They've now been forked and lost their slot as the premiere Linux desktop.
Have they? Sure, it's not all-GNOME-almost-everywhere like it used to be, but most distros are still either using Gnome or most of it. Fedora's using Gnome3 as its premiere desktop last I heard. Ubuntu uses Gnome3 as well, except that they've replaced the shell part with Unity. Linux Mint is mostly pushing Cinnamon, which is Gnome3 again, but with a different shell. KDE and XFCE are still minor players in comparison, and the others (LXDE etc.) smaller still.
What's worse is that this "crippled zombie thing" actually seems to have a lot more users than KDE, even though people incessantly bitch about how bad Gnome3 is and KDE would be much, much easier for former Windows users to use (and is endlessly configurable for those who want something a little different).
Lennart didn't reimplement anything that "used to work". You can complain about his implementations all you want, but they were attempts to fix real problems.
PulseAudio was an attempt to fix the massively broken Linux audio system. As it was, Linux didn't allow a lot of things with audio, such as being able to have different inputs and outputs and being able to adjust the levels for them all independently. Now maybe PA wasn't the best, maybe OSS4 is better, I don't know, but before PA, Linux audio was pretty bad, and certainly didn't compare at all to what Windows had.
systemd was an attempt to fix the massively broken Linux start-up system. Sysvinit is reliable, but it's dog-slow because it doesn't allow different services to be started in parallel; it descends from the old days of computers being left on all the time and never rebooted, which simply isn't the case any more for desktops and especially laptops and mobile devices.
PulseAudio isn't from Ubuntu, it's from Red Hat/Fedora. Ubuntu merely adopted it, like many other Linux distros.
If you want to blame Ubuntu for something similar, it'd be Upstart. We already had SysVInit (which of course was old and had problems), so some other people made systemd to address these problems, but Ubuntu decided they didn't like that and had to make their own thing, which was Upstart.
Of course, Upstart isn't nearly as bad as this: writing start-up scripts isn't really that hard, and it's not that much extra effort to maintain different start-up environments, and this work is typically done by the distros themselves anyway. You don't need the cooperation of hardware manufacturers to use sysvinit or one of its replacements. This isn't the case for a display server, where you absolutely need drivers, which are huge pieces of work and tend to be made by or with the help of the hardware companies (Intel, AMD, and Nvidia).
But the moment someone DARE'S to spend their time and money on an (just as open and free) alternative to a 25-year old monolithic mess of display server, THEN the swiss-guard comes out in force.
They're coming out in force because there's already a new, open and free alternative to that 25-year-old monolithic mess: it's called Wayland. They don't see why we need yet another alternative, when there's no way you're going to get Nvidia, Intel, and AMD to all make drivers for all three display servers. We were already worried about making a smooth transition to Wayland, which make all these grand promises of being clean and modular, and now this Mir thing has basically dashed our hopes of that.
They didn't have a choice. Bush couldn't be re-elected since he had reached his two-term limit, so it was a choice between Obama and McCain. There wasn't much different between the two really, but at the time most people didn't know that because of all the grand promises Obama was making (which he promptly reneged on after he was elected--wars, Guantanamo, transparency, etc.).
Now what's interesting is if you compare Obama's first term campaigning to that for his second term. There was all kinds of excitement about him before his first term; before his second term, not so much. So it looks like many people followed your advice: they realized there wasn't much difference between him and Romney, decided "change for the sake of change is bad", and stuck with the known evil rather than trying out someone new who didn't tell them anything to make them believe he'd be any better.
The thing they're missing is that, if you chase IT/Linux geeks and make them happy, they're going to recommend and push for your products to be adopted by their employers. If you piss them off, they're not going to recommend you any more. This is somewhat important in the IT area, where management will listen, to a certain extent (though maybe not at all companies...), to what their IT personnel recommend as far as IT purchases. If they all love DistroX, for instance, and the company wants to choose a distro for their servers, or perhaps even to evaluate as a replacement for Windows on the desktop after seeing the horror show that is Win8, when they go ask their trusted IT people, they're going to hear "Let's use DistroX!", and DistroX might secure a nice support contract.
