nation, need a sea change from "selfish assholism" to "helping each other out, because if we all win, we're all winners."
I think you're both right.
The root problem simply isn't fixable. As you say, the nation needs a sea change, but that's about as likely as Vulcans visiting us and establishing first contact next week.
Apparently, you can't drive down a street in Manhattan without a gang of 200 violent motorcyclists (including a couple of cops) chasing you, smashing your window, dragging you out into the street, and beating you within an inch of your life.
I will agree though, the OP was wrong to compare SF to those other places.
Realize that thinking that the system has to be up to my minimum standard or, otherwise, I'll just sit around and play my fiddle while Rome burns (throw my vote away on a third party that I know won't win) is childish and simple-minded thinking bred from irrational anger and frustration.
Continuing to prop up a broken regime is not the right choice; it's better to let Rome burn, so to speak, because then something better can be built from its ashes. I'd rather let the country collapse if that's what it takes, so we can more quickly get to a point where we're rebuilding, because that point will never come as long as the current powers stay in power.
To make an analogy, it's like trying to keep using a creaky old building with a fractured foundation by continually propping it up with little pieces of wood, rather then just letting it collapse and building a nice new building in that spot.
The first *six* lunar probes in the 1960's Ranger program failed. We lost Mariners 3 and 8 and Mars Observer.
I don't think this is quite fair. Technology in the 1960s was downright primitive; that was a time when computers took up whole rooms, and car engines had their fuel metered by Rube Goldbergesque all-mechanical contraptions rather than electronic control systems. Space exploration was brand-new. It's not too surprising that a bunch of late 50s/early 60s-tech space probes crapped out; it was amazing if they worked at all.
Anyone launching probes these days has access to far more scientific knowledge and engineering expertise and technology. Anyone these days can buy an Arduino at Radio Shack and put it to use fairly quickly doing things that would have required a huge engineering team and lots of expensive hardware (taking up a lot more space) back in 1960. You can't really compare the two.
Because you keep spouting incorrect bullshit about things you know nothing about.
People often decide in their introductory flight whether they hate it, or can't live without it. Yes, some who decide they can't live without it might never be good at it, but often those who don't have the touch will scare themselves enough on the first flight that they'll come to the correct conclusion.
And how exactly do you know this? Do you have a pilot's license? How many people have you seen this happen to? Or are you just making up shit?
People know after an intro ride whether they had any aptitude for it,
No, they don't. Lots of people spend lots of money before finally giving up. You're lying again. Stop lying.
Of course, that does't stop the non-introspective from spending $20,000 before realizing the answer that was clear to the instructor on the first flight.
Bullshit. Flight instructors do not tell this stuff to prospective students because they'd be fired. What kind of businessperson would turn away customers? Flight school owners will always tell you how easy it is to fly, that you can get your private license in 40 hours (total bullshit unless you're already a proficient fixed-wing pilot), and will gladly fly you around in circles to drain you of your money so they can keep their flight school going.
I'm done arguing with you. You're a fucking moron who doesn't know shit about helicopters.
When you suggested that making aircraft available would necessarily result in poor maintenance of aircraft. If the regulations work now, why would you think they'd fail if a new R22 cost $20k?
Because regulations are not enforced. There's various laws about the state your car needs to be maintained to, and they're rarely enforced. There's simply no way to enforce that. An R-22 has to have regular maintenance every 100 hours. What you are you going to do, train an entire army of government inspectors to run around and check every owner to make sure they've done their 100-hour maintenance? No one cares that much with cars, because if your car engine dies, you just pull over to the side of the road. If your helicopter engine fails, you crash. Good pilots might be able to autorotate and avoid a catastrophe, but that's only if there's a clear spot for them to land it: in the middle of a city, that's not so easy, and many skilled pilots have crashed helicopters in cities (frequently resulting in fatalities) simply because there was no place for them to land. And if you think the general population would be able to react fast enough to autorotate (you have a little over 1 second to slam the collective), then you're an idiot.
So if they have trouble keeping up with the maintenance of the helicopter, they can sell it and drive.
No, they'll keep it and continue flying. Who's going to stop them?
As for flying, it's one of those things that anyone who would be bad at it would probably find out their first time in one.
