The thing is, you're both right, it just depends on whose definition you want to use. If you want to use the dictionary definition, then you're right: the UK's actions are terroristic. If you want to use the official UK government definition, then you're wrong, since by their definition, any actions by a "legitimate" (aka "de facto") government are by definition not terrorism. Of course, their definition has some flaws; they've used the word "terrorism" to describe actions by agents of the legitimate government of Libya (back when it was under Gadafi), so they're not very consistent with their own definition.
You're exactly right. We see it in all kinds of things, but especially politics. A good example is all the Obama fans; they've completely changed their very opinions of many issues (wars, Guantanamo, etc.) because they had to in order to continue supporting Obama instead of seeing him for the liar that he is.
I'd like to see a bunch more countries friendly to Ecuador (or unfriendly to Britain and the US) do the same to both British and American embassies. If the UK and US are going to ignore the Vienna treaty, then the whole diplomacy and embassy thing falls apart.
Wrong. I mean piston vs. jet. Piston engines are much more efficient than turbines. They don't have the power-to-weight ratio though, but that's less important in a fixed-wing aircraft than a helicopter. Check out the fuel burn on a small (4-6-seat) private jet compared to a piston plane with the same seating; the piston plane uses a fraction of the fuel (and there's no cost advantage for jet fuel either vs. avgas).
Don't be so smug. Acting like someone with a totally different personality takes real talent. There's a reason actors like Marlon Brando are so well-remembered; he could play all kinds of different people. I'm sure I could never pull that job off in a believable manner.
Now, of course, this doesn't mean all actors are highly talented. A lot of them are "character actors"; essentially, they play the exact same character (usually someone just like themselves) over and over, just with a different name and situation. The really good ones who can play different people aren't so common. And as Tom Cruise has shown, the most talented ones are sometimes also quite loony. (I would also mention Sheen here, except that he's never struck me as all that talented.) Angelina Jolie is another one who's also very talented, but again, rather loony.
But calling them "morons" is just dumb. The guy who works at 7-11 is a low-to-midgrade moron (or worse). You don't hold down a job as an A-list actor if you're a complete moron; you don't have to be a genius of course, but a moron wouldn't make it. For an example of a moron who had a little (very little) bit of acting talent but was too dumb to make a lasting career out of it, check out Lindsey Lohan. No one will hire her any more despite her name recognition because she's such a goofball and can't show up on time for filming shoots.
You've heard wrong. Jets actually fly quite a bit slower than they used to back in the 70s (when ticket prices were high), specifically to save fuel. They save further costs by packing more people into smaller seats, and cutting out all the extras.(meals) and adding extra charges for other things (luggage fees, optional in-flight movies, optional in-flight WiFi, extra charges for "premium economy" seats (that are slightly more desirable than bottom-barrel economy seats), etc. So yes, fuel savings DO help that much. Staff costs are low anyway. Flight attendants only make around $20k/year or so. Compared to the cost of 60,000 gallons of fuel for one flight, the cost of flight attendants is pretty tiny. Pilot salaries are pretty low too, maybe $80-100k or so for the most experienced, and more like $20k for the new guys. People don't go into aviation for the money.
Ok, the thing I have to question here is the sex while sleeping thing. Did Assange actually admit to it? If not, then how can you possibly have a case? It's he-said-she-said. There's no way to prove someone guilty of that crime unless they actually admit to it, or you have a camera recording the two of you all night. This is the whole problem with "date rape"; it's ridiculously hard to prove, but sex while sleeping (after having consensual sex before that)? It's impossible.
We Americans did it too, long long ago, and it certainly wasn't pretty then either. But yes, the French revolution was pretty nasty too, with all the guillotining and all. Good point about Libya too; they changed their government recently, and look how the losers were treated (Gadafi was hunted down like a dog and shot).
If the Brits storm the Ecuadorian embassy, it'd be funny if Ecuador stormed the British embassy in Quito in return. And maybe a bunch of other governments will storm the British embassies in their countries too.
