My problem with NetFlix was that of the thirty movies I wound up with on my queue, ALL of them were on delayed availability...most had been there for months. When they weren't able to explain to me when I'd get the movies I wanted, and were unable to explain to me why I should give them $20 for them to give me zero movies, I quit their service. I was sad to do so...had their stock been more reliable with esoteric movies (why have them in the list if I can't get them?) I'd have been delighted to continue paying them.
I do see your point, but I still disagree. The problem with fighting non-Geneva Convention signatories is that they don't play by the rules of "civilized" warfare. Specifically, prisoners of war are routinely mistreated, hospitals and the like are used to camouflage legitimate military targets, and we (the "Good Guys") care more about our enemy's civilian populace than the enemies do.
I submit that this is an untenable situation. For the same reason that we cannot allow terrorists to get what they want, we cannot tolerate a foreign power that strikes from behind cover of their civilian populace. I argue that this sort of power is MOST likely to start aggressive wars (like, say, the Gulf War) and they're by your argument the least "attackable". What do you propose? What tactics can be employed that will accomplish the mission, but not offend our sensibilities? I'm really interested in any thoughts you may have.
Huh? I'd say that any government that puts military targets in concentrated civilian areas is monstrous. Or, more to the point, using the civilian population as a shield to hide weapons behind is a pretty low tactic. The only way to make sure that governments don't do this is to systematically destroy such installations, preferably with smart weapons to moderate (though not eliminate) civilian casualties.
War is monstrous. It's also inevitable. The only question is how to decrease its cost...sometimes, being monstrous is the only way to do it. (ref. Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
One point. It was Jack Northrop who designed and built the post-WW2 flying wings, and it was his company that got the nod for the B-2. Lockheed's aircraft was much less expensive, and rather a lot smaller, carrying about the same warload as the F-111. (rather than the B-2, whose load is on the same order as the B-1 and B-52) The Air Force decided to put their eggs in fewer, larger baskets, and bought the large Northrop bomber. Lockheed was seriously annoyed.
The marketing research agencies who get paid to find out that marketing works do studies that prove conclusively that marketing and advertising works. Does this surprise you?
Yup. Let's get rid of things like radios. And rope. And knives. All that technological froo-froo just gets in the way of getting yourself killed in the wilderness.
Tools is tools. A different set of tools does not change a person...only that person's capabilities. If you're a jaded nature hating jerk, getting rid of your GPS isn't going to change you.
Nonsense. Water operates in a closed system. It's infinitely replenishable...at least until we start cracking it in fusion plants. Humans don't occupy a significant fraction of land on Earth, so land is not a scarcity. You can TRY to get a TV network to play what you pay them for...I bet you'll be unsuccessful.
TV frequencies ARE regulated. It is required that certain bands be set aside for things like PBS. You're arguing that radio should not be regulated, by saying it's like TV, which is easily as regulated as radio. This doesn't make sense.
The ONLY problem with your argument is the fact that the radio spectrum is a limited resource, owned by the public and placed under the stewardship of the FCC (that is, the government). The People, through their proxy the FCC, can and should regulate what is done with The People's resources. If the resource in question were not finite (like, say the radio stations were broadcasting on the Internet, where bandwidth is relatively inexpensive) then the free market would be just dandy.
OK, I'm not a particularly environmentally minded person, but I believe that large numbers of supersonic shock waves in the ocean is a catastrophically Bad Idea. These waves will be WAY more powerful (and destructive) than sonic booms are in air. I think far more study is required before we decide that high-speed underwater travel is a Good Idea.
I'd go so far as to speculate that no unmanned space mission can EVER be classed as a "disaster", no matter what happens. A debacle, certainly. Very embarassing, sure. Space engineering gets an order of magnitude or three more rigorous when people are involved. The only tricky bit is that it also gets an order of magnitude or three more tricky, too.
Reducing costs and increasing mission reliability and efficacy all at the same time is not possible. Effective, reliable and cheap...you get to pick two. NASA does as good (or better) a job of this than anybody else on Earth. Their track record is, by and large, pretty damn impressive.
That said, I think a) NASA is way too stodgy and b) they're FAR too interested in the (dead end) International Space Station. Exploration of space is worth the risk of life. Sign me up for the first seat out of Earth's gravity well.