Look, you're obviously not a pilot, so you really don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Almost no one finds out in their first flight if they're able to do it or not. It takes many flights for normal pilots to get good at it. R-22 training time is around $250-300 per hour. Lots of aspiring pilots spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to learn to fly before they finally give up because they realize they're never going to be to master it enough to pass their check rides.
The high-strung panicky people (I've ridden with many in cars) would, without an instructor dampening their inputs, get a boom strike and kill themselves pretty quickly.
So Darwinism? You don't think there'd be a huge public outcry if tens of thousands of people started dying in helicopter training?
The high-strung panicky people (I've ridden with many in cars) would, without an instructor dampening their inputs, get a boom strike and kill themselves pretty quickly.
>Yet are one of the most popular training helicopters, and around here are (by far) the most popular for agricultural use.
That's only because it's the cheapest helicopter in existence to purchase and to operate (in per-hour costs), aside from kit-type helicopters such as the Mosquito (which is only 1 seat). Helicopters are enormously expensive, so of course people are going to go for the cheapest thing available. Luckily, the R-22 is also an extremely reliable helicopter, so they're not getting something dangerous (from a mechanical standpoint), but it is difficult to fly because of its characteristics (esp. weight).
> There's no way that most of the population could handle operating an aircraft (in 3 dimensions rather than 2) safely. So you are saying that the pilot licensing program passes a large number of unsafe pilots?
Where did I say that? Most people could not actually pass the pilot licensing program. Lots of people wash out early on, because they're simply unable to master basic maneuvers, most especially hovering. Not everyone can do it. Some people have a natural ability for it, and pick it up quickly. Other people take more time. Some people take too much time, and run out of money and/or quit. Some people just can't do it no matter what. It's something that requires real physical aptitude, and just like not everyone is able to master something like skating or skiing or bicycling, not everyone is able to fly a helicopter.
>Don't forget the atrociously poor maintenance that many cars have. With personal helicopters, they'd be falling out of the air left and right, running into each other, falling on buildings; it'd be a bloodbath. Most of the operating cost per hour of aircraft is amortized maintenance, not fuel or other direct costs. You are suggesting that maintenance rules should be lowered when the incompetent fliers are allowed?
You really have reading comprehension problems, don't you? Where did I suggest that? Most people don't maintain their cars very well; it's a simple fact. Helicopters (and other aircraft) don't have such a problem here because they're so expensive that only rich people and for-profit companies own or lease them. Some guy who earns $25k or $50k simply isn't going to own a helicopter. Because of their high cost and the nature of their owners, they're generally well-maintained. The same is NOT true of cars; people will drive any old piece of shit around, frequently because they simply can't afford meticulous maintenance. If helis were as cheap as Chevies, you'd have the same maintenance problems; it'd be a bloodbath.
The historical claim is tenuous at best, and also *ignores* the wishes of the actual people who live there.
I'm a big supporter of this notion, however I do have to point out that a minority of people in the world share this sentiment. This notion, that people should have the right to self-determination, is the root of something called "separatism", which most people think very poorly of. How many people in China think that the people of Tibet and Taiwan should be free to decide whether to be independent or part of the PRC? How many Americans think that individual states (or clusters of them) should have the right to secede and form their own countries? How many Europeans think that the Basque people in France and Spain (their region straddles the border, though more of it is in Spain) should be allowed to form their own new country? Or that Catalan should be allowed to secede from Spain? How many people in Iraq and Turkey think that the Kurds should be allowed to secede from those countries and form their own country? Separatism is usually a very unpopular thing. The USA itself was formed by separatists, yet less than 100 years after that point, it fought a civil war to prevent another separatist movement, and even today (now that the whole slavery issue is settled), any more calls for secession are met with derision and accusations of treason or sedition. If we don't believe that countless people in various regions should have the right to self-determination and self-government, then why do we care about the opinions of a few thousand people on some remote islands?
The main problem with MS's "Shared Source" was that, with the timing of it and all, they seemed to be trying to make themselves out to be open-source-friendly, or steal open-source's thunder with it.
Not only that, it wasn't even a very good effort. Unlike what I've proposed here, Shared Source isn't actually available to all MS customers. It's only available to a few extremely large corporate and governmental customers.