They were only profitable enough to have a handful of aircraft. That's not really very profitable. If you want something that's going to become commonplace, you need something that doesn't just cater to the mega-wealthy (many of whom would probably rather just take their own private subsonic jet instead of having to share space on an SST with other passengers, even if they're all a bunch of rich people). The Concorde could never become commonplace, because of the fuel consumption (and to a much lesser extent, the sonic booms). There's just no way you're going to build a giant airline business transporting hundreds or thousands of passengers a day with ticket prices of $5-10k/seat. Contrast this to the jets that fly transatlantic every day carrying probably thousands of people a day for maybe around $500. Do you think a crash of a 747 or some Airbus model is going to cause all those jets to be taken out of service? Of course not. They even had an Air France crash not that long ago (it had taken off from Brazil and crashed into the ocean, killing everyone); did all Airbus A330 flights suddenly get canceled? No, there's over 400 such planes still flying. However, the Concorde crash wasn't even due to problems in the plane, but faulty maintenance on a totally different plane which left debris on the runway. Even so, the plane kept flying, but eventually they shut it down because, according to Wikipedia, rising maintenance costs and decreased passenger volume. Too few passengers + excessive costs = economically non-viable. You don't see other planes completely taken out of service because of the post-9/11 slump in air travel or a single accident.
I don't know what the projections are for this scramjet stuff, but if it has the same fuel consumption problems that cannot be overcome, then this is largely a waste of time and money too. Oil is getting more and more expensive, and gas-guzzling things like this aren't ever going to become economical. Of course, this is obviously really just another bloated, money-wasting American military project, so it goes on. Why exactly do you need a Mach 6 cruise missile to fight "insurgents" armed with AK47s, anyway?
Crossing the Atlantic wouldn't be that hard. You don't put the vacuum tunnel on the sea floor, you float it so that it's not that far below the surface of the water (deep enough to avoid storm waves), and is anchored to the floor with flexible cables so that it can move around a fair amount. Crossing the continent on land seems like it'd be harder because of seismic problems; you don't have seismic problems in water.
Well, no, not personally. Besides, a Zeppelin shouldn't be that expensive; it's slow, and the fuel consumption should be low compared to a jet (it doesn't have to burn fuel to generate lift, only thrust). Part of what you're paying for with a jet ride is the speed.
The poster in the blog you linked to is exactly correct: Afghanistan is hopeless, and we should pull out. However, in support of women's rights, perhaps we should provide safe passage to any women who want to get out of that hellhole and away from their male relatives.
No, we ditched it because of fuel efficiency. SSTs use a ridiculous amount of fuel. The Concorde had no trouble with sonic booms over the Atlantic (no one cares out there), and transatlantic flights are very popular these days (why do you think they have so many 747s that make the trip every day?). But that demand wasn't enough to make up for the insane ticket price caused mostly by all the fuel needed.
Heck, even jet aircraft use a lot of fuel compared to piston-driven aircraft; they only get really economical when they carry lots of people. The only way a supersonic plane would be economical is if it carried a few thousand people somehow.
If there's a bunch of you traveling together, you need to try chartering a small plane from a local airport. There's likely a small airport closer to where you live than DFW, there's no TSA security, and there's likely another small airport much close to your destination than San Antonio's, and it doesn't take 4-8 people long to deplane. It's probably too expensive for 1-2 people, but if you've got 4-8, it might be economical, and it'll definitely be very quick.
What's really funny is that the Google's G+ team had no trouble making this fictional URL real in a very short time for a completely whimsical reason, but it took the Google Maps team years to figure out how to make Louisville, Kentucky actually show the name "Louisville" on their map even though tons of people were complaining about it, along with many other "lost cities".
Even better, the ancient Greeks actually calculated the circumference of the Earth to a shockingly accurate degree (less than 2% error), as well as the tilt of the Earth's axis, and its distance to the Sun.