Look...building hardware is just not all THAT hella expensive. If you don't design it such that it requires recovery, the physical hardware that goes slamming into the ocean need not be 'spensive. That's not to say that the PROGRAM is cheap...but the incremental cost of one more spaceplane prototype just isn't that crazy high.
Nevertheless, I feel that air-breathing high-speed propulsion (that's to say hypersonic atmospheric travel) is a dead end. We'd be much better off developing air-augmented rockets and pure rockets for ferrying humans around Earth. The engineering requirements of hypersonic atmospeheric craft (specifically, the aerodynamic heating of the craft) are pretty staggering. Someday it'll be practical. For now, we'd be much better off figuring out that aerospike engine concept.
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300zubrin.htm l
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan goes you one step better. It produces breathable atmosphere (pure low-pressure oxygen, just like in most of the manned spaceflights thusfar), rocket fuel, and even some water from the Martian atmosphere. Shoot your Earth Return Vehicle ahead of the crew, land it, and have it fuel itself up, and lay in a stockpile of fuel, water, and O2 before the crew even leaves Earth. It's a brilliant, elegant plan. If you're interested, check out the marssociety.org web page, and Dr. Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars". Great reading.
Nobody who fails to find their own country on a globe is going to go to Mars anyway, so what difference would that make? Even if they tried, they'd get lost in space. Hey...that gives me an idea...
Seems to me that the only thing that little demonstration proves is that it's easy to find stupid people. Why does this little factoid shock ANYBODY?
FYI, the Russian space shuttle Buran was basically a 2/3 scale copy of the American space shuttle design. From the outside, they're almost indistinguishable (apart from size and markings). It's possible that the Russians simply mimicked the US design, but I suspect that they were able to obtain some handy engineering schematics to help out with the complicated bits.
Also, the Tu-144 supersonic transport developed in the late 60's was a dead ringer for the Concorde. Russian engineers never seemed to have much of a problem with the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. : )
Dammit, the history book I read says he blew it up with the power of his mind, causing the hamsters at the core of the battle station to spontaneously combust. You can't trust ANYBODY these days...
Look, swami, are you going to refute the POINT of my original post, or are you enjoying your ad hominem attacks too much? We've already established that I don't know dick about stocks. How much more would you like to belabor the point?
I'm going to go cry myself to sleep now, you bad scary person. I don't know HOW I'm going to continue living my life knowing you don't like me. I guess I'll just have to find a way.
Ummm....hate to break it to you. All the movies you mention are FICTION. That means that nobody thinks it really happened that way. You might also notice that Red 5 didn't really blow up the Death Star using the Force.
It's a fun movie. If you want a history lesson, read a book. Start with Admiral Bull Halsey's biography. Then read Patton's book. Numerous coffee table books do a decent job of imagery of the men and materiel, and there are numerous discussions of tactics and strategy in WW2. Go see Pearl Harbor because it's a fun movie. Don't make it be anything it's not.
If you want historicity, read a good book on the subject or watch Tora Tora Tora. If you want an excellent impressionistic, reasonably accurate portrayal of how it felt to be involved in that attack, watch Pearl Harbor. The visuals are absolutely breathtaking from the first torpedo hit. Skip the first hour of the movie...it's strictly there to broaden the interest in the film beyond military history and aviation buffs. The way the attack, and the aftermath, were presented was indeed stunning.
I mean, you don't go see a Michael Bay flick to get historicity. You go to get spectacle. Pearl Harbor delivers on the spectacle.
I'm new to investing. Thanks to the kind advice of my betters, maybe I'll somehow figure out how to make a paltry sum someday...certainly not as much as market gurus like yourself, but I'll manage to eke out a pathetic existence somehow.
Even when I do, though, you'll still be a real asshole.
My major objection to the current crop of hybrid vehicles is pretty shallow...they are phenomenally ugly cars. Not just poorly styled (like most of Honda's stuff), but aggressively ugly. Like "We're going to make you work real hard to get past how ugly this car is" ugly. I mean, the Prius looks like an Echo, which is possibly the ugliest car in the history of US motoring. Shallow objection? Maybe. But styling sells cars. Anybody who tells you different is trying to sell ugly cars.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with NetFlix was that of the thirty movies I wound up with on my queue, ALL of them were on delayed availability...most had been there for months. When they weren't able to explain to me when I'd get the movies I wanted, and were unable to explain to me why I should give them $20 for them to give me zero movies, I quit their service. I was sad to do so...had their stock been more reliable with esoteric movies (why have them in the list if I can't get them?) I'd have been delighted to continue paying them.