Of course he wouldn't, he wants everything to be GPLv3 ideally. I'm not asking if he'd like it or not, but how much he'd like it. Even RMS has some pragmatism, which is why we have the LGPL. I'm sure he'd prefer there to be no need for the LGPL, but he supports it because it has its uses.
When that company goes out of business you can't really outsource patches
That could be part of the license: if the vendor goes under, you're free to get someone else to fix it or maintain a fork for you.
If you even can maintain it, the code may require a special compiler or the hardware could require code signing system that you don't have.
This could also be part of the license. And what special compilers are out there these days anyway? I'm not aware of any proprietary languages that have any significant usage.
The whole Free Software thing kicked off because he got a new OS, and his printer wouldn't work with it. He needed the driver source, and found another coder who had the same hardware and driver source, but they were required to sign a "business friendly" NDA such that that they could not pass on the code they received.
Right, and with my not-so-Free license, he'd have the source because he (or his employer) was a customer of the vendor that supplied the driver, so this wouldn't be an issue. No, it's not nearly as good as having truly Free and open-source software that anyone can download, use, and modify, I never said it was, but it'd be better than totally proprietary software that customers don't get the source to at all.
The user gets the same freedoms from BSD and GPL, but GPL says anyone building on top of the software has to contribute their improvements to the community. Only fair really.
Technically, that's not what the GPL says. It says you have to distribute the source (or make it available) to anyone you distribute your software (binaries) to. In practice, that usually means making the source code available to "the community", but it doesn't have to. If you're a company selling that software, you only have to give the source to your customers. Of course, they have no restriction on redistributing it, so it goes to the community from there, so it's a minor distinction.
I wonder what RMS would think of a more "business-friendly" license where a commercial entity selling software could take software that's publicly-available, modify it, and then distribute that to paying customers, but not back to the community, but where the license required them only to distribute the modified source code to those same customers, however the customers were not allowed to distribute it themselves. This would be good for customers since they'd have the source code available "just in case" (the vendor went under, or they wanted to make their own modifications for their own use), and the vendor would like this because they wouldn't be "giving the software away". The upstream sources wouldn't like it as much as truly Free distribution, but at least anyone who becomes a customer of that vendor isn't getting screwed over.
The Nimitz is great if you need to strike targets far from home, but if you have equally capable aircraft, you could defend against one with a far smaller carrier.
I disagree. A smaller carrier can't handle the same kind of planes a large one can, so that makes it impossible to have equally capable aircraft. Last I heard, Britain's small carriers only use Harriers, which are no threat to the F-18 Superhornets used by the US Navy. Harriers don't even have supersonic capability. US carriers have had supersonic fighters for ages. Britain's carriers just aren't large enough for such planes.
If you're going to try to argue that the Islands should go to Argentina because they supposedly owned them 200 years ago, then you must also believe that all non-Native American people must evacuate the US and Canada and move back to Europe since it was stolen from the Natives. Same goes for all Hispanics in Latin America who have any European blood in them. As for Britain, this means that most of the British need to leave Britain (same goes for Ireland). Lots of them probably have Norman blood in them, and they were invaders in 1066. And before that, it was invaded by the Angles and Saxons, so anyone who isn't a purebred Pict or Celt needs to leave.
Exactly how far back in history do we have to go to figure out who really has a right to own a piece of land?
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but the English have a whole lot more experience pissing on and pissing off the rest of the world. Theirs started in the Age of Exploration and ended in the fifties.
Those English people are pretty much all dead now. Their descendants don't have that same experience. Giving today's English credit for things done during the Age of Exploration is like giving today's Italians credit for building the Coliseum or giving today's Greeks credit for inventing the Socratic Method or giving today's Egyptians credit for building the Pyramids of Giza.
Any idiot knows that there's roughly 3 feet in a meter, so obviously 700 ft^3 is roughly equivalent to 700/9 or around 78 m^3. If you can't figure that out on your own, you're woefully ignorant.
I use headphones when necessary. My coworker coined this "going under the knife", as people seem less inclined to interrupt.
I worked at a company with an open office environment (mostly; each work group had its own section with cubicle walls separating them, but there were no real walls between the team members in each group), and I tried using headphones, but people interrupted me at least as much as when I wasn't wearing them.