It is silly, but you're talking about a lame show on that crappy cable channel "MTV", which doesn't really have any kind of mission since the "M" stands for "music" yet they never actually play any music or music videos.
He's an actor who got famous starring in some crappy show about the 70s for a while, then gained notoriety when he married Demi Moore who was over a decade older than him, but she still looked amazingly young, but then he cheated on her with some much younger girl and they broke up and suddenly her magic spell of anti-aging was broken and she now looks like death incarnate.
This is exactly right. For how many years were people telling them that Google Maps wasn't showing Louisville, Kentucky and various other "lost cities"? It took them years to fix these problems.
Fuel cost is only a part of the operating cost of an airplane; purchasing cost and maintenance costs are the other big ones, plus pilot cost (or pilot training if you're the pilot). Even the cheapest Cessna costs around $50/hour to operate. If it travels perhaps 120 miles, that's $2.40/mile. Your SUV would have to get 9.6mpg (highway) to equal that cost, though that's assuming the Cessna is flying directly over the highway instead of taking a shorter route.
A 2-seat gyrocopter, OTOH, probably does a lot better since you can maintain it yourself unlike a Cessna (have to be a licensed A&P mechanic) and remove that cost factor, plus you can land in a very short space with those. Getting the pilot's license will still be expensive though, and even with it, you're still likely to be a very dangerous flyer. Pilots with only private licenses are notoriously dangerous, and get themselves and their passengers killed regularly.
Except that by having separate devices, I can let my spouse or guest borrow a system, or if I drop my phone in the toilet I haven't lost much valuable data because everything is synced to the desktop.
Isn't that where Michelle Bachmann comes from? Any place where the people are backwards enough to elect that freak is not going to be a place where anyone from Europe would want to live.
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The thing is, you're both right, it just depends on whose definition you want to use. If you want to use the dictionary definition, then you're right: the UK's actions are terroristic. If you want to use the official UK government definition, then you're wrong, since by their definition, any actions by a "legitimate" (aka "de facto") government are by definition not terrorism. Of course, their definition has some flaws; they've used the word "terrorism" to describe actions by agents of the legitimate government of Libya (back when it was under Gadafi), so they're not very consistent with their own definition.
You're exactly right. We see it in all kinds of things, but especially politics. A good example is all the Obama fans; they've completely changed their very opinions of many issues (wars, Guantanamo, etc.) because they had to in order to continue supporting Obama instead of seeing him for the liar that he is.
I'd like to see a bunch more countries friendly to Ecuador (or unfriendly to Britain and the US) do the same to both British and American embassies. If the UK and US are going to ignore the Vienna treaty, then the whole diplomacy and embassy thing falls apart.
Wrong. I mean piston vs. jet. Piston engines are much more efficient than turbines. They don't have the power-to-weight ratio though, but that's less important in a fixed-wing aircraft than a helicopter. Check out the fuel burn on a small (4-6-seat) private jet compared to a piston plane with the same seating; the piston plane uses a fraction of the fuel (and there's no cost advantage for jet fuel either vs. avgas).
Entertainment is a part of a society, to be sure, but a wise people do not run their country on the whim of the court jester.
Since when was any general populace of a country "wise"?
Don't be so smug. Acting like someone with a totally different personality takes real talent. There's a reason actors like Marlon Brando are so well-remembered; he could play all kinds of different people. I'm sure I could never pull that job off in a believable manner.
Now, of course, this doesn't mean all actors are highly talented. A lot of them are "character actors"; essentially, they play the exact same character (usually someone just like themselves) over and over, just with a different name and situation. The really good ones who can play different people aren't so common. And as Tom Cruise has shown, the most talented ones are sometimes also quite loony. (I would also mention Sheen here, except that he's never struck me as all that talented.) Angelina Jolie is another one who's also very talented, but again, rather loony.