One of the main reasons the UNIX vendors stagnated and fell is because of fragmentation. Consumer PCs were saddled with a POS OS (and also later iterations of it which did have full 32-bit protected memory, and later 64-bit) because that POS eliminated fragmentation. Fragmentation is one of the big things keeping Linux from being a true threat to Windows.
Good question. According to your link, the President appoints the Librarian, with the consent of the Senate. However, the current guy has been serving since 1987. The link doesn't say when the President is allowed to appoint a new one: can the President decide to "fire" the Librarian whenever he feels like it, or does he have to wait until the Librarian dies or decides to retire, like the Supreme Court justices? If it's the latter, then there really is nothing Obama can do. If it's the former (which I actually doubt, given how long those Librarians' tenures in that list have been), then we can blame Obama for doing nothing here.
Unfortunately, while Wikipedia doesn't specify, I suspect Obama has no power to "fire" this guy, so as much as I like to complain about Obama's total lack of progress and making all kinds of promises on the campaign trail and then reneging on them, this is probably an instance of someplace where Obama really can't do anything (unless you go with Cajun Hell's comment below about having the FCC (which Obama does control) effectively overturn the LoC's decision with some new regulations about what phone makers and sellers are allowed to do.
Don't forget Springfield's XD line of pistols, made by HS Produkt in Croatia. Also the CZ pistols made in Czech Republic.
There's lots of guns imported into the US. There's no Federal laws requiring guns to be made in the US, or else those and all the brands you listed would not be sold here, yet they are. You're probably thinking of US Military requirements, which do indeed require guns to be mostly made here when the US Military makes a contract with a gunmaker. That's what happened to the Beretta M9 pistol: the Italian-made models worked well enough in testing, but when they started building them here, they screwed it up somehow and the American-made models issued to servicemen were total crap and had a ton of problems. They eventually got it sorted out, but not before the debacle earned M9s and Berettas a terrible reputation in America.
It seems to me the unions, when presented with situations like this ("we'll make it up to you"), need to demand a contract where the union workers will profit somehow if the company does turn around and regain profitability, rather than just relying on good faith.
Everything dies after some time. The longer you can keep things afloat, the better (for you), but nothing's ever permanent. Nothing would have kept the US the leader in steel forever, nothing; eventually something would change it, such as people in another country finally figuring out how to do it themselves for less than you can. But if you can keep the economy (in a certain sector) good for another few decades, that's a large part of the career of one generation of workers.
Think of it this way: suppose you and all your friends worked at a prominent buggy whip manufacturer, and the year is 1885. You enjoy a great quality of life due to circumstance; maybe your employer is really generous. You've come to a crossroads where you can either take one action and continue working at the buggy whip manufacturer and getting very good wages and enjoying a great quality of life, or you can take another action and allow the company to outsource all its manufacturing to Canada or wherever, and you and all your friends will lose your well-paying jobs and have to go find something else to do which probably will pay far less. Well, if you take the long view, it doesn't really matter which course you take, because that company is going to be out of business in ~30 years, because of the rise of the automobile and the total obsolescence of horse-drawn transportation. But in 30 years, you'll certainly have retired, and enjoyed a long career with great wages if you choose path A, whereas with path B you'll suffer 30 years of misery after losing your house because your new job doesn't pay nearly enough to allow you to afford it. And in that 30 years with path A, you'll have earned plenty of money to help your children choose a different path in life than making buggy whips, such as sending them to college, so they'll be prepared when inevitable change comes, whereas with path B, your kids will grow up destitute.
Sure, good pilots shouldn't get off course, but who says the mexican military has good pilots?
Probably not.
Helicopters tend to be flown manually so the pilot could have just been navigating visually and mixed up landmarks.
At least in the world of competent helicopter pilots, you don't just buzz around looking at landmarks; you use GPS, VOR, etc. to navigate, and you're careful about doing so because helicopters burn a lot of fuel, and you can't afford to screw up and run out of fuel and have to autorotate somewhere where there may not be a safe place to do so.