Example of a bad open office: "Let's make the cubicles smaller and shorten the walls!" (seen at Intel)
Holy shit, did they really do that there? Company-wide? I worked there up until 2007, and they had nice-size cubicles with pretty tall walls during my tenure, though in some places they were moving to compressed cubicles (but still with tall walls).
You are obviously an idiot. The AC OP said that electric motors couldn't generate the power needed for an 18 wheeler, when clearly we have electric motors that power aircraft carriers, which are far larger. I never said anything about the electricity source. The only reason diesel is still used is because batteries don't have the energy density of diesel fuel, yet (taking into account the massive inefficiency of burning fossil fuel). We're not very far away from bridging that gap, since Teslas can already go nearly as far as regular gas-powered cars, but the battery cost is a big issue.
This is complete bullshit. You obviously know nothing about cars. Just look at the service manual for a car with both manual and automatic transmission options; the automatic section (with complete rebuild instructions) is many times the size of the section for the manual transmission.
As the other responder said, people have been modifying their cars since cars were invented, and this hasn't affected insurance claims at all unless the modification was shown to have caused or aggravated the accident (e.g., disabling the airbags could cause you to be denied a claim for bodily injury). Unless you have some loony idea about the insurance companies conspiring with the automakers, but again, if the insurance companies cared to do that, they would have done it ages ago.
Satellite radio and OnStar don't involve renting hardware that's already in your car, they involve access to radio/satellite-based services. If you don't pay the fee, the device doesn't work; it's no different than a cellphone.
For the heated seats, how exactly do the propose to prevent people from modifying the car to enable the seats without paying a fee? You don't need cryptographic authentication to connect +12V to a couple of wires in a seat. It'd be trivial to unplug the factory control module and plug in a simple on/off switch.
That's why they invented the "battery". Yes, today's batteries leave a bit to be desired, but battery technology is progressing. The point is, 1500W per sm is quite a lot; your house probably doesn't use 1500W unless you have the HVAC or a clothesdryer on. Your roof is much bigger than 1sm. Do the math.
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> My case: the root issue isn't fixable.
With a collective attitude like that, you're probably right.
We, as a nation, need a sea change from "selfish assholism" to "helping each other out, because if we all win, we're all winners."
I think you're both right.
The root problem simply isn't fixable. As you say, the nation needs a sea change, but that's about as likely as Vulcans visiting us and establishing first contact next week.
Unless they're coming from Somalia or Afghanistan, they're probably safer in their home country.
Apparently, you can't drive down a street in Manhattan without a gang of 200 violent motorcyclists (including a couple of cops) chasing you, smashing your window, dragging you out into the street, and beating you within an inch of your life.
I will agree though, the OP was wrong to compare SF to those other places.
Realize that thinking that the system has to be up to my minimum standard or, otherwise, I'll just sit around and play my fiddle while Rome burns (throw my vote away on a third party that I know won't win) is childish and simple-minded thinking bred from irrational anger and frustration.
Continuing to prop up a broken regime is not the right choice; it's better to let Rome burn, so to speak, because then something better can be built from its ashes. I'd rather let the country collapse if that's what it takes, so we can more quickly get to a point where we're rebuilding, because that point will never come as long as the current powers stay in power.
To make an analogy, it's like trying to keep using a creaky old building with a fractured foundation by continually propping it up with little pieces of wood, rather then just letting it collapse and building a nice new building in that spot.
The first *six* lunar probes in the 1960's Ranger program failed. We lost Mariners 3 and 8 and Mars Observer.
I don't think this is quite fair. Technology in the 1960s was downright primitive; that was a time when computers took up whole rooms, and car engines had their fuel metered by Rube Goldbergesque all-mechanical contraptions rather than electronic control systems. Space exploration was brand-new. It's not too surprising that a bunch of late 50s/early 60s-tech space probes crapped out; it was amazing if they worked at all.
Anyone launching probes these days has access to far more scientific knowledge and engineering expertise and technology. Anyone these days can buy an Arduino at Radio Shack and put it to use fairly quickly doing things that would have required a huge engineering team and lots of expensive hardware (taking up a lot more space) back in 1960. You can't really compare the two.
You don't think I'm a pilot. But you are wrong
Do you often fly your helicopter in actual IFR conditions?
Why are you being so angry?
Because you keep spouting incorrect bullshit about things you know nothing about.