But calling them "morons" is just dumb. The guy who works at 7-11 is a low-to-midgrade moron (or worse). You don't hold down a job as an A-list actor if you're a complete moron; you don't have to be a genius of course, but a moron wouldn't make it. For an example of a moron who had a little (very little) bit of acting talent but was too dumb to make a lasting career out of it, check out Lindsey Lohan. No one will hire her any more despite her name recognition because she's such a goofball and can't show up on time for filming shoots.
You've heard wrong. Jets actually fly quite a bit slower than they used to back in the 70s (when ticket prices were high), specifically to save fuel. They save further costs by packing more people into smaller seats, and cutting out all the extras.(meals) and adding extra charges for other things (luggage fees, optional in-flight movies, optional in-flight WiFi, extra charges for "premium economy" seats (that are slightly more desirable than bottom-barrel economy seats), etc. So yes, fuel savings DO help that much. Staff costs are low anyway. Flight attendants only make around $20k/year or so. Compared to the cost of 60,000 gallons of fuel for one flight, the cost of flight attendants is pretty tiny. Pilot salaries are pretty low too, maybe $80-100k or so for the most experienced, and more like $20k for the new guys. People don't go into aviation for the money.
Here's an article from MIT about the issue:
http://engineering.mit.edu/live/news/188-why-hasnt-commercial-air-travel-gotten-any-faster
Ok, the thing I have to question here is the sex while sleeping thing. Did Assange actually admit to it? If not, then how can you possibly have a case? It's he-said-she-said. There's no way to prove someone guilty of that crime unless they actually admit to it, or you have a camera recording the two of you all night. This is the whole problem with "date rape"; it's ridiculously hard to prove, but sex while sleeping (after having consensual sex before that)? It's impossible.
We Americans did it too, long long ago, and it certainly wasn't pretty then either. But yes, the French revolution was pretty nasty too, with all the guillotining and all. Good point about Libya too; they changed their government recently, and look how the losers were treated (Gadafi was hunted down like a dog and shot).
If the Brits storm the Ecuadorian embassy, it'd be funny if Ecuador stormed the British embassy in Quito in return. And maybe a bunch of other governments will storm the British embassies in their countries too.
They were only profitable enough to have a handful of aircraft. That's not really very profitable. If you want something that's going to become commonplace, you need something that doesn't just cater to the mega-wealthy (many of whom would probably rather just take their own private subsonic jet instead of having to share space on an SST with other passengers, even if they're all a bunch of rich people). The Concorde could never become commonplace, because of the fuel consumption (and to a much lesser extent, the sonic booms). There's just no way you're going to build a giant airline business transporting hundreds or thousands of passengers a day with ticket prices of $5-10k/seat. Contrast this to the jets that fly transatlantic every day carrying probably thousands of people a day for maybe around $500. Do you think a crash of a 747 or some Airbus model is going to cause all those jets to be taken out of service? Of course not. They even had an Air France crash not that long ago (it had taken off from Brazil and crashed into the ocean, killing everyone); did all Airbus A330 flights suddenly get canceled? No, there's over 400 such planes still flying. However, the Concorde crash wasn't even due to problems in the plane, but faulty maintenance on a totally different plane which left debris on the runway. Even so, the plane kept flying, but eventually they shut it down because, according to Wikipedia, rising maintenance costs and decreased passenger volume. Too few passengers + excessive costs = economically non-viable. You don't see other planes completely taken out of service because of the post-9/11 slump in air travel or a single accident.
I don't know what the projections are for this scramjet stuff, but if it has the same fuel consumption problems that cannot be overcome, then this is largely a waste of time and money too. Oil is getting more and more expensive, and gas-guzzling things like this aren't ever going to become economical. Of course, this is obviously really just another bloated, money-wasting American military project, so it goes on. Why exactly do you need a Mach 6 cruise missile to fight "insurgents" armed with AK47s, anyway?