I'd like to think that the US military would still keep an eye out for stuff like this
This is my biggest point here: where were the fighter planes? Several years ago, some poor Cessna pilot on his first solo flight for his private license accidentally put in the transponder code for "I've been hijacked!", and two F-16s were immediately scrambled, weapons hot, from the nearest AFB to intercept him and force him to land. An armed military helicopter from a neighboring country where the entire northern half of the country (including much of the military), the part that borders us, is in the control of drug lords, and they do nothing?
But, that's the beauty of having it the United States of America, where you have states' rights (supposedly) the mainstay rather than one all encompassing Federal govt.
1800 called, and wants you back. The Civil War decided this issue once and for all, and the all-encompassing Federal government won. Ever since that event, the Federal government has grown stronger and stronger, and there's no turning back, without some kind of major change (like a whole new constitution).
One nice thing is, if you don't like they way they do it in NY, then move to TX if that fits your way of life and outlook on life. That's what makes it a good thing IMHO.
Sounds great, except that's fantasy, not reality. Again, 1800 called and wants you back.
The US is a large place with a great diversity of geographical and environmental situations. Many of the different views and needs are based on this, and also different views happen due to this too.
The problem is, you have to have one law that fits all different places. The only places where you can have very different laws are for things such as building codes or water management laws, since those things really do need to vary from place to place. But for things like abortion, whether we should have an official religion, what the speed limit is, etc., these have to be decided at the highest level, because that's how centralized governments work. You can't have different regions with radically different laws; it simply doesn't work. We tried it before several times, first with the Articles of Confederation, and later with slavery being legal some places and not others. Centralized government won. It's happening in Europe too with the EU: things are becoming more homogenized there; there's even pressure on Germany to put a speed limit on the Autobahn because other countries like it better that way. A confederation sharing currency and defense and international relations duties, while having very different laws between the member states, sounds great in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. It never has, and there's no good examples of this being done successfully, except maybe Switzerland.
But the idea of states is that it IS similar to living in a different small country, that allows for more freedom for a person to live how they want to live in the US, but with the states themselves united, we're much stronger that if apart when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.
Sounds great, except this isn't reality at all. There's very little different in living between Maine and California, as far as laws and your relationship to the government goes (local cultures do indeed vary a lot, but that's different from the laws we live under). And there's absolutely no way to get back to your ideal, except through a revolution. And even then, we'll just repeat history eventually, going right back to a strong centralized government. If you really want to live differently, with different laws than a bordering region, the only way to do it effectively is to be a separate country from them. If you need to be allied for mutual defense, then form an official military alliance like NATO. Once you commingle everything into a central government, and start commingling funds (i.e., sharing a currency and having a centralized government decide monetary policy), there's no way to do things differently in different regions.
Most people think 75 degrees is comfortable. However, it's impossible to have the whole planet at 75 degrees; the poles will always be colder than the equator.
BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous. No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake; that's why they have GPS in aircraft now, not to mention basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations (plus the Rio Grande river, which is obvious from the air) rule this excuse out.
That still doesn't solve the problem that they're really one big city, divided by a river and a state border that shouldn't exist. Cities (/metro areas) should never span states. And because of all this, looking at the population of any city these days is really a rather pointless thing to do, especially if you're comparing it with any other city. The population of a city is utterly irrelevant: the population of the metro area is the only thing that's important for comparison purposes.
"The thing is that Defending Canada is not that high of a priority of the Canadian military. " Isn't that any military's highest priority?
It sure as hell isn't the priority of the US military. We have Mexican military aircraft invading US airspace all the time, even landing on US soil, and the US military is nowhere to be found.
Except that, even inside the US, these views stand out as "odd" or even "insane", it just depends where you go within the US. In Texas, such views are probably considered "normal" (except maybe in Austin). In New York, you might get committed. This country is just so polarized between extremely different views that we'd be much better off if we broke up into separate smaller countries. We're never going to get any kind of agreement when you have one group of people that thinks all taxation is "evil" and that we shouldn't have any government unless it's run by some fundamentalist Christian church.