People often decide in their introductory flight whether they hate it, or can't live without it. Yes, some who decide they can't live without it might never be good at it, but often those who don't have the touch will scare themselves enough on the first flight that they'll come to the correct conclusion.
And how exactly do you know this? Do you have a pilot's license? How many people have you seen this happen to? Or are you just making up shit?
People know after an intro ride whether they had any aptitude for it,
No, they don't. Lots of people spend lots of money before finally giving up. You're lying again. Stop lying.
Of course, that does't stop the non-introspective from spending $20,000 before realizing the answer that was clear to the instructor on the first flight.
Bullshit. Flight instructors do not tell this stuff to prospective students because they'd be fired. What kind of businessperson would turn away customers? Flight school owners will always tell you how easy it is to fly, that you can get your private license in 40 hours (total bullshit unless you're already a proficient fixed-wing pilot), and will gladly fly you around in circles to drain you of your money so they can keep their flight school going.
I'm done arguing with you. You're a fucking moron who doesn't know shit about helicopters.
When you suggested that making aircraft available would necessarily result in poor maintenance of aircraft. If the regulations work now, why would you think they'd fail if a new R22 cost $20k?
Because regulations are not enforced. There's various laws about the state your car needs to be maintained to, and they're rarely enforced. There's simply no way to enforce that. An R-22 has to have regular maintenance every 100 hours. What you are you going to do, train an entire army of government inspectors to run around and check every owner to make sure they've done their 100-hour maintenance? No one cares that much with cars, because if your car engine dies, you just pull over to the side of the road. If your helicopter engine fails, you crash. Good pilots might be able to autorotate and avoid a catastrophe, but that's only if there's a clear spot for them to land it: in the middle of a city, that's not so easy, and many skilled pilots have crashed helicopters in cities (frequently resulting in fatalities) simply because there was no place for them to land. And if you think the general population would be able to react fast enough to autorotate (you have a little over 1 second to slam the collective), then you're an idiot.
So if they have trouble keeping up with the maintenance of the helicopter, they can sell it and drive.
No, they'll keep it and continue flying. Who's going to stop them?
As for flying, it's one of those things that anyone who would be bad at it would probably find out their first time in one.
Look, you're obviously not a pilot, so you really don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Almost no one finds out in their first flight if they're able to do it or not. It takes many flights for normal pilots to get good at it. R-22 training time is around $250-300 per hour. Lots of aspiring pilots spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to learn to fly before they finally give up because they realize they're never going to be to master it enough to pass their check rides.
The high-strung panicky people (I've ridden with many in cars) would, without an instructor dampening their inputs, get a boom strike and kill themselves pretty quickly.
So Darwinism? You don't think there'd be a huge public outcry if tens of thousands of people started dying in helicopter training?
The high-strung panicky people (I've ridden with many in cars) would, without an instructor dampening their inputs, get a boom strike and kill themselves pretty quickly.
>Yet are one of the most popular training helicopters, and around here are (by far) the most popular for agricultural use.
That's only because it's the cheapest helicopter in existence to purchase and to operate (in per-hour costs), aside from kit-type helicopters such as the Mosquito (which is only 1 seat). Helicopters are enormously expensive, so of course people are going to go for the cheapest thing available. Luckily, the R-22 is also an extremely reliable helicopter, so they're not getting something dangerous (from a mechanical standpoint), but it is difficult to fly because of its characteristics (esp. weight).
> There's no way that most of the population could handle operating an aircraft (in 3 dimensions rather than 2) safely.
So you are saying that the pilot licensing program passes a large number of unsafe pilots?
Where did I say that? Most people could not actually pass the pilot licensing program. Lots of people wash out early on, because they're simply unable to master basic maneuvers, most especially hovering. Not everyone can do it. Some people have a natural ability for it, and pick it up quickly. Other people take more time. Some people take too much time, and run out of money and/or quit. Some people just can't do it no matter what. It's something that requires real physical aptitude, and just like not everyone is able to master something like skating or skiing or bicycling, not everyone is able to fly a helicopter.
>Don't forget the atrociously poor maintenance that many cars have. With personal helicopters, they'd be falling out of the air left and right, running into each other, falling on buildings; it'd be a bloodbath.
Most of the operating cost per hour of aircraft is amortized maintenance, not fuel or other direct costs. You are suggesting that maintenance rules should be lowered when the incompetent fliers are allowed?