Check out the girl angst band Rasputina. Very very crunchy electric cello musc. Cool stuff.
I do see your point, but I still disagree. The problem with fighting non-Geneva Convention signatories is that they don't play by the rules of "civilized" warfare. Specifically, prisoners of war are routinely mistreated, hospitals and the like are used to camouflage legitimate military targets, and we (the "Good Guys") care more about our enemy's civilian populace than the enemies do.
I submit that this is an untenable situation. For the same reason that we cannot allow terrorists to get what they want, we cannot tolerate a foreign power that strikes from behind cover of their civilian populace. I argue that this sort of power is MOST likely to start aggressive wars (like, say, the Gulf War) and they're by your argument the least "attackable". What do you propose? What tactics can be employed that will accomplish the mission, but not offend our sensibilities? I'm really interested in any thoughts you may have.
Huh? I'd say that any government that puts military targets in concentrated civilian areas is monstrous. Or, more to the point, using the civilian population as a shield to hide weapons behind is a pretty low tactic. The only way to make sure that governments don't do this is to systematically destroy such installations, preferably with smart weapons to moderate (though not eliminate) civilian casualties.
War is monstrous. It's also inevitable. The only question is how to decrease its cost...sometimes, being monstrous is the only way to do it. (ref. Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
One point. It was Jack Northrop who designed and built the post-WW2 flying wings, and it was his company that got the nod for the B-2. Lockheed's aircraft was much less expensive, and rather a lot smaller, carrying about the same warload as the F-111. (rather than the B-2, whose load is on the same order as the B-1 and B-52) The Air Force decided to put their eggs in fewer, larger baskets, and bought the large Northrop bomber. Lockheed was seriously annoyed.
The marketing research agencies who get paid to find out that marketing works do studies that prove conclusively that marketing and advertising works. Does this surprise you?
Mass Media Ethics? I'm stunned that the power of that oxy moron didn't destroy the entire campus.
I'd be very interested to read your references, if you have them handy.
Yup. Let's get rid of things like radios. And rope. And knives. All that technological froo-froo just gets in the way of getting yourself killed in the wilderness.
Tools is tools. A different set of tools does not change a person...only that person's capabilities. If you're a jaded nature hating jerk, getting rid of your GPS isn't going to change you.
Nonsense. Water operates in a closed system. It's infinitely replenishable...at least until we start cracking it in fusion plants. Humans don't occupy a significant fraction of land on Earth, so land is not a scarcity. You can TRY to get a TV network to play what you pay them for...I bet you'll be unsuccessful.
TV frequencies ARE regulated. It is required that certain bands be set aside for things like PBS. You're arguing that radio should not be regulated, by saying it's like TV, which is easily as regulated as radio. This doesn't make sense.
The ONLY problem with your argument is the fact that the radio spectrum is a limited resource, owned by the public and placed under the stewardship of the FCC (that is, the government). The People, through their proxy the FCC, can and should regulate what is done with The People's resources. If the resource in question were not finite (like, say the radio stations were broadcasting on the Internet, where bandwidth is relatively inexpensive) then the free market would be just dandy.
I assume you're being sarcastic. Yes, in principle, the mechanism is very simple.
Try designing one.
OK, I'm not a particularly environmentally minded person, but I believe that large numbers of supersonic shock waves in the ocean is a catastrophically Bad Idea. These waves will be WAY more powerful (and destructive) than sonic booms are in air. I think far more study is required before we decide that high-speed underwater travel is a Good Idea.
I'd go so far as to speculate that no unmanned space mission can EVER be classed as a "disaster", no matter what happens. A debacle, certainly. Very embarassing, sure. Space engineering gets an order of magnitude or three more rigorous when people are involved. The only tricky bit is that it also gets an order of magnitude or three more tricky, too.
Reducing costs and increasing mission reliability and efficacy all at the same time is not possible. Effective, reliable and cheap...you get to pick two. NASA does as good (or better) a job of this than anybody else on Earth. Their track record is, by and large, pretty damn impressive.
That said, I think a) NASA is way too stodgy and b) they're FAR too interested in the (dead end) International Space Station. Exploration of space is worth the risk of life. Sign me up for the first seat out of Earth's gravity well.