Silent Running was a cool movie to watch, I'll agree, but it's basic premise was so flawed that it really hurt watching the story if you have any understanding of physics whatsoever. 2001 didn't have this: everything was actually quite accurate WRT basic physics, except of course for the monoliths and the starchild scene at the end, which can be chalked up to extremely advanced alien technology and such. The premise of Silent Running was that Earth was now devoid of forests and wild places (and they even said the whole planet was 75 degrees, which is quite impossible), so these forests were preserved in a space ship in orbit around Saturn. 1) Why on earth would you put a bunch of trees in orbit around Saturn? It's so far from the Sun you're not going to get enough light to keep Earth-normal plants alive. 2) Where'd the artificial gravity come from? There was no spinning or anything of the sort, just a dome and a flat bottom. Artificial gravity as a future technology might be believable in a story set far in the future where humans have FTL-capable spaceships and such, but there's none of that here, the tech's otherwise not much advanced from that seen in 2001. 3) Why are they keeping nuclear bombs on board? If you want to abandon the place, you'd just set it adrift. It's not like the outer solar system is short on space.
It really wasn't in the same league as 2001. 2001, aside from the alien stuff and HAL's AI, was an extremely accurate portrayal of what things would have looked like in 2001 had the US not thrown in the towel on space exploration in the early 70s. It properly showed weightlessness (in the transit ship), artificial gravity as generated by a giant, rotating space station, a permanent base on the Moon, and a manned mission to Jupiter, all things that were achievable in the 42 years starting in 1969 when the film was released.
Obviously, the problem here is that there shouldn't be two places named "Kansas City", right across the river from each other. They need to join the two into a single city, and redraw the state lines so there's no state border anywhere near the metro area.
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That's funny, every time I install Linux Mint (KDE version, though it shouldn't make a difference) onto some laptop, it "just works".
They've now been forked and lost their slot as the premiere Linux desktop.
Have they? Sure, it's not all-GNOME-almost-everywhere like it used to be, but most distros are still either using Gnome or most of it. Fedora's using Gnome3 as its premiere desktop last I heard. Ubuntu uses Gnome3 as well, except that they've replaced the shell part with Unity. Linux Mint is mostly pushing Cinnamon, which is Gnome3 again, but with a different shell. KDE and XFCE are still minor players in comparison, and the others (LXDE etc.) smaller still.
What's worse is that this "crippled zombie thing" actually seems to have a lot more users than KDE, even though people incessantly bitch about how bad Gnome3 is and KDE would be much, much easier for former Windows users to use (and is endlessly configurable for those who want something a little different).
Lennart didn't reimplement anything that "used to work". You can complain about his implementations all you want, but they were attempts to fix real problems.
PulseAudio was an attempt to fix the massively broken Linux audio system. As it was, Linux didn't allow a lot of things with audio, such as being able to have different inputs and outputs and being able to adjust the levels for them all independently. Now maybe PA wasn't the best, maybe OSS4 is better, I don't know, but before PA, Linux audio was pretty bad, and certainly didn't compare at all to what Windows had.
systemd was an attempt to fix the massively broken Linux start-up system. Sysvinit is reliable, but it's dog-slow because it doesn't allow different services to be started in parallel; it descends from the old days of computers being left on all the time and never rebooted, which simply isn't the case any more for desktops and especially laptops and mobile devices.
PulseAudio isn't from Ubuntu, it's from Red Hat/Fedora. Ubuntu merely adopted it, like many other Linux distros.
If you want to blame Ubuntu for something similar, it'd be Upstart. We already had SysVInit (which of course was old and had problems), so some other people made systemd to address these problems, but Ubuntu decided they didn't like that and had to make their own thing, which was Upstart.
Of course, Upstart isn't nearly as bad as this: writing start-up scripts isn't really that hard, and it's not that much extra effort to maintain different start-up environments, and this work is typically done by the distros themselves anyway. You don't need the cooperation of hardware manufacturers to use sysvinit or one of its replacements. This isn't the case for a display server, where you absolutely need drivers, which are huge pieces of work and tend to be made by or with the help of the hardware companies (Intel, AMD, and Nvidia).
But the moment someone DARE'S to spend their time and money on an (just as open and free) alternative to a 25-year old monolithic mess of display server, THEN the swiss-guard comes out in force.
They're coming out in force because there's already a new, open and free alternative to that 25-year-old monolithic mess: it's called Wayland. They don't see why we need yet another alternative, when there's no way you're going to get Nvidia, Intel, and AMD to all make drivers for all three display servers. We were already worried about making a smooth transition to Wayland, which make all these grand promises of being clean and modular, and now this Mir thing has basically dashed our hopes of that.
They didn't have a choice. Bush couldn't be re-elected since he had reached his two-term limit, so it was a choice between Obama and McCain. There wasn't much different between the two really, but at the time most people didn't know that because of all the grand promises Obama was making (which he promptly reneged on after he was elected--wars, Guantanamo, transparency, etc.).
Now what's interesting is if you compare Obama's first term campaigning to that for his second term. There was all kinds of excitement about him before his first term; before his second term, not so much. So it looks like many people followed your advice: they realized there wasn't much difference between him and Romney, decided "change for the sake of change is bad", and stuck with the known evil rather than trying out someone new who didn't tell them anything to make them believe he'd be any better.
The thing they're missing is that, if you chase IT/Linux geeks and make them happy, they're going to recommend and push for your products to be adopted by their employers. If you piss them off, they're not going to recommend you any more. This is somewhat important in the IT area, where management will listen, to a certain extent (though maybe not at all companies...), to what their IT personnel recommend as far as IT purchases. If they all love DistroX, for instance, and the company wants to choose a distro for their servers, or perhaps even to evaluate as a replacement for Windows on the desktop after seeing the horror show that is Win8, when they go ask their trusted IT people, they're going to hear "Let's use DistroX!", and DistroX might secure a nice support contract.
One of the main reasons the UNIX vendors stagnated and fell is because of fragmentation. Consumer PCs were saddled with a POS OS (and also later iterations of it which did have full 32-bit protected memory, and later 64-bit) because that POS eliminated fragmentation. Fragmentation is one of the big things keeping Linux from being a true threat to Windows.
Good question. According to your link, the President appoints the Librarian, with the consent of the Senate. However, the current guy has been serving since 1987. The link doesn't say when the President is allowed to appoint a new one: can the President decide to "fire" the Librarian whenever he feels like it, or does he have to wait until the Librarian dies or decides to retire, like the Supreme Court justices? If it's the latter, then there really is nothing Obama can do. If it's the former (which I actually doubt, given how long those Librarians' tenures in that list have been), then we can blame Obama for doing nothing here.
Unfortunately, while Wikipedia doesn't specify, I suspect Obama has no power to "fire" this guy, so as much as I like to complain about Obama's total lack of progress and making all kinds of promises on the campaign trail and then reneging on them, this is probably an instance of someplace where Obama really can't do anything (unless you go with Cajun Hell's comment below about having the FCC (which Obama does control) effectively overturn the LoC's decision with some new regulations about what phone makers and sellers are allowed to do.
In European cities, where cycling is much more common, there seems to be significantly fewer (although sadly still more than zero) idiots.
Maybe it's because Europeans, on average, are much smarter than Americans.
Don't forget Springfield's XD line of pistols, made by HS Produkt in Croatia. Also the CZ pistols made in Czech Republic.
There's lots of guns imported into the US. There's no Federal laws requiring guns to be made in the US, or else those and all the brands you listed would not be sold here, yet they are. You're probably thinking of US Military requirements, which do indeed require guns to be mostly made here when the US Military makes a contract with a gunmaker. That's what happened to the Beretta M9 pistol: the Italian-made models worked well enough in testing, but when they started building them here, they screwed it up somehow and the American-made models issued to servicemen were total crap and had a ton of problems. They eventually got it sorted out, but not before the debacle earned M9s and Berettas a terrible reputation in America.
It seems to me the unions, when presented with situations like this ("we'll make it up to you"), need to demand a contract where the union workers will profit somehow if the company does turn around and regain profitability, rather than just relying on good faith.
A cut might have delayed things by afew years
Everything dies after some time. The longer you can keep things afloat, the better (for you), but nothing's ever permanent. Nothing would have kept the US the leader in steel forever, nothing; eventually something would change it, such as people in another country finally figuring out how to do it themselves for less than you can. But if you can keep the economy (in a certain sector) good for another few decades, that's a large part of the career of one generation of workers.
Think of it this way: suppose you and all your friends worked at a prominent buggy whip manufacturer, and the year is 1885. You enjoy a great quality of life due to circumstance; maybe your employer is really generous. You've come to a crossroads where you can either take one action and continue working at the buggy whip manufacturer and getting very good wages and enjoying a great quality of life, or you can take another action and allow the company to outsource all its manufacturing to Canada or wherever, and you and all your friends will lose your well-paying jobs and have to go find something else to do which probably will pay far less. Well, if you take the long view, it doesn't really matter which course you take, because that company is going to be out of business in ~30 years, because of the rise of the automobile and the total obsolescence of horse-drawn transportation. But in 30 years, you'll certainly have retired, and enjoyed a long career with great wages if you choose path A, whereas with path B you'll suffer 30 years of misery after losing your house because your new job doesn't pay nearly enough to allow you to afford it. And in that 30 years with path A, you'll have earned plenty of money to help your children choose a different path in life than making buggy whips, such as sending them to college, so they'll be prepared when inevitable change comes, whereas with path B, your kids will grow up destitute.
Sure, good pilots shouldn't get off course, but who says the mexican military has good pilots?
Probably not.
Helicopters tend to be flown manually so the pilot could have just been navigating visually and mixed up landmarks.
At least in the world of competent helicopter pilots, you don't just buzz around looking at landmarks; you use GPS, VOR, etc. to navigate, and you're careful about doing so because helicopters burn a lot of fuel, and you can't afford to screw up and run out of fuel and have to autorotate somewhere where there may not be a safe place to do so.
I'd like to think that the US military would still keep an eye out for stuff like this
This is my biggest point here: where were the fighter planes? Several years ago, some poor Cessna pilot on his first solo flight for his private license accidentally put in the transponder code for "I've been hijacked!", and two F-16s were immediately scrambled, weapons hot, from the nearest AFB to intercept him and force him to land. An armed military helicopter from a neighboring country where the entire northern half of the country (including much of the military), the part that borders us, is in the control of drug lords, and they do nothing?
But, that's the beauty of having it the United States of America, where you have states' rights (supposedly) the mainstay rather than one all encompassing Federal govt.
1800 called, and wants you back. The Civil War decided this issue once and for all, and the all-encompassing Federal government won. Ever since that event, the Federal government has grown stronger and stronger, and there's no turning back, without some kind of major change (like a whole new constitution).
One nice thing is, if you don't like they way they do it in NY, then move to TX if that fits your way of life and outlook on life. That's what makes it a good thing IMHO.
Sounds great, except that's fantasy, not reality. Again, 1800 called and wants you back.
The US is a large place with a great diversity of geographical and environmental situations. Many of the different views and needs are based on this, and also different views happen due to this too.
The problem is, you have to have one law that fits all different places. The only places where you can have very different laws are for things such as building codes or water management laws, since those things really do need to vary from place to place. But for things like abortion, whether we should have an official religion, what the speed limit is, etc., these have to be decided at the highest level, because that's how centralized governments work. You can't have different regions with radically different laws; it simply doesn't work. We tried it before several times, first with the Articles of Confederation, and later with slavery being legal some places and not others. Centralized government won. It's happening in Europe too with the EU: things are becoming more homogenized there; there's even pressure on Germany to put a speed limit on the Autobahn because other countries like it better that way. A confederation sharing currency and defense and international relations duties, while having very different laws between the member states, sounds great in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice. It never has, and there's no good examples of this being done successfully, except maybe Switzerland.
But the idea of states is that it IS similar to living in a different small country, that allows for more freedom for a person to live how they want to live in the US, but with the states themselves united, we're much stronger that if apart when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.
Sounds great, except this isn't reality at all. There's very little different in living between Maine and California, as far as laws and your relationship to the government goes (local cultures do indeed vary a lot, but that's different from the laws we live under). And there's absolutely no way to get back to your ideal, except through a revolution. And even then, we'll just repeat history eventually, going right back to a strong centralized government. If you really want to live differently, with different laws than a bordering region, the only way to do it effectively is to be a separate country from them. If you need to be allied for mutual defense, then form an official military alliance like NATO. Once you commingle everything into a central government, and start commingling funds (i.e., sharing a currency and having a centralized government decide monetary policy), there's no way to do things differently in different regions.
That was a random sampling of hundreds of Google hits for those terms.
And no, that's bullshit about 16 miles. You're obviously not a pilot.
Most people think 75 degrees is comfortable. However, it's impossible to have the whole planet at 75 degrees; the poles will always be colder than the equator.
http://www.newser.com/story/125261/mexican-helicopter-mistakes-airports-lands-in-texas.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023633/Mexican-military-helicopter-soldiers-lands-airport-Texas--MISTAKE.html
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Mexican-military-helicopter-lands-in-Laredo-by-2082188.php
https://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/mexican-military-helicopter-spotted-flying-over-texas/
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mexican-helicopters-flying-over-texas-would-obama-respond-to-mexican-invasion-with-use-of-force/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread557760/pg1
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110905191138AAP32Xj
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=429229#.US-m5WJ2n4Y
BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous. No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake; that's why they have GPS in aircraft now, not to mention basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations (plus the Rio Grande river, which is obvious from the air) rule this excuse out.
That still doesn't solve the problem that they're really one big city, divided by a river and a state border that shouldn't exist. Cities (/metro areas) should never span states. And because of all this, looking at the population of any city these days is really a rather pointless thing to do, especially if you're comparing it with any other city. The population of a city is utterly irrelevant: the population of the metro area is the only thing that's important for comparison purposes.
"The thing is that Defending Canada is not that high of a priority of the Canadian military. "
Isn't that any military's highest priority?
It sure as hell isn't the priority of the US military. We have Mexican military aircraft invading US airspace all the time, even landing on US soil, and the US military is nowhere to be found.
Except that, even inside the US, these views stand out as "odd" or even "insane", it just depends where you go within the US. In Texas, such views are probably considered "normal" (except maybe in Austin). In New York, you might get committed. This country is just so polarized between extremely different views that we'd be much better off if we broke up into separate smaller countries. We're never going to get any kind of agreement when you have one group of people that thinks all taxation is "evil" and that we shouldn't have any government unless it's run by some fundamentalist Christian church.
The FX sequence when the ship flies through Saturn's belts was actually made for 2001 IIRC, and was cut from 2001 so he reused it in Silent Running.
Silent Running was a cool movie to watch, I'll agree, but it's basic premise was so flawed that it really hurt watching the story if you have any understanding of physics whatsoever. 2001 didn't have this: everything was actually quite accurate WRT basic physics, except of course for the monoliths and the starchild scene at the end, which can be chalked up to extremely advanced alien technology and such. The premise of Silent Running was that Earth was now devoid of forests and wild places (and they even said the whole planet was 75 degrees, which is quite impossible), so these forests were preserved in a space ship in orbit around Saturn. 1) Why on earth would you put a bunch of trees in orbit around Saturn? It's so far from the Sun you're not going to get enough light to keep Earth-normal plants alive. 2) Where'd the artificial gravity come from? There was no spinning or anything of the sort, just a dome and a flat bottom. Artificial gravity as a future technology might be believable in a story set far in the future where humans have FTL-capable spaceships and such, but there's none of that here, the tech's otherwise not much advanced from that seen in 2001. 3) Why are they keeping nuclear bombs on board? If you want to abandon the place, you'd just set it adrift. It's not like the outer solar system is short on space.
It really wasn't in the same league as 2001. 2001, aside from the alien stuff and HAL's AI, was an extremely accurate portrayal of what things would have looked like in 2001 had the US not thrown in the towel on space exploration in the early 70s. It properly showed weightlessness (in the transit ship), artificial gravity as generated by a giant, rotating space station, a permanent base on the Moon, and a manned mission to Jupiter, all things that were achievable in the 42 years starting in 1969 when the film was released.
Obviously, the problem here is that there shouldn't be two places named "Kansas City", right across the river from each other. They need to join the two into a single city, and redraw the state lines so there's no state border anywhere near the metro area.