You really have reading comprehension problems, don't you? Where did I suggest that? Most people don't maintain their cars very well; it's a simple fact. Helicopters (and other aircraft) don't have such a problem here because they're so expensive that only rich people and for-profit companies own or lease them. Some guy who earns $25k or $50k simply isn't going to own a helicopter. Because of their high cost and the nature of their owners, they're generally well-maintained. The same is NOT true of cars; people will drive any old piece of shit around, frequently because they simply can't afford meticulous maintenance. If helis were as cheap as Chevies, you'd have the same maintenance problems; it'd be a bloodbath.
The historical claim is tenuous at best, and also *ignores* the wishes of the actual people who live there.
I'm a big supporter of this notion, however I do have to point out that a minority of people in the world share this sentiment. This notion, that people should have the right to self-determination, is the root of something called "separatism", which most people think very poorly of. How many people in China think that the people of Tibet and Taiwan should be free to decide whether to be independent or part of the PRC? How many Americans think that individual states (or clusters of them) should have the right to secede and form their own countries? How many Europeans think that the Basque people in France and Spain (their region straddles the border, though more of it is in Spain) should be allowed to form their own new country? Or that Catalan should be allowed to secede from Spain? How many people in Iraq and Turkey think that the Kurds should be allowed to secede from those countries and form their own country? Separatism is usually a very unpopular thing. The USA itself was formed by separatists, yet less than 100 years after that point, it fought a civil war to prevent another separatist movement, and even today (now that the whole slavery issue is settled), any more calls for secession are met with derision and accusations of treason or sedition. If we don't believe that countless people in various regions should have the right to self-determination and self-government, then why do we care about the opinions of a few thousand people on some remote islands?
The main problem with MS's "Shared Source" was that, with the timing of it and all, they seemed to be trying to make themselves out to be open-source-friendly, or steal open-source's thunder with it.
Not only that, it wasn't even a very good effort. Unlike what I've proposed here, Shared Source isn't actually available to all MS customers. It's only available to a few extremely large corporate and governmental customers.
RMS wouldn't like it.
Of course he wouldn't, he wants everything to be GPLv3 ideally. I'm not asking if he'd like it or not, but how much he'd like it. Even RMS has some pragmatism, which is why we have the LGPL. I'm sure he'd prefer there to be no need for the LGPL, but he supports it because it has its uses.
When that company goes out of business you can't really outsource patches
That could be part of the license: if the vendor goes under, you're free to get someone else to fix it or maintain a fork for you.
If you even can maintain it, the code may require a special compiler or the hardware could require code signing system that you don't have.
This could also be part of the license. And what special compilers are out there these days anyway? I'm not aware of any proprietary languages that have any significant usage.
The whole Free Software thing kicked off because he got a new OS, and his printer wouldn't work with it. He needed the driver source, and found another coder who had the same hardware and driver source, but they were required to sign a "business friendly" NDA such that that they could not pass on the code they received.
Right, and with my not-so-Free license, he'd have the source because he (or his employer) was a customer of the vendor that supplied the driver, so this wouldn't be an issue. No, it's not nearly as good as having truly Free and open-source software that anyone can download, use, and modify, I never said it was, but it'd be better than totally proprietary software that customers don't get the source to at all.
The user gets the same freedoms from BSD and GPL, but GPL says anyone building on top of the software has to contribute their improvements to the community. Only fair really.
Technically, that's not what the GPL says. It says you have to distribute the source (or make it available) to anyone you distribute your software (binaries) to. In practice, that usually means making the source code available to "the community", but it doesn't have to. If you're a company selling that software, you only have to give the source to your customers. Of course, they have no restriction on redistributing it, so it goes to the community from there, so it's a minor distinction.
I wonder what RMS would think of a more "business-friendly" license where a commercial entity selling software could take software that's publicly-available, modify it, and then distribute that to paying customers, but not back to the community, but where the license required them only to distribute the modified source code to those same customers, however the customers were not allowed to distribute it themselves. This would be good for customers since they'd have the source code available "just in case" (the vendor went under, or they wanted to make their own modifications for their own use), and the vendor would like this because they wouldn't be "giving the software away". The upstream sources wouldn't like it as much as truly Free distribution, but at least anyone who becomes a customer of that vendor isn't getting screwed over.