Look...building hardware is just not all THAT hella expensive. If you don't design it such that it requires recovery, the physical hardware that goes slamming into the ocean need not be 'spensive. That's not to say that the PROGRAM is cheap...but the incremental cost of one more spaceplane prototype just isn't that crazy high.
Nevertheless, I feel that air-breathing high-speed propulsion (that's to say hypersonic atmospheric travel) is a dead end. We'd be much better off developing air-augmented rockets and pure rockets for ferrying humans around Earth. The engineering requirements of hypersonic atmospeheric craft (specifically, the aerodynamic heating of the craft) are pretty staggering. Someday it'll be practical. For now, we'd be much better off figuring out that aerospike engine concept.
http://www.sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300zubrin.htm l
Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan goes you one step better. It produces breathable atmosphere (pure low-pressure oxygen, just like in most of the manned spaceflights thusfar), rocket fuel, and even some water from the Martian atmosphere. Shoot your Earth Return Vehicle ahead of the crew, land it, and have it fuel itself up, and lay in a stockpile of fuel, water, and O2 before the crew even leaves Earth. It's a brilliant, elegant plan. If you're interested, check out the marssociety.org web page, and Dr. Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars". Great reading.
Nobody who fails to find their own country on a globe is going to go to Mars anyway, so what difference would that make? Even if they tried, they'd get lost in space. Hey...that gives me an idea...
Seems to me that the only thing that little demonstration proves is that it's easy to find stupid people. Why does this little factoid shock ANYBODY?
FYI, the Russian space shuttle Buran was basically a 2/3 scale copy of the American space shuttle design. From the outside, they're almost indistinguishable (apart from size and markings). It's possible that the Russians simply mimicked the US design, but I suspect that they were able to obtain some handy engineering schematics to help out with the complicated bits.
Also, the Tu-144 supersonic transport developed in the late 60's was a dead ringer for the Concorde. Russian engineers never seemed to have much of a problem with the "Not Invented Here" syndrome. : )
Dammit, the history book I read says he blew it up with the power of his mind, causing the hamsters at the core of the battle station to spontaneously combust. You can't trust ANYBODY these days...
Look, swami, are you going to refute the POINT of my original post, or are you enjoying your ad hominem attacks too much? We've already established that I don't know dick about stocks. How much more would you like to belabor the point?
I'm going to go cry myself to sleep now, you bad scary person. I don't know HOW I'm going to continue living my life knowing you don't like me. I guess I'll just have to find a way.
Ummm....hate to break it to you. All the movies you mention are FICTION. That means that nobody thinks it really happened that way. You might also notice that Red 5 didn't really blow up the Death Star using the Force.
It's a fun movie. If you want a history lesson, read a book. Start with Admiral Bull Halsey's biography. Then read Patton's book. Numerous coffee table books do a decent job of imagery of the men and materiel, and there are numerous discussions of tactics and strategy in WW2. Go see Pearl Harbor because it's a fun movie. Don't make it be anything it's not.
If you want historicity, read a good book on the subject or watch Tora Tora Tora. If you want an excellent impressionistic, reasonably accurate portrayal of how it felt to be involved in that attack, watch Pearl Harbor. The visuals are absolutely breathtaking from the first torpedo hit. Skip the first hour of the movie...it's strictly there to broaden the interest in the film beyond military history and aviation buffs. The way the attack, and the aftermath, were presented was indeed stunning.
I mean, you don't go see a Michael Bay flick to get historicity. You go to get spectacle. Pearl Harbor delivers on the spectacle.
The love story IS pretty hackneyed, though...
I'm new to investing. Thanks to the kind advice of my betters, maybe I'll somehow figure out how to make a paltry sum someday...certainly not as much as market gurus like yourself, but I'll manage to eke out a pathetic existence somehow.
Even when I do, though, you'll still be a real asshole.
I stand corrected. You're right and I'm wrong. I'd managed to block that rolling abortion from my memory. What an awful awful car...
My major objection to the current crop of hybrid vehicles is pretty shallow...they are phenomenally ugly cars. Not just poorly styled (like most of Honda's stuff), but aggressively ugly. Like "We're going to make you work real hard to get past how ugly this car is" ugly. I mean, the Prius looks like an Echo, which is possibly the ugliest car in the history of US motoring. Shallow objection? Maybe. But styling sells cars. Anybody who tells you different is trying to sell ugly cars.
Umm...you know that there are four litres in a gallon, right? $2/gal is laughably cheap compared to fuel costs in just about any other country.