Crossing the Atlantic wouldn't be that hard. You don't put the vacuum tunnel on the sea floor, you float it so that it's not that far below the surface of the water (deep enough to avoid storm waves), and is anchored to the floor with flexible cables so that it can move around a fair amount. Crossing the continent on land seems like it'd be harder because of seismic problems; you don't have seismic problems in water.
Well, no, not personally. Besides, a Zeppelin shouldn't be that expensive; it's slow, and the fuel consumption should be low compared to a jet (it doesn't have to burn fuel to generate lift, only thrust). Part of what you're paying for with a jet ride is the speed.
The poster in the blog you linked to is exactly correct: Afghanistan is hopeless, and we should pull out. However, in support of women's rights, perhaps we should provide safe passage to any women who want to get out of that hellhole and away from their male relatives.
No, we ditched it because of fuel efficiency. SSTs use a ridiculous amount of fuel. The Concorde had no trouble with sonic booms over the Atlantic (no one cares out there), and transatlantic flights are very popular these days (why do you think they have so many 747s that make the trip every day?). But that demand wasn't enough to make up for the insane ticket price caused mostly by all the fuel needed.
Heck, even jet aircraft use a lot of fuel compared to piston-driven aircraft; they only get really economical when they carry lots of people. The only way a supersonic plane would be economical is if it carried a few thousand people somehow.
The future of intercontinental travel is in underwater vacuum trains. NY to London in 45 minutes.
If there's a bunch of you traveling together, you need to try chartering a small plane from a local airport. There's likely a small airport closer to where you live than DFW, there's no TSA security, and there's likely another small airport much close to your destination than San Antonio's, and it doesn't take 4-8 people long to deplane. It's probably too expensive for 1-2 people, but if you've got 4-8, it might be economical, and it'll definitely be very quick.
And hot-looking female flight attendants in miniskirts would be best for topping it off.
What's really funny is that the Google's G+ team had no trouble making this fictional URL real in a very short time for a completely whimsical reason, but it took the Google Maps team years to figure out how to make Louisville, Kentucky actually show the name "Louisville" on their map even though tons of people were complaining about it, along with many other "lost cities".
Even better, the ancient Greeks actually calculated the circumference of the Earth to a shockingly accurate degree (less than 2% error), as well as the tilt of the Earth's axis, and its distance to the Sun.
It is silly, but you're talking about a lame show on that crappy cable channel "MTV", which doesn't really have any kind of mission since the "M" stands for "music" yet they never actually play any music or music videos.
He's an actor who got famous starring in some crappy show about the 70s for a while, then gained notoriety when he married Demi Moore who was over a decade older than him, but she still looked amazingly young, but then he cheated on her with some much younger girl and they broke up and suddenly her magic spell of anti-aging was broken and she now looks like death incarnate.
This is exactly right. For how many years were people telling them that Google Maps wasn't showing Louisville, Kentucky and various other "lost cities"? It took them years to fix these problems.
Fuel cost is only a part of the operating cost of an airplane; purchasing cost and maintenance costs are the other big ones, plus pilot cost (or pilot training if you're the pilot). Even the cheapest Cessna costs around $50/hour to operate. If it travels perhaps 120 miles, that's $2.40/mile. Your SUV would have to get 9.6mpg (highway) to equal that cost, though that's assuming the Cessna is flying directly over the highway instead of taking a shorter route.
A 2-seat gyrocopter, OTOH, probably does a lot better since you can maintain it yourself unlike a Cessna (have to be a licensed A&P mechanic) and remove that cost factor, plus you can land in a very short space with those. Getting the pilot's license will still be expensive though, and even with it, you're still likely to be a very dangerous flyer. Pilots with only private licenses are notoriously dangerous, and get themselves and their passengers killed regularly.
Except that by having separate devices, I can let my spouse or guest borrow a system, or if I drop my phone in the toilet I haven't lost much valuable data because everything is synced to the desktop.
Face it, your idea is stupid.
Isn't that where Michelle Bachmann comes from? Any place where the people are backwards enough to elect that freak is not going to be a place where anyone from Europe would want to live.