The Nimitz is great if you need to strike targets far from home, but if you have equally capable aircraft, you could defend against one with a far smaller carrier.
I disagree. A smaller carrier can't handle the same kind of planes a large one can, so that makes it impossible to have equally capable aircraft. Last I heard, Britain's small carriers only use Harriers, which are no threat to the F-18 Superhornets used by the US Navy. Harriers don't even have supersonic capability. US carriers have had supersonic fighters for ages. Britain's carriers just aren't large enough for such planes.
If you're going to try to argue that the Islands should go to Argentina because they supposedly owned them 200 years ago, then you must also believe that all non-Native American people must evacuate the US and Canada and move back to Europe since it was stolen from the Natives. Same goes for all Hispanics in Latin America who have any European blood in them. As for Britain, this means that most of the British need to leave Britain (same goes for Ireland). Lots of them probably have Norman blood in them, and they were invaders in 1066. And before that, it was invaded by the Angles and Saxons, so anyone who isn't a purebred Pict or Celt needs to leave.
Exactly how far back in history do we have to go to figure out who really has a right to own a piece of land?
Uh, I hate to break it to you, but the English have a whole lot more experience pissing on and pissing off the rest of the world. Theirs started in the Age of Exploration and ended in the fifties.
Those English people are pretty much all dead now. Their descendants don't have that same experience. Giving today's English credit for things done during the Age of Exploration is like giving today's Italians credit for building the Coliseum or giving today's Greeks credit for inventing the Socratic Method or giving today's Egyptians credit for building the Pyramids of Giza.
I had no trouble memorizing the fact that 0K equals -273.15degC even though I haven't used Kelvins since college chemistry.
Any idiot knows that there's roughly 3 feet in a meter, so obviously 700 ft^3 is roughly equivalent to 700/9 or around 78 m^3. If you can't figure that out on your own, you're woefully ignorant.
I use headphones when necessary. My coworker coined this "going under the knife", as people seem less inclined to interrupt.
I worked at a company with an open office environment (mostly; each work group had its own section with cubicle walls separating them, but there were no real walls between the team members in each group), and I tried using headphones, but people interrupted me at least as much as when I wasn't wearing them.
Example of a bad open office: "Let's make the cubicles smaller and shorten the walls!" (seen at Intel)
Holy shit, did they really do that there? Company-wide? I worked there up until 2007, and they had nice-size cubicles with pretty tall walls during my tenure, though in some places they were moving to compressed cubicles (but still with tall walls).
You are obviously an idiot. The AC OP said that electric motors couldn't generate the power needed for an 18 wheeler, when clearly we have electric motors that power aircraft carriers, which are far larger. I never said anything about the electricity source. The only reason diesel is still used is because batteries don't have the energy density of diesel fuel, yet (taking into account the massive inefficiency of burning fossil fuel). We're not very far away from bridging that gap, since Teslas can already go nearly as far as regular gas-powered cars, but the battery cost is a big issue.
This is complete bullshit. You obviously know nothing about cars. Just look at the service manual for a car with both manual and automatic transmission options; the automatic section (with complete rebuild instructions) is many times the size of the section for the manual transmission.
As the other responder said, people have been modifying their cars since cars were invented, and this hasn't affected insurance claims at all unless the modification was shown to have caused or aggravated the accident (e.g., disabling the airbags could cause you to be denied a claim for bodily injury). Unless you have some loony idea about the insurance companies conspiring with the automakers, but again, if the insurance companies cared to do that, they would have done it ages ago.
Satellite radio and OnStar don't involve renting hardware that's already in your car, they involve access to radio/satellite-based services. If you don't pay the fee, the device doesn't work; it's no different than a cellphone.
For the heated seats, how exactly do the propose to prevent people from modifying the car to enable the seats without paying a fee? You don't need cryptographic authentication to connect +12V to a couple of wires in a seat. It'd be trivial to unplug the factory control module and plug in a simple on/off switch.
That's why they invented the "battery". Yes, today's batteries leave a bit to be desired, but battery technology is progressing. The point is, 1500W per sm is quite a lot; your house probably doesn't use 1500W unless you have the HVAC or a clothesdryer on. Your roof is much bigger than 1sm. Do